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A Unified Theory of CIA Covert Operations: 1960-1990


John Simkin

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In his book, Blond Ghost: The Shackley and the CIA's Crusades (1994), David Corn defends Ted Shackley against Gene Wheaton's unified theory of CIA illegal operations.

Sheehan and Wheaton sat down in the kitchen of Hoven's house in early February of 1986. It was magic. To a wide-eyed Sheehan, Wheaton, posing as an experienced operator, tossed out wild stories of clandestine operations and dozens of names: Wilson, Secord, Clines, Hakim, Singlaub, Bush. A whole crew was running amok, supporting Contras, conducting covert activity elsewhere. Drugs were involved. Some of this gang had engaged in corrupt government business in Iran and Southeast Asia. Now the same old boys were running weapons to Latin America. Central to the whole shebang was a former CIA officer named Ted Shackley. Sheehan was captivated. He had struck the mother lode.

Sheehan spoke a few times with Carl Jenkins. At one session, Sheehan listened as Jenkins and Wheaton discussed what Wheaton was calling the "off-the-reservation gang"- Secord, Clines, Hakim, and Shackley - and the operations they ran in and out of government. According to Hoven, Wheaton and Jenkins wanted to see information about this crowd made public and saw Sheehan as the mechanism of disclosure.

Wheaton and Jenkins did not tell Sheehan that they hoped to settle a score with a band they believed had an unfair lock on the air-supply contracts they desired. But to Hoven it was clear that one faction of spooks was whacking another. Hoven was not sure who was on what side. He guessed that somebody somewhere - maybe even in the Agency itself - was upset with the freelancers and wanted to see them reined in. But if Jenkins or anyone else thought they could use Sheehan as a quiet transmitter of damaging information, they were as wrong as they could be.

Throughout the winter and spring, as Sheehan talked to Wheaton and Jenkins, he had something else on his mind: a two-year-old bombing in Nicaragua. On May 30, 1984, a bomb had exploded at a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, held by Eden Pastora, a maverick Contra leader who resisted cooperating with the CIA and the main Contra force. Several people were killed, but not Pastora. Afterward, Tony Avirgan, an American journalist who suffered shrapnel wounds at La Penca, and his wife, Martha Honey, set out to uncover who had plotted the attack. A year later, they produced a book that charged a small group of Americans and Cuban exiles-some with ties to the CIA and the Contras-with planning the murderous assault. One of the persons they fingered was John Hull, a Contra supporter with a spread in northern Costa Rica and a relationship with North and the CIA. Their report noted that some Contra supporters were moonlighting in the drug trade.

Hull sued the couple for libel in Costa Rica. He demanded $1 million. Avirgan and Honey, who lived in San Jose, received death threats. They considered retaliating by filing a lawsuit in the States against individuals in the secret Contra-support network. But they could find no lawyer to take such a difficult case. Eventually Sheehan was recommended to them. They checked him out. The reports were mixed. But he had one undeniable positive attribute: he would accept the case. The couple retained him.

Come late spring of 1986, Sheehan was mixing with spooks in the Washington area, and he was pondering how to craft a lawsuit for Avirgan and Honey. He collected information on the Contra operation. He drew closer to Wheaton, who had a new tale every time they met. Then Sheehan made a pilgrimage to meet the dark angel of the covert crowd: Ed Wilson.

The imprisoned rogue officer made Sheehan's head swim. The essence of Wilson's story, Sheehan claimed, was that the Agency in 1976 had created a highly secretive counter terrorist unit modeled on the PRUs of Vietnam and had run this entity apart from the main bureaucracy. The mission: conduct "wet operations" (spy talk for assassinations). After the election of Jimmy Carter, this group was erased from the books and hidden in private companies, and Shackley was the man in charge of the unit both in and out of government. The program was divided into different components. CIA man William Buckley supposedly had directed one out of Mexico with Quintero and Ricardo Chavez. Another unit was headed by a former Mossad officer. Felix Rodriguez was involved in yet one more in the Mideast. Sheehan took Wilson at his word. "Wilson went into such detail," Sheehan later maintained. "It's not something that's being made up."

