Hidden government group linking JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra and 9/11

[Paul Brancato]

Steven - thank you for the great links to some of our not so secret outsourced government.

[Paul Brancato]

And Douglas - thanks for the link to the Peter Dale Scott interview.

Paul Trejo - your uncharacteristic attack on Peter Dale Scott and his theories, and your blanket statement that the mega rich and powerful are not in control, are for me a perfect litmus test for your Theory. Why of all people would you go after Peter Dale Scott? I will only answer my own question here by stating that his worldview and yours are antithetical. The effect it has on me and my theories is that I no longer have any doubt that the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, and many others, were sanctioned by the very forces whose existence you so vociferously deny. And don't go throwing around bugaboos like the Trilateral commission etc and start casting my world view, or Scott's, as conspiracy theories on a par with the JBS. It just ain't so. Who was it that invented the term 'conpiracy theorists'? Very convenient way to dismiss what should be obvious to anyone with a brain, that the history of civilization is and always has been the history of secret societies. And in this modern time, with such huge concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of so few individuals, it is larger and more pervasive than any time in human history.

[Paul Trejo]

Well, Paul B., all I can do is wait for the fulfillment of the JFK information act at the end of 2017, and watch all the jaws drop as the now-secret FBI and CIA documents reveal that Jack Ruby and Harry Dean were right all along.

Again -- it's just too easy to blame impersonal Institutions. It's almost a knee-jerk reaction. Most people are doing it -- so it's too easy.

But the "CIA-did-it" research doesn't add up. The logic isn't there.

We have only two middle-level CIA Officers who confessed to a role in the JFK murder: David Morales and Howard Hunt. These were headstrong guys who were burned by the Bay of Pigs. Others who confessed include Carlos Marcello, Frank Sturgis, Johnny Roselli, John Martino, Loran Hall, Gerry Patrick Hemming, David Ferrie, Jack S. Martin, Thomas Edward Beckham and a large host of other CIVILIANS, who were also enraged over the Bay of Pigs.

I base my theory on confessions and I build up from there. It's puzzling to me why more JFK researchers overlook this clear path.

JFK was killed by the forces dominating US society in 1963 -- not the forces dominating future years. In 1963 the politics were limited to Cold War paranoia on the one hand, and Civil Rights on the other. That's 1963. Now, find the leaders of Cold War paranoia in Dallas, and you'll find the leaders of the JFK plot. That's just common sense, to me.

These grandiose theories of writers like Peter Dale Scott, however, who paint broad portraits of a "Secret Government," or an "Invisible Government," or a "Shadow Government," are too general to get down to the details of life in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited October 18, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Steven Gaal]

These grandiose theories of writers like Peter Dale Scott, however, who paint broad portraits of a "Secret Government," or an "Invisible Government," or a "Shadow Government," are too general to get down to the details of life in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

======================

If Ruby FBN asset and FBN & CIA worked together in 1950-1960s yes there is a confluence to future events.

=

THE CIA AND DRUG-TRAFFICKING BY CONTRA SUPPORTERS

Affidavit by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.

=

My name is Peter Dale Scott. I am an author with a doctorate in Political Science from McGill University. After four years as a diplomat in the Canadian Foreign Service I taught for thirty-three years at the University of California, Berkeley.

Four of my books have dealt with the problem of drug-traffickers who owe their prominence and protection to their involvement with CIA-backed covert operations. The most relevant of these books is Cocaine Politics, co-authored with Jonathan Marshall and published in 1991 by the University of California Press. (Four of the chapters dealt with the subject of Contras and drug-trafficking, including the California network of Norwin Meneses.) (1)

At various times I have taken leave from teaching to conduct full-time research into covert politics. In 1970 I was a Guggenheim Fellow for a year. In 1973 I took leave again for six months, for part of which I was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. In 1987 I served in Washington for six months as a Senior Fellow at, and drug consultant to, the Center for International Development Policy, gathering information in support of the investigation into Drugs and Foreign Policy conducted at that time by Senator John Kerry. In that capacity I consulted with a number of experts in Washington inside and outside government. I was also a personal eyewitness to the falsity of a story published in the Washington Post (and subsequently retracted) which exonerated the Contras from involvement in drug-trafficking (2).

My researches into U.S. government involvement with drug-traffickers date back to 1970, when I wrote a book, The War Conspiracy, about the origins of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. I returned to this topic yet again in 1986, when I noticed that certain Cuban exiles I had already written about, some of them indicted or convicted drug-traffickers were involved in the Contra support movement in Costa Rica. (3)

After twenty-five years of research, I have come to believe, as I wrote in 1992, that “governments themselves, and the links they develop with major traffickers, are the key both to the drug-trafficking problem and to its solution.” (4)

The United States Government is by no means the only example of such involvement, but it is the one with the most deleterious impact on its own citizens.