At one point after Sheehan met with Wilson, it dawned on him: everything was connected. The La Penca bombing, the North-Contra network, the Wilson gang, all those CIA-trained Cuban exiles, the whole history of Agency dirty tricks, the operations against Castro, the war in Laos, the nasty spook side of the Vietnam War, clandestine Agency action in Iran. It was an ongoing conspiracy. It did not matter if these guys were in or out of government. It was a villainous government within a government, a plot that had existed for decades, a permanent criminal enterprise. Sheehan had a unified held theory of covert U.S. history. And Shackley was the evil Professor Moriarty, the man who pulled all the strings. The avenging Sheehan now was determined to take Shackley down.

Sheehan melded the La Penca bombing case to his Wheaton - influenced investigation of the old-boy network. Avirgan and Honey shared with him all the information they carefully had developed on the Contra support operation. Names and stories he threw at them - including Shackley's - were unfamiliar. They took it on faith that Sheehan knew what he was doing when he blended the results of their professional investigation with the grab-bag of information he had collected from Wheaton, Wilson, and others. "We saw John Hull as the center, and Sheehan saw it as Shackley," Honey recalled. "Shackley was the main ingredient. I don't know why Danny fixated on him. He told us he had lots of information on Shackley's involvement in La Penca. That was b.s. But what do we know, sitting in Costa Rica?" Sheehan was looking for a case he could play before a large audience. He repeatedly told Avirgan and Honey the public did not care about La Penca. But people would pay notice if the enemy was one grand conspiracy headed by a dastardly figure.

Sheehan applied the resources of his small Christic Institute to the case. Wheaton continued investigating the Wilson crowd and other covert sorts. He started telling Jenkins that he believed he was chasing a decades-old, top-secret assassination unit. Wheaton claimed it had begun with an assassination training program for Cuban exiles that Shackley had set up in the early 1960s. The target was Castro. The secret war against Cuba faded, but the "Shooter Team" continued. It expanded and was now called the Fish Farm, and Shackley remained its chief.

Sheehan knitted together all this spook gossip and misinformation with a few hard facts, and on May 29, 1986, he dropped the load. In a Miami federal court, Sheehan filed a lawsuit against thirty individuals, invoking the RICO antiracketeering law and accusing all of being part of a criminal conspiracy that trained, financed, and armed Cuban-American mercenaries in Nicaragua, smuggled drugs, violated the Neutrality Act by supporting the Contras, traded various weapons, and bombed the press conference at La Penca. Sheehan's plaintiffs were journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey. The conspirators were far-flung: John Hull in Costa Rica; Cuban exiles based in Miami (including Quintero); drug lords Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa in Colombia; arms dealers in Florida; Contra leader Adolfo Calero; an Alabama mercenary named Tom Posey; Robert Owen, a secret North aide; the unknown bomber at La Penca; and Singlaub, Hakim, Secord, Clines, and Shackley. Sheehan alleged that Shackley had peddled arms illegally, plotted to kill Pastora, and (with Secord, Clines, and Hakim) accepted money from drug sales for arms shipments. Sheehan demanded over $23 million in damages.

With this lawsuit, Sheehan believed, he could break up the Contra support operation and cast into the light shadowy characters who had been up to mischief for years. Sheehan and Wheaton had stumbled across some real players and some real operations. But they both possessed hyperactive imaginations, and whatever truth they did uncover they had twisted into a false, cosmic conspiracy.

The filing-drafted sloppily by Sheehan-surprised Shackley and his fellow defendants. Hoven and Jenkins were stunned. Neither expected Sheehan to produce such a storm. Sheehan clearly was in this for politics and ego. He was not about to be a quiet disseminator of information. "I had been left with the assumption," Hoven noted, "that I was set up to pass information to Sheehan. But they" - whoever they were - "mucked it up because Sheehan was not playing it close to the script."

Corn’s view has been generally accepted by most commentators on the CIA. Daniel Sheehan was also criticised by “conspiracy theorists” for including too much in his original legal action that he could not prove. This was mainly based on information provided by Carl E. Jenkins, who was still working for the CIA at the time. Jenkins later refused to testify for Sheehan. Peter Dale Scott has suggested that Jenkins’ role was to undermine Sheehan’s case. I am sure he is right about this. However, I believe Gene Wheaton was a genuine informer. As far as I can see, nothing that Wheaton told Sheehan has proved to be incorrect. It has to be remembered that Wheaton began telling his story before the Iran-Contra scandal was exposed by the shooting down of the C-123K cargo plane and the capture of Eugene Hasenfus on the 5th October, 1986.

Wheaton’s unified theory goes further than the one told to Sheehan and assessed by Corn.

In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board with information on the death of John F. Kennedy. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: "Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins. Wheaton also named Irving Davidson as being involved in the assassination.

In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Carl E. Jenkins and Rafael Quintero were both involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The operation was organized out of JM/WAVE, the CIA station in Miami. In 1963, Ted Shackley was chief of JM/WAVE station. Shackley was also a close associate of George Bush.

Bush was head of the CIA when in 1976 Frank Castro established Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Other members included Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Armando Lopez Estrada and Guillermo Novo. CORU was partly financed by Guillermo Hernández Cartaya, another Bay of Pigs veteran closely linked to the CIA. He was later charged with money laundering, drugs & arms trafficking and embezzlement. The federal prosecutor told Pete Brewton that he had been approached by a CIA officer who explained that "Cartaya had done a bunch of things that the government was indebted to him for, and he asked me to drop the charges against him."

Bush also played an important role in covering up the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, by CIA contract agent Michael Townley.

Bush was grooming Shackley to take over from him as director of the CIA. Jimmy Carter’s election put an end to this plan. Bush then worked with Shackley to help Reagan defeat Carter in 1980. Bush had been a candidate for the job (some of his speeches had been written by Shackley) but decided to help Reagan after being promised the vice-presidency.

Bush was also the key figure in the Iran-Contra Scandal. However, as Lawrence E. Walsh, who wrote the official report on the scandal, Bush refused to be interviewed or to hand over documents during the enquiry. As soon as Bush became president he pardoned all those who could have provided evidence against him. He also gave top jobs in his administration who helped him cover-up the scandal (this includes Dick Cheney who is still being rewarded for his silence).

It is Shackley and Bush that is the unifying factor in understanding CIA illegal activities between 1960-1990.

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In his book, Blond Ghost: The Shackley and the CIA's Crusades (1994), David Corn defends Ted Shackley against Gene Wheaton's unified theory of CIA illegal operations.

Sheehan and Wheaton sat down in the kitchen of Hoven's house in early February of 1986. It was magic. To a wide-eyed Sheehan, Wheaton, posing as an experienced operator, tossed out wild stories of clandestine operations and dozens of names: Wilson, Secord, Clines, Hakim, Singlaub, Bush. A whole crew was running amok, supporting Contras, conducting covert activity elsewhere. Drugs were involved. Some of this gang had engaged in corrupt government business in Iran and Southeast Asia. Now the same old boys were running weapons to Latin America. Central to the whole shebang was a former CIA officer named Ted Shackley. Sheehan was captivated. He had struck the mother lode.

Sheehan spoke a few times with Carl Jenkins. At one session, Sheehan listened as Jenkins and Wheaton discussed what Wheaton was calling the "off-the-reservation gang"- Secord, Clines, Hakim, and Shackley - and the operations they ran in and out of government. According to Hoven, Wheaton and Jenkins wanted to see information about this crowd made public and saw Sheehan as the mechanism of disclosure.

Wheaton and Jenkins did not tell Sheehan that they hoped to settle a score with a band they believed had an unfair lock on the air-supply contracts they desired. But to Hoven it was clear that one faction of spooks was whacking another. Hoven was not sure who was on what side. He guessed that somebody somewhere -

maybe even in the Agency itself - was upset with the freelancers and wanted to see them reined in. But if Jenkins or anyone else thought they could use Sheehan as a quiet transmitter of damaging information, they were as wrong as they could be.