One can see this impact in the efforts in the 1980s by the CIA, and later Oliver North, to arrange for extra-governmental support for the Contras. These arrangements led to documented U.S. government involvement with, and often support to, top-level drug-traffickers in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama, as well as with domestic traffickers in the states of Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and California. This recurring pattern of involvement with those who dominated the drug traffic cannot be dismissed as an accidental or coincidental aberration.

In a few cases, Contras and their supporters became traffickers after their contact with CIA officers. This was the case with Ricky Ross’s supplier, Danilo Blandon Reyes. The CIA might argue in its defense that Blandon, and others like him, were not traffickers at the time contact was made. But one hears recurring reports that such recruits were given to understand that funds should be raised for the Contras by any means, which was taken to include drug-trafficking. Blandon has testified that he heard this from a leading U.S. protégé in the Contras, Enrique Bermudez. Other, more senior Contra officials are said to have heard the same indirect guidance from at least one high-ranked CIA officer.

It is a matter of record that the CIA has also established contacts with those already known to the U.S. government as major narcotics traffickers. This was the case with Blandon’s supplier, Norwin Meneses, a highly publicized Contra supporter who had been listed as a trafficker in DEA records since the 1970s.

Officials in at least four law enforcement agencies have confirmed that Meneses was untouchable in this country in the era of Contra support. A key illustration of this was the so-called Frogman case in 1983, at that time the largest cocaine seizure ever made on the U.S. West coast.

Although 150 agents and police rounded up members of Meneses’ network, and over thirty of them were ultimately convicted, Meneses himself (so I have been personally told by one of his contacts, a fellow Contra supporter), was warned by law enforcement officials to leave town to escape arrest. Other sources in law enforcement have complained that Meneses was protected for reasons of “national security” (5). The protection given to Meneses was given to other traffickers as well. Jorge Morales in Miami testified under oath that he agreed to fly arms-for-drugs flights for the Contras after he was promised legal protection for them by two Nicaraguans, Marcos Aguado and Octaviano Cesar, who represented themselves to him as CIA agents (6).

Leslie Cockburn subsequently corroborated Cesar’s CIA status from no less than eight sources, including high-level administration officials in Washington (7).

Marcos Aguado was close to two other CIA-linked Contra supporters later indicted in Central America for drug-trafficking: John Hull in Costa Rica, and Norwin Meneses in California (8). (Neither Hull nor Meneses was ever prosecuted in the United States.) It remains to be established whether the cocaine introduced into Florida by Morales found its way to his friend and future drug-trafficking partner Norwin Meneses in California.

Morales made a point of letting CIA personnel know of his Contra-related drug-trafficking, to ensure his protection. Government behavior for two years confirmed that he was protected. Despite a previous indictment, and DEA objections, a court order permitted him to enter and leave the country on his drug business (9).

He was directed to land his drug planes at two government controlled airports, Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador and Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport in Florida; and thereafter for two years arms and drugs were loaded and unloaded at Fort Lauderdale in broad daylight without any problems. Morales heard from one of his own informants that Florida law enforcement knew of at least one of his 1985 drug flights, but did not act on it (10). (Morales was ultimately indicted and arrested in 1986, after the Contra-drug story had been broken by AP.) (11)

In a 1990 drug case against Jose Abello in Oklahoma, one of Morales’ pilots, Fabio Carrasco, testified under oath that he had delivered millions of dollars of cocaine earnings to Octaviano Cesar and another Contra leader. He said that he had personally supervised flights of arms to Costa Rica which had returned [to Fort Lauderdale] with cocaine. He added that he believed this to have been done with CIA knowledge and approval. In this trial Carrasco was a federal prosecution witness (12).

CIA knowledge of drug-trafficking in support of the Contras was possibly admitted by Alan Fiers, in the mid-1980s the Chief of the CIA’s Central American Task Force. In a sworn deposition to the Congressional Iran-Contra Committees, the Task Force Chief said, “We knew that everybody around [Contra leader Eden] Pastora was involved in cocaine… His staff and friends [redacted] they were drug smugglers or involved in drug smuggling.” (13)

Whether or not they were named in the redaction to his deposition, we know that Octaviano Cesar and Marcos Aguado were top aides to Pastora, Aguado being the chief of his Air Force. Inasmuch as drug-trafficking in Costa Rica (where Pastora was based) was conducted almost exclusively by airplane, Fiers’ statement corroborates the claim of others that the CIA had knowledge of Aguado’s activities.