Throughout the winter and spring, as Sheehan talked to Wheaton and Jenkins, he had something else on his mind: a two-year-old bombing in Nicaragua. On May 30, 1984, a bomb had exploded at a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, held by Eden Pastora, a maverick Contra leader who resisted cooperating with the CIA and the main Contra force. Several people were killed, but not Pastora. Afterward, Tony Avirgan, an American journalist who suffered shrapnel wounds at La Penca, and his wife, Martha Honey, set out to uncover who had plotted the attack. A year later, they produced a book that charged a small group of Americans and Cuban exiles-some with ties to the CIA and the Contras-with planning the murderous assault. One of the persons they fingered was John Hull, a Contra supporter with a spread in northern Costa Rica and a relationship with North and the CIA. Their report noted that some Contra supporters were moonlighting in the drug trade.

Hull sued the couple for libel in Costa Rica. He demanded $1 million. Avirgan and Honey, who lived in San Jose, received death threats. They considered retaliating by filing a lawsuit in the States against individuals in the secret Contra-support network. But they could find no lawyer to take such a difficult case. Eventually Sheehan was recommended to them. They checked him out. The reports were mixed. But he had one undeniable positive attribute: he would accept the case. The couple retained him.

Come late spring of 1986, Sheehan was mixing with spooks in the Washington area, and he was pondering how to craft a lawsuit for Avirgan and Honey. He collected information on the Contra operation. He drew closer to Wheaton, who had a new tale every time they met. Then Sheehan made a pilgrimage to meet the dark angel of the covert crowd: Ed Wilson.

The imprisoned rogue officer made Sheehan's head swim. The essence of Wilson's story, Sheehan claimed, was that the Agency in 1976 had created a highly secretive counter terrorist unit modeled on the PRUs of Vietnam and had run this entity apart from the main bureaucracy. The mission: conduct "wet operations" (spy talk for assassinations). After the election of Jimmy Carter, this group was erased from the books and hidden in private companies, and Shackley was the man in charge of the unit both in and out of government. The program was divided into different components. CIA man William Buckley supposedly had directed one out of Mexico with Quintero and Ricardo Chavez. Another unit was headed by a former Mossad officer. Felix Rodriguez was involved in yet one more in the Mideast. Sheehan took Wilson at his word. "Wilson went into such detail," Sheehan later maintained. "It's not something that's being made up."

At one point after Sheehan met with Wilson, it dawned on him: everything was connected. The La Penca bombing, the North-Contra network, the Wilson gang, all those CIA-trained Cuban exiles, the whole history of Agency dirty tricks, the operations against Castro, the war in Laos, the nasty spook side of the Vietnam War, clandestine Agency action in Iran. It was an ongoing conspiracy. It did not matter if these guys were in or out of government. It was a villainous government within a government, a plot that had existed for decades, a permanent criminal enterprise. Sheehan had a unified held theory of covert U.S. history. And Shackley was the evil Professor Moriarty, the man who pulled all the strings. The avenging Sheehan now was determined to take Shackley down.

Sheehan melded the La Penca bombing case to his Wheaton - influenced investigation of the old-boy network. Avirgan and Honey shared with him all the information they carefully had developed on the Contra support operation. Names and stories he threw at them - including Shackley's - were unfamiliar. They took it on faith that Sheehan knew what he was doing when he blended the results of their professional investigation with the grab-bag of information he had collected from Wheaton, Wilson, and others. "We saw John Hull as the center, and Sheehan saw it as Shackley," Honey recalled. "Shackley was the main ingredient. I don't know why Danny fixated on him. He told us he had lots of information on Shackley's involvement in La Penca. That was b.s. But what do we know, sitting in Costa Rica?" Sheehan was looking for a case he could play before a large audience. He repeatedly told Avirgan and Honey the public did not care about La Penca. But people would pay notice if the enemy was one grand conspiracy headed by a dastardly figure.

Sheehan applied the resources of his small Christic Institute to the case. Wheaton continued investigating the Wilson crowd and other covert sorts. He started telling Jenkins that he believed he was chasing a decades-old, top-secret assassination unit. Wheaton claimed it had begun with an assassination training program for Cuban exiles that Shackley had set up in the early 1960s. The target was Castro. The secret war against Cuba faded, but the "Shooter Team" continued. It expanded and was now called the Fish Farm, and Shackley remained its chief.

Sheehan knitted together all this spook gossip and misinformation with a few hard facts, and on May 29, 1986, he dropped the load. In a Miami federal court, Sheehan filed a lawsuit against thirty individuals, invoking the RICO antiracketeering law and accusing all of being part of a criminal conspiracy that trained, financed, and armed Cuban-American mercenaries in Nicaragua, smuggled drugs, violated the Neutrality Act by supporting the Contras, traded various weapons, and bombed the press conference at La Penca. Sheehan's plaintiffs were journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey. The conspirators were far-flung: John Hull in Costa Rica; Cuban exiles based in Miami (including Quintero); drug lords Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa in Colombia; arms dealers in Florida; Contra leader Adolfo Calero; an Alabama mercenary named Tom Posey; Robert Owen, a secret North aide; the unknown bomber at La Penca; and Singlaub, Hakim, Secord, Clines, and Shackley. Sheehan alleged that Shackley had peddled arms illegally, plotted to kill Pastora, and (with Secord, Clines, and Hakim) accepted money from drug sales for arms shipments. Sheehan demanded over $23 million in damages.

With this lawsuit, Sheehan believed, he could break up the Contra support operation and cast into the light shadowy characters who had been up to mischief for years. Sheehan and Wheaton had stumbled across some real players and some real operations. But they both possessed hyperactive imaginations, and whatever truth they did uncover they had twisted into a false, cosmic conspiracy.

The filing-drafted sloppily by Sheehan-surprised Shackley and his fellow defendants. Hoven and Jenkins were stunned. Neither expected Sheehan to produce such a storm. Sheehan clearly was in this for politics and ego. He was not about to be a quiet disseminator of information. "I had been left with the assumption," Hoven noted, "that I was set up to pass information to Sheehan. But they" - whoever they were - "mucked it up because Sheehan was not playing it close to the script."

Corn’s view has been generally accepted by most commentators on the CIA. Daniel Sheehan was also criticised by “conspiracy theorists” for including too much in his original legal action that he could not prove. This was mainly based on information provided by Carl E. Jenkins, who was still working for the CIA at the time. Jenkins later refused to testify for Sheehan. Peter Dale Scott has suggested that Jenkins’ role was to undermine Sheehan’s case. I am sure he is right about this. However, I believe Gene Wheaton was a genuine informer. As far as I can see, nothing that Wheaton told Sheehan has proved to be incorrect. It has to be remembered that Wheaton began telling his story before the Iran-Contra scandal was exposed by the shooting down of the C-123K cargo plane and the capture of Eugene Hasenfus on the 5th October, 1986.

Wheaton’s unified theory goes further than the one told to Sheehan and assessed by Corn.

In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board with information on the death of John F. Kennedy. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: "Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins. Wheaton also named Irving Davidson as being involved in the assassination.

In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Carl E. Jenkins and Rafael Quintero were both involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The operation was organized out of JM/WAVE, the CIA station in Miami. In 1963, Ted Shackley was chief of JM/WAVE station. Shackley was also a close associate of George Bush.

Bush was head of the CIA when in 1976 Frank Castro established Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Other members included Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Armando Lopez Estrada and Guillermo Novo. CORU was partly financed by Guillermo Hernández Cartaya, another Bay of Pigs veteran closely linked to the CIA. He was later charged with money laundering, drugs & arms trafficking and embezzlement. The federal prosecutor told Pete Brewton that he had been approached by a CIA officer who explained that "Cartaya had done a bunch of things that the government was indebted to him for, and he asked me to drop the charges against him."

Bush also played an important role in covering up the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, by CIA contract agent Michael Townley.