Major international drug traffickers who supported the Contras enjoyed the same kind of protection. A flagrant case in 1983-87 was that of the top drug trafficker or kingpin in Honduras, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesters. Matta was an integral part of the Contra support apparatus in that country. As Senator Kerry’s drug investigation revealed, Matta’s airline SETCO received supply contracts not just from the CIA-funded Contras, but from Oliver North and the U.S. State Department (14).

Newsweek (5/15/85) cited official estimates that Matta was responsible for perhaps one third of the cocaine reaching the United States. Yet the DEA station in Honduras was closed in 1983, as it was moving in on Matta. Matta himself remained untouchable until 1988, after Congressional support for the Contras was terminated altogether (15).

By this time Matta Ballesteros was sought by the DEA for the murder in Mexico of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena. Two of his associates and co-defendants in that murder case, Rafael Caro Quintero and Miguel Felix Gallardo of the then dominant Mexican Guadalajara cartel, have been identified in U.S. government records as major drug-traffickers who were also Contra supporters. A DEA Debriefing Report of their top informant Lawrence Harrison, introduced into a U.S. Federal Court in Los Angeles, reported how CIA-sponsored training of Contra guerrillas was conducted at a drug ranch owned by Rafael Caro Quintero near Veracruz. This training activity had been reported by two Mexican journalists in 1984, after which both journalists were murdered within a day of each other (16). Though a CIA spokesman at the time dismissed these charges as “nonsense,” they are corroborated from other sources (17).

According to the DEA Debriefings of Harrison and of Werner Lotz, another pilot for the Guadalajara cartel, Caro’s drug-trafficking partner, Miguel Felix Gallardo, was also a “big supporter” of the Contras; and advanced Lotz $150,000 to pass on to the Contras (18).

These coordinated drug-trafficking and Contra-supporting activities of Matta, Caro, and Felix Gallardo, all members of the Guadalajara cartel, were mirrored by the Contra-supporting drug-trafficking originating in Colombia and protected in Panama by Manuel Noriega. A witness in the Noriega trial testified that the Medellin cartel gave $10 million to the Contras (19).

The first drug case for which Noriega was indicted in Miami in 1988 involved flights of a Miami-based air company, DIACSA, owned by two convicted drug-traffickers, Floyd Carlton and Alfredo Caballero (the latter a veteran of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs). These drug flights, which eventually led to the conviction of all three men, were simultaneously Contra support flights. This no doubt explains why in 1986 the State Department chose to contract for “humanitarian assistance” to the Contras with the drug airline DIACSA, at the same time as it allotted a similar contract to the Matta-owned drug airline SETCO (20).

These State Department contracts are but one reminder that the U.S. Government assistance and protection for Contra-supporting drug traffickers was not confined to the CIA. Perhaps the most flagrant and undeniable case of such official assistance and protection was the opening to traffickers of the Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador.

Cocaine for the Meneses connection came from the Ilopango Air Force base in El Salvador, a closed base totally under government control, and virtually under control of the U.S. Department of Defense. In 1985 this control was exercised by Col. James Steele, who in 1985 was chief of the U.S. Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, and in that capacity oversaw the Contra supply operation at Ilopango at first hand. (Oliver North’s notebooks record a meeting on September 10, 1985, with Colonel Steele and former CIA officer Donald Gregg of Vice-President Bush’s staff, to discuss logistic support for the Contras.) (21)

This was at a time when Celerino Castillo, the Drug Enforcement Agent in Charge of Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica, was reporting to DEA HQ about a huge drug and gun smuggling operation that was run out of the Ilopango military airport by the ‘North Network’ and the CIA. According to Castillo’s later book,

“my reports contained not only the names of traffickers, but their destinations, flight paths, tail numbers, and the date and time of each flight. Hundreds of flights each week delivered cocaine to the buyers and returned with money headed for the great isthmus laundering machine in Panama (22).”

According to Castillo, the entire program was run out of Ilopango’s Hangars 4 and 5: “The CIA owned one hangar and the National Security Council ran the other.” (23)

Castillo also reported that the CIA in El Salvador requested a U.S. visa for one Contra pilot listed by the DEA as a trafficker, while his attempt to arrest another was forestalled by intervention from Washington (24). (Like other whistle-blowers inside the DEA, Castillo was eventually reprimanded and threatened with suspension.)

These are only some of the documented links between the U.S. Government and Contra-supporting drug traffickers. I hope that they are enough to demonstrate a systematic pattern of U.S. Government assistance and protection, involving the CIA but by no means limited to it.