Bush was grooming Shackley to take over from him as director of the CIA. Jimmy Carter’s election put an end to this plan. Bush then worked with Shackley to help Reagan defeat Carter in 1980. Bush had been a candidate for the job (some of his speeches had been written by Shackley) but decided to help Reagan after being promised the vice-presidency.

Bush was also the key figure in the Iran-Contra Scandal. However, as Lawrence E. Walsh, who wrote the official report on the scandal, Bush refused to be interviewed or to hand over documents during the enquiry. As soon as Bush became president he pardoned all those who could have provided evidence against him. He also gave top jobs in his administration who helped him cover-up the scandal (this includes Dick Cheney who is still being rewarded for his silence).

It is Shackley and Bush that is the unifying factor in understanding CIA illegal activities between 1960-1990.

XXX

John:

You might like to note that in 1983 Wheaton and another operative were talking to then Senator Gary Hart about the Contra northern front and the formation of the new southern front. Both of these gentleman provided Senator Gary Hart with military maps and detailed flyways as well as aircraft ID numbers, and names of pilots, long before the Iran-Contra affair and the names of locations, operatives, and pilots, became public knowledge. (1983-86) The information provided by both of these operatives was given to The Senate Arms Service Committee which decided to take "No Action" as per Senator Hart's memo of 1984 and again in 1991. This was before the C-123 crash, which opened the door into the contra re-supply operations and the "Savings and Loan scandal of the mid eighites. In 1990 an article with Senator Hart's information and the map notations was published in a southern California publication which created a "firestorm" in Washington DC. Leslie Cockburn also had inside information which she published concerning the secret airbase located in CR (Santa Elena) which was later referenced as "Point West" in O North's notebook, as noted in her 1987 book "Out of Control", and CBS producer Ty West's 60 min program, confirmed Cockburns account of the affair.. All of this information was and still is still being withheld. Senator John Kerry has had the major parts of this information "Classified Top Secret, Committee Senitive" as of 1990. FWIW

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So the way I understand it THEODORE SHACKLEY moved from Miami ZR/RIFLE Cuban insurgence, insertion and assassination work for the CIA to Laos and SOutheast Asia in the middle 1960's. The nationalists and tribal warlords were our ally against the Chinese and Vietnamese communist governments. SHACKLEY and the group he hid in the greater Vietnam war theater certainly traded with Kuhn Sa and other GOLDe shocked EN TRIANGLE heroin producers and dealers..........and this criminal fascist enterprise was transplanted to the South and Central American zone in the late 1970's.............inductively the war zones in drug producing areas is the constant and this continues to this day in Afganistan.

Al McCoy would probably agree with this thread and not be shocked that COLBY and HELMS's program of OPERATION PHEONIX had a little cell that could trace back to Dallas in 1963.

Nixon, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney all took signals from DICK HELMS on how to work all this to their advantage - capiche?

So GREER was originally navy, interesting.

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You might like to note that in 1983 Wheaton and another operative were talking to then Senator Gary Hart about the Contra northern front and the formation of the new southern front. Both of these gentleman provided Senator Gary Hart with military maps and detailed flyways as well as aircraft ID numbers, and names of pilots, long before the Iran-Contra affair and the names of locations, operatives, and pilots, became public knowledge. (1983-86) The information provided by both of these operatives was given to The Senate Arms Service Committee which decided to take "No Action" as per Senator Hart's memo of 1984 and again in 1991. This was before the C-123 crash, which opened the door into the contra re-supply operations and the "Savings and Loan scandal of the mid eighites. In 1990 an article with Senator Hart's information and the map notations was published in a southern California publication which created a "firestorm" in Washington DC. Leslie Cockburn also had inside information which she published concerning the secret airbase located in CR (Santa Elena) which was later referenced as "Point West" in O North's notebook, as noted in her 1987 book "Out of Control", and CBS producer Ty West's 60 min program, confirmed Cockburns account of the affair.. All of this information was and still is still being withheld. Senator John Kerry has had the major parts of this information "Classified Top Secret, Committee Senitive" as of 1990. FWIW

Very interesting information Tosh. Is it a coincidence that the two senators who attempted to explore the relationship between the CIA, drugs and the arms trade, both attempted to become the Democratic presidential candidate? In both cases they had to endure smear campaigns (probably part of Operation Mockingbird). The same happened to other American politicians who attempted to expose the illegal activities of the CIA: Frank Church and Otis Pike.