September 30, 1996

————————————————– Footnotes

1. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection (Boston: South End Press, 1987); Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972).

2. Cocaine Politics, 179-81.

3. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 42-49.

4. Peter Dale Scott, “Honduras, the Contra Support Networks, and Cocaine: How the U.S. Government Has Augmented America’s Drug Crisis;” in War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotic Policy, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992, 126.

5. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 106-09.

6. Kerry Hearings, I, 54-55; III, 278-80; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 112-14.

7. Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), 170.

8. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 113 (Hull); San Jose Mercury , August 18, 1996 (Meneses).

9. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics , 115, 231; Eddy, Cocaine Wars, 332: “To the chagrin of the DEA, Morales was allowed bond…and he was given extraordinary freedom by the court to travel abroad.”

10. Kerry Hearings, III, 361-68, 300-03. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics , 115.

11. Kerry Report, 53; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 117.

12. Tulsa World , April 7, 1990; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 115-16.

13. Iran-Contra Committees, Appendix B, Volume 3, pp. 1121, 1230; reprinted in Kerry Report, p. 38; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 8-9.14. Kerry Report, 44-45; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 56-58.

15. Christian Science Monitor , 3/7/88; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 63-64.

16. DEA Debriefing of Lawrence Harrison, 2/13/90; Los Angeles Times , 7/5/90; 7/8/90; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 41.

17. Washington Post, 7/6/90 (“nonsense”). A later written denial from the CIA asserted that the CIA “never used Mexico as a training site for the Nicaraguan contras or for Guatemalan guerrillas, nor did it use Mexican drug traffickers or territory as a conduit for support of any type to the contras” (Washington Post, 7/18/90, emphasis added). Note that this lawyerly language evades the charge made by defense attorneys who introduced the Harrison debrief: namely, that the CIA knew of the drug and training activities and tolerated them, in exchange for the drug lords’ support of the Contras. Cf. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 41.

18. DEA Debriefing of Werner Lotz, 11/20/87, introduced into Federal Court in August 1988; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 41.

19. New York Times, 11/26/91.

20. Kerry Report, 47-48; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 11, 70, 110, 116.

21. Peter Dale Scott, in War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotic Policy, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block, cf. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 120.

22. Celerino Castillo III and Dave Harmon, Powder Burns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1994), 138.

23. Ibid.

24. Castillo and Harmon, 144, 155-77.

#################################################

Unaccountable Power: The CIA and the Return of the Global Drug Connection

Since World War Two the CIA has made systematic use of drug trafficking forces to increase its covert influence -- first in Thailand and Burma, then in Laos and Vietnam, and most recently in Afghanistan.⁸ With America’s expansion overseas, we have seen more and more covert programs and agencies, all using drug traffickers to different and opposing ends.

In 2004 Time and USA Today ran major stories about two of the chief Afghan drug traffickers, Haji Juma Khan and Haji Bashir Noorzai, alleging that each was supporting al-Qaeda, and that Khan in particular “has helped al-Qaeda establish a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia and Europe.”⁹ Later it was revealed that both traffickers were simultaneously CIA assets, and that Khan in particular was “paid a large amount of cash by the United States,” even while he was reportedly helping al-Qaeda to establish smuggling networks.¹⁰

There is no longer anything surprising in the news that large U.S. payments were made to a drug trafficker who was himself funding the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The arrangement is no more bizarre than the CIA’s performance during the U.S. “war on drugs” in Venezuela in the 1990s, when the CIA first set up an anti-drug unit in Venezuela, and then helped its chief, Gen. Ramon Guillén Davila, smuggle at least one ton of pure cocaine into Miami International Airport.¹¹

It would be easy to conclude from these reports that the CIA and Pentagon intentionally use drugs to help finance the enemy networks that justify their overseas operations. Yet I doubt that such a cynical Machiavellian objective is ever consciously voiced by those responsible in Washington.

More likely, it is an inevitable consequence of the U.S. repressive style of conducting covert operations. Great emphasis is put on recruiting covert assets; and in unstable areas with weak governance, drug traffickers with their own ample funds and repressive networks are the most obvious candidates for recruitment by the CIA. The traffickers in turn are happy to become U.S. assets, because this status affords them at least a temporary immunity from U.S. prosecution.¹²

In a nutshell: I am describing a development that is not so much intentional, as a consequence of repressive dynamics. A related example would be the CIA’s recurring use of double agents, again for the reason just suggested. In the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, the chief planner was a double agent, Ali Mohammed, who surveyed the Embassy and reported to Osama bin Laden in 1993, just months after the FBI had ordered the Canadian RCMP to release him from detention.¹³ In the Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008, the scene was initially surveyed for the attackers by a DEA double agent, David Headley (alias Daood Sayed Gilani) whom “U.S. authorities sent … to work for them in Pakistan…despite a warning that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups.”¹⁴

David Headley in court

The central point is that expansion beyond a nation’s borders engenders a pattern of repressive power with predictable results -- results that transcend the conscious intentions of anyone within that repressive power system. Newly formed and ill-supervised agencies spawn contradictory policies abroad, the net effect of which is usually both expansive and deleterious – not just to the targeted nation but also to America.

This is especially true of covert agencies, whose practice of secrecy means that controversial policies proliferate without either coordination or review. Asia in particular has been since 1945 the chief area where the CIA has ignored or overridden the policy directives of the State Department. As I document in American War Machine, CIA interventions in Asia, especially those that escalated into the Laotian, Vietnam, and Afghan wars, fostered an ongoing global CIA drug connection, or what I have called elsewhere a dark quadrant of unaccountable power.

This drug connection, richly endowed with huge resources and its own resources of illegal violence, has a major stake in both American interventions and above all unwinnable wars to aggravate the conditions of regional lawlessness that are needed for drug trafficking. Thus it makes perfect sense that the global drug connection has, as I believe, been an ongoing factor in the creation of an overseas American empire that most U.S. citizens never asked for. More specifically, the dark quadrant has contributed to all the major deep events – including Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, that have helped militarize America and overshadow its public institutions.

=

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3476

Edited October 18, 2014 by Steven Gaal

[Paul Trejo]

Steven, your last post on the fact that Mafia figures such as Jack Ruby were hired as part-time contractors for the CIA to do dirty jobs for them, is factual as far as it goes.

Yet it is also a generality that all-by-itself fails to solidly link the CIA with the JFK murder. You're making a leap of logic there. It's too facile.

The HSCA uncovered plenty of evidence to prove that the CIA worked with the Mafia in 1963 to try to murder Fidel Castro. Johnny Roselli is a perfect example. The fact that Roselli later bragged about killing JFK doesn't prove that the CIA killed JFK -- it equally likely that some civilians training with the CIA to kill Fidel Castro decided to kill JFK instead.

That's the spin that David Atlee Phillips placed on the relationship between his own connection with the AMLASH scenario and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Yet, these civilians (and two CIA guys) would then need further orders and plans -- such as, from the John Birch Society stalwart, Ex-General Edwin Walker.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited October 20, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Steven Gaal]

see

http://harveyandlee.net/Ruby/Ruby.html

============================

Doug Valentine

George White was the guy the CIA went to when they wanted to start up the MKULTRA program at Bedford Street. But prior to that, in 1947, he was head of the Chicago office and one of his informants was Jack Ruby.

Jack Ruby went to Dallas in 1948 working for White and actually infiltrated Bugsy Siegel’s Mafia drug connection with the Kuomintang in Mexico. As far as I know nobody was ever arrested. Bugsy Siegel was killed because he was getting a little out of control.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Strength of the Wolf:
The Secret History of America’s War On Drugs
by Douglas Valentine
Verso Press, London/NY, 2004. 554pgs.

Back in the 1980's, during the era of William Casey’s CIA, there were reports circulating in the alternative press about an international drug smuggling operation involving the mujaheddin in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pakistani military, including elements of its intelligence service, the Inter Service Intelligence or ISI. At one point the CIA, in an effort to ramp up this smuggling operation, sought to requisition 400 vehicles, including dozens of transport trucks from the Department of Defense. The Pentagon refused, but the CIA appealed to Reagan’s Vice President, career spook George H.W. Bush, through the National Security Council. The CIA got its trucks.

At that time there were 17 Drug Enforcement Agents stationed in Islamabad, the largest contingent in the world at the time outside of the United States, according to Alfred W. Mc Coy in his classic history The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. (The number I remember reading at the time was 14 agents, still a formidable number for a single overseas station.) This contingent of DEA agents was “pushing paper” in Islamabad when “n marked contrast ...a single Norwegian detective, [Oyvind Olsen,] broke a heroin case that led directly to the leader of Pakistan, General Zia ul Haq’s private banker.”