The same thing happens to the journalists. It has never helped the careers of journalists who attempt to expose the role that the CIA has played in these illegal activities. Look what happened to Gary Webb, Angus Mackenzie, Jonathan Kwitny and Steve Kangas? It was hardly a good career move for Pete Brewton, Barbara Honegger, Robert Parry, Leslie Cockburn, Joel Bainerman and Daniel Hopsicker. Compare their careers with those who were willing to write about “limited hangouts” like David Corn, Evan Thomas and Bob Woodward.

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You might like to note that in 1983 Wheaton and another operative were talking to then Senator Gary Hart about the Contra northern front and the formation of the new southern front. Both of these gentleman provided Senator Gary Hart with military maps and detailed flyways as well as aircraft ID numbers, and names of pilots, long before the Iran-Contra affair and the names of locations, operatives, and pilots, became public knowledge. (1983-86) The information provided by both of these operatives was given to The Senate Arms Service Committee which decided to take "No Action" as per Senator Hart's memo of 1984 and again in 1991. This was before the C-123 crash, which opened the door into the contra re-supply operations and the "Savings and Loan scandal of the mid eighites. In 1990 an article with Senator Hart's information and the map notations was published in a southern California publication which created a "firestorm" in Washington DC. Leslie Cockburn also had inside information which she published concerning the secret airbase located in CR (Santa Elena) which was later referenced as "Point West" in O North's notebook, as noted in her 1987 book "Out of Control", and CBS producer Ty West's 60 min program, confirmed Cockburns account of the affair.. All of this information was and still is still being withheld. Senator John Kerry has had the major parts of this information "Classified Top Secret, Committee Senitive" as of 1990. FWIW

Very interesting information Tosh. Is it a coincidence that the two senators who attempted to explore the relationship between the CIA, drugs and the arms trade, both attempted to become the Democratic presidential candidate? In both cases they had to endure smear campaigns (probably part of Operation Mockingbird). The same happened to other American politicians who attempted to expose the illegal activities of the CIA: Frank Church and Otis Pike.

The same thing happens to the journalists. It has never helped the careers of journalists who attempt to expose the role that the CIA has played in these illegal activities. Look what happened to Gary Webb, Angus Mackenzie, Jonathan Kwitny and Steve Kangas? It was hardly a good career move for Pete Brewton, Barbara Honegger, Robert Parry, Leslie Cockburn, Joel Bainerman and Daniel Hopsicker. Compare their careers with those who were willing to write about “limited hangouts” like David Corn, Evan Thomas and Bob Woodward.

Let us not forget; DEA SA agent KiKi Camarena, Col. James Sabow, USMC, CIA UC agent Scott Wheeler; CIA James A Paisly, Congressman Tom Downing; ONI Com. Lt. Col D Sullivan; DEA SA Shaggy Wallace, Vincent Foster, Berry A Seal and a host of others dead and alive that in some ways reads like the 9-11 list of fatalites: And above all we cannot forget, JFK and RFK.

Edited by William Plumlee
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If you take a look at Bruce Jones I think there is sufficient reason to consider the earlier formation of the networking that coalesced into the Contra as early as the mid 70's.

EDIT:

and of course further back there's the Monroe doctrine

and in early 1900 the Natinal Guard from which the Contra came.

1909 US backs uprising against President Jose Santos Zelaya, forced to resign after refusing US demands for exclusive rights to use Nicaraguan lands to build a canal

10

11

12 US Marines enter Nicaragua to crush a revolt against the US-supported government; they will stay for the next thirteen years

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26 US Marines return to quell an uprising led by Gen. Moncada

27 Moncada surrenders. Officer Augusto César Sandino rejects the US terms and launches a guerrilla war against the US.

28

29

30

31

32

33 US withdraws Marines leaving the US-trained National Guard under Sgt Anastasio Somoza Garcia. Sandino agrees to a truce.