The CIA’s close relationship to elements in the Zia regime, including the ISI, were well known. Also the agency's ties to heroin and raw opium smuggler and mujaheddin leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were becoming problematic as revelations of U.S. complicity in the drug trade bloomed. Hekmatyar has turned on his American allies and is currently battling the CIA-installed Hamid Karzai regime in Afghanistan. This is not surprising. He was a founder of the Islamic brotherhood and led student demonstrations in Kabul in the 1970's and remains a member of the Jamaat-i Islami (Party of Islam), “a fundamentalist and quasi-fascist Muslim group with many followers inside the Pakistani officer corps.” The U.S. State Department and the mainstream media never fail to mention in their public comments that Hekmatyar is a “narco-terrorist,” as though all those years he worked hand in hand with the CIA he was a choirboy. He was particularly close to another drug dealer, Jesse Helms, former Senator from North Carolina.

What was the Reagan administration’s response to this torrent of reports tying the CIA to mujaheddin/ISI drug smuggling? As the Islamabad branch of the DEA began to stir around the reports of convoys of arms going up to Afghanistan and bringing drugs back, the Reagan people reassigned all but two agents, lest they interfere with the CIA drug operation. Pakistan virtually overnight went from a country with a few thousand heroin abusers to 1.3 million addicts.

And this is where Doug Valentine’s study of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs, proves itself essential. The FBN was a precursor of the DEA and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, or BNDD; and as such, repeatedly, both worked with and ran afoul of the CIA and the national security apparatus in its pursuit of national and international drug cartels. Valentine draws much of his narrative from interviews with former FBN agents whose frustration with and anger at interference by the CIA and the national security apparatus interference is palpable.

The amount of information Valentine crams into his text is formidable and often takes on the texture of the dense web of law enforcement, felonious behavior, and intrigue he’s illuminating. Some sets of passages reveal corruption so deep and pervasive that it's “thrilling”, to borrow Dirty Lenny’s term. Any one of dozens of cases Valentine touches on could have become one of Mark Lombardi’s elegant and complex graphs of corruption.

For example, Valentine quotes from a memo from Ed Lansdale, the head of Operation Mongoose, part of JM/WAVE, which in part plotted to assassinate Castro as well as other Cubans and destroy Cuba’s infrastructure. Lansdale wrote: “Gangster elements might prove the best recruitment potential for actions [murders] against police G-2 (intelligence) officials. CW [Chemical Warfare] agents should be fully considered.” And recent documents have proven that CW were used as well as biological weapons against crops and the hog population of the island nation. Lansdale is ubiquitous in the annals of U.S. foreign policy. He can be found at the Huk rebellion, Vietnam/Laos, as well as Kennedy assassination. There is a hagiography on Lansdale which has its uses if you can read between the lines. But for biting insight into just how cultural chauvinists like Lansdale or Ted Shackley can xxxx things up, read Richard Drinnon’s chapters on the former in his Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building.

As it turns out, the gangsters in Lansdale’s employ were the very gangsters the FBN was chasing--Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano.

On the very next page, we get Bobby Kennedy et al. Not the indefatigably noble Bobby Kennedy of the current Emilio Estevez hagiography, but the historical Bobby Kennedy:

While Bobby Kennedy was using Mafia drug smugglers in murder plots against Castro [Robert Kennedy was intimately involved with Operation Mongoose], and thus neutralizing the FBN, the CIA was relocating its Havana station and anti-Castro terror activities to Miami. Known as JM/WAVE, the station was managed by Theodore Shackley, a protée;gée; of Bill Harvey from Germany. It included Lansdale’s Mongoose unit, and some 400 CIA case officers. Already the preferred habitat of America’s mobsters, Miami was soon packed with dozens of CIA front companies. Thousands of CIA informers and assets, and several drug smuggling terror teams financed by wacky privateers like William Pawley, mentioned in Chapter 5 as having engineered the Pawley-Cooke Advisory Mission in Taiwan.

Reader’s Digest Press published career spook Ted Shackley’s book The Third Option in 1981. The book is such self-righteous bluster as to be laughable coming from a man who was stung by the Church and Pike committee reports and forced to fake his retirement from the Agency. “Shackley, having met drug lord General Vang Pao in Miami during his cooling off period, was reassigned as station chief to Laos.” He needed to chill in Vientiane because “he’d been caught selling 50 kilograms of morphine base to FBN agent Bowman Taylor.”

“How could the United States project power into distant lands, thus restoring some control over events which threaten our very survival?” Shackley asks. His answer: counter-insurgency and para-military operations like JM/WAVE, the Phoenix Program, and Operation Mongoose. Shackley is never clear how events in Nicaragua, the Congo, Bangladesh, Chile, Burkina Faso or Haiti etc. ad nauseum “threaten [the] very survival” of the U.S., a piece of political hyperbole obviously designed to disguise naked imperialism. But the global nature of American hegemony is clear in the statement.