34 After a State dinner with Somoza, Sandino is assassinated by a detachment of the National Guard. Somoza, now a general, seizes total power.

a couple of generations later a Somoza is ousted by the FSLN named after Sandino.

Edited by John Dolva
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And then The Sandinistas

56 Somoza is assassinated by poet Rigoberto Lopez Perez. Somoza’s eldest son, Luis Somoza Debayle, becomes President

57

58

59

60 (Kennedy eleced)

61 Carlos Fonseca Amador, Tomas Borge, Silvio Mayorga and others found the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN).

62

63 (Kennedy assassinated)

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65

66

67 Luis Somoza dies of a heart attack and his younger brother, Anastasio Somoza Debayle assumes the Presidency.

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71

72 An earthquake kills and makes homeless thousands. Aid from around the world is taken by Somoza and the National Guard for thei're own private gain.

73

74 (Bruce Jones settles near the Nicaraguan Border in Costa Rica)

75

76 Carlos Fonseca's death sparks a new roar in the Sandinista movement.

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78 Full-scale guerrilla war envelops Nicaragua

January 1978 - Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, publisher of the popular conservative newspaper, La Prensa and leader of the opposition Democratic Liberation Union, is murdered. Somoza is suspected of ordering the crime. Assassination triggers general strike and brings together moderates of the business and professional classes, and the FSLN in a united front to oust Somoza.

August 1978 - An FSLN commando unit seizes the National Palace and forces Somoza to release political prisoners. A strike is called by the broad opposition front.

September 1978 - An FSLN-led insurrection in major towns in northern Nicaragua is put down with massive repression and bombing by the National Guard.

April 1979 - The US cuts off Somoza following the televised murder by a National Guard lieutenant of ABC newsman Bill Stewart.

July 17, 1979 - Somoza flees Nicaragua.

July 19, 1979 - The National Guard surrenders to the FSLN.

1979 - Government of National Reconstruction, led by the Sandinistas, takes power.

1980 - Somoza assassinated in Paraguay; FSLN government led by Daniel Ortega nationalises and redistributes lands held by the Somoza family.

December 1981- US President Reagan authorizes a CIA covert action against Nicaragua, a force of 500 men to “interdict” alleged arms traffic from Nicaragua to rebels in El Salvador. Nicaraguans report raids by contrarevolucionarios (Contras) on the northern border. State of emergency declared.

1982 - Former Sandinista official, Eden Pastora, forms a Contra organization based in Costa Rica, opening a two-front guerrilla war against the Sandinistas.

January 1984 - The FSLN holds elections that result in Daniel Ortega elected president; US mines Nicaraguan harbours and is condemned by the World Court for doing so.

Contras take credit for mining Nicaraguan harbors. An investigation reveals that the mining was done by the CIA.

May 1984 - An assassination attempt on the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border wounds Pastora and leaves several journalists dead and wounded. The CIA is suspected to be behind it.

1985 - The International Court of Justice at The Hague sides with the Sandinistas against the US. In elections, the Sandinistas win over 60% of the vote for parliamentary seats. The US refuses to recognize the election results. The US Congress cuts off aid to the Contras, but national security officials continue to fund the Contras from money derived from surreptitious arms sales to Iran.

1986-89

Beginning in the summer of 1986, a Contra company infiltrates into northern Nicaragua, but is forced to retreat under a Sandinista counteroffensive. Battles continue to rage on many fronts, with the Contras unable to hold a piece of Nicaraguan Territory. War casualties number 30,000. Hurricane leaves 180,000 people homeless.

1990 - Sandinistas lose the national election. Violeta Chamorro, widow of slain Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, backed by the US, wins the election for President.

Washington immediately stops the Contra war.

Ortega et al are of course still alive and this century will see the struggle continue.

Edited by John Dolva
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