So Ted Shackley in Florida! No wonder it was so easy for him to plug into the drugs and illegal arms side of the Iran-Contra affair, along with a bevy of Miami Cubans accused of drugs and arms smuggling, sabotage and murder, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who blew up a Cuban airliner, killing all aboard. Is that in your Bobby Kennedy legacy, Emilio? It's what you often find among American politicians; relatively benign domestic policy – fodder-friendly -- yet a foreign policy, the tool of empire, that is cruel, vindictive, even sadistic.

But wait, it gets better, Golden Triangle fans! “To cover a fraction of the costs of this massive enterprise, former spymaster Paul L. E. Helliwell established and directed a string of drug money laundering banks for the CIA. At the time, Helliwell was general counsel for the Thai consulate in Miami, an active leader in the Republican Party, and a friend of Nixon’s cohort, Bebe Rebozo. Among his drug smuggling credentials, Helliwell had worked with Chiang Kai-Shek’s intelligence chief, General Tai Li, and had set up the CIA’s drug smuggling air force, CAT [Civil Air Transport](later Air America), as well as the Bangkok trading company Sea Supply, which provided cover for CIA officers advising the drug-smuggling Thai border police.”

Against this new OSS/CIA backdrop of international criminality disguised as national security, the FBN was assigned the task of keeping America’s streets safe from drugs. As Valentine points out, the long and bitter dissolution of the FBN had begun.

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, FBN, which was formed on June 30th, 1930, from the remnants of the Narcotics Division, the corrupt Prohibition Unit of the Internal Revenue Service, and the Treasury Department’s Foreign Control Board, antedates the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the precursor to the CIA, by over two decades. The CIA’s role in the international drug trade and how it warped, thwarted, and finally made a mockery of U.S. drug policy cannot be stressed enough. Valentine himself begins his introduction with a discussion of how, after finishing work on his excellent study of the ‘Phoenix Program’, he turned to the FBN. The Phoenix Program was turned over to the CIA by the DoD midstream. This put the CIA in an ideal position to protect its Golden Triangle drug smuggling turf and infiltrate and subvert DEA efforts to stem the international drug trade after the end of the U.S. incursion into Vietnam and Southeast Asia (see mujaheddin story above).

Not that the FBN, anymore than the BNDD or DEA, was a sainted organization. From its inception in 1930 to just under a decade before its dissolution, it was headed by Harry Jacob Anslinger, who was recommended by then head of the Foreign Relations committee, Stephen G. Porter (R-PA), and that paragon of truth and beauty, yellow journalist, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, William Randolph Hearst. Anslinger was a bureaucratic brown-noser with little interest in real drug enforcement and little idea of how to proceed. His main concern was preserving his power and maneuvering his little fiefdom politically while in the shadow of J. Edgar Hoover’s far more powerful FBI. Lucky Luciano appropriately nicknamed Anslinger, Harry ‘Asslicker.’

Post-World War II American foreign policy is often grotesque, and as Valentine makes clear, the FBN managed to find itself entangled in more than its share of bizarre machinations. Sometimes FBN agents pursuing a case were suddenly told to back off, often without explanation, or removed altogether. Other times they were willing participants eager to take part in the Bureau’s sexy, Ed Wood-like cross-dressing fantasies or to abet felonies like drug dealing and murder.

Not that the FBN didn’t have its law enforcement moments. One of its best agents was Charles Siragusa, who nearly became Anslinger’s heir to head the bureau. Siragusa opened the FBN’s first overseas office in Rome and liaisoned there with the CIA.

Siragusa drew the line at facilitating drug trafficking, but helped the CIA in other ways. For example he helped black-bag CIA money to Italian politicians for James [Jesus] Angleton, the CIA’s aggressive counter-intelligence chief...

Siragusa was especially helpful to the CIA when it came to investigating diversions of Marshall Plan aid. In one case he learned through an informer that the commercial attachée; at the Romanian Embassy [the U.S.’s secret Communist ally] in Berne was diverting American-made ball-bearings to the Soviet Union, which the Soviets used to build tanks for North Korea. According to Siragusa, the attachée; traded the ball-bearings for heroin as part of a sinister scheme to steal strategic materials with one hand from the West, while the other poisoned it with smack.

As a result of the Berne case, a CIA team was sent to Rome under military cover to stop diversions, and with Siragusa’s help it intercepted all manner of strategic items, including uranium for the Soviet atomic energy program.

James Jesus Angleton is loosely portrayed by Mat Damon in Robert DeNiro’s film ‘The Good Shepherd.’ But it's doubtful that Damon communicates the very non-photogenic, spidery creepiness of the alcohol-soaked real thing. One retired CIA officer told me about a dinner party he attended where Angleton was also a guest. Angleton turned to the young spook and began asking him questions about his family background, beliefs, aspirations, etc. As he posed his questions, he pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket and began keeping notes on the answers. The paranoid Angleton continued taking notes the entire evening. So much for Emily Post meets Skull and Bones.

The FBN was involved in other notable cases, for example the famous French Connection and agent Frank Selvaggi’s Valachi investigation. Much of the FBN’s drug enforcement activity, however, was directed at street level dealers and users, especially among America’s blacks and disenfranchised. Much like today, street busts were easier and the numbers could be used to justify funding. And if you didn’t go too high up you wouldn’t run afoul of the powers that be like the CIA and get your ass fired or worse. When in the early 1950's the FBN was closing in on the Pahlavi family and the Shah of Iran through the Shah’s brother, Mahmoud Pahlavi, who along with other members of his family owned huge opium farms, they sat on the information because “the CIA was plotting to overthrow the government in Iran, and reinstall the Shah.” And indeed in 1953 the CIA overthrew the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and installed their favorite Persian drug dealers, the Pahlevis. Numerous other drug dealers from the Kuomintang to the Thai royal family and the Contras got a similar free pass flooding the streets of the world’s major cities with drugs.

Take a more recent analogy. Reporter Gary Webb, for his reporting on the CIA/Contra drug smuggling connection to the ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross and the Los Angeles crack epidemic, was roundly vilified by the mainstream media protecting its masters. Webb was also hounded by various agencies of the U.S. government. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to contradict without explanation its own earlier reporting on ‘Freeway’ Ricky and his influence on the L.A. crack epidemic in order to protect the CIA in the name of national security. The whole hypocritical episode is laid out by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and The Press. As for Gary Webb: despondent over the outing of such a fine Ivy League crew as the CIA and their noble 'founding father'-like buddies, the Contras, he allegedly committed suicide à la Danny Casolaro in December of 2004.

Valentine’s book also expands on the FBN’s role in one of the seediest episodes involving the CIA, the creation of the American counter-culture or MKULTRA. As you might recall, MKULTRA was a program under the supervision of OSS/CIA scientist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb approached Harry Anslinger to enlist the services of FBN agent George White, in effect making White both an employee of the FBN and the OSS/CIA. All of this is nicely reprised in John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control The Story of the Agency’s Secret Efforts to the Control Human Behavior. For the perpetually naive I recommend the Church and Pike congressional committee reports or the books of CIA Inspector General Lyman B. Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick, for example, closed the case, ruling the mysterious death of Frank Olson a suicide. The CIA scientist, who specialized in airborne diseases like anthrax, was surreptitiously slipped LSD at a CIA social gathering. After a bad trip, Olson plunged to his death from a window of the Manhattan Statler Hilton several days later, in the presence of CIA psychiatrist Robert Lashbrook. Police initially called the crime scene a homicide until Kirkpatrick stepped in.

The ostensible reason for this CIA ‘research’ which embraced LSD and other hallucinogens was to create a ‘truth serum.’ Added to that project were various attempts to control behavior, in effect creating assassins chemically, the Manchurian Candidate. Better assassins through chemistry. But mostly it was used as a party drug by the Agency and a small group of elites who were creating the nascent vocabulary of mind expansion. The OSS project began under the supervision of Dr. Winfred Overholser of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, who also oversaw Ezra Pound’s treatment there during the 1950's. Overholser used a dozen unsuspecting guinea pigs from the Manhattan Project, possibly searching for Soviet or German spies. A liquid concentrate of marijuana was used but with no discernible results other than to make the young scientists ill. Whether Overholser was tripping while treating Pound is lost to posterity.

When George White came on board, he had bigger plans. White used FBN ‘safe houses’ and apartments around the country, including the birthplace of the counter-culture, San Francisco, for illicit trysts and parties among FBN, CIA, and other law enforcement and intelligence people. The ‘program’ expanded to include unwitting victims, acquaintances, prostitutes, musicians, etc. White would spike the punch with a cocktail of hallucinogens and their variants, often triggering hallucinations & even psychosis in his unsuspecting victims. Many suffered permanent psychological damage. For many more no record exists of what effect this clandestine drugging might have had on them. Years later in a personal letter to Sid Gottlieb, George White wrote an epitaph for his role in the CIA:

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and the blessing of the All-Highest?

The breadth of drug-related events in the post-World War II world the FBN had a stake in is extraordinary. Though corruption flourished within the bureau throughout its history, it’s the FBN’s connection with broad historical events from a relatively unique perspective, often in the agents' own words, that makes Valentine’s reprise fresh and informative.

Valentine makes clear that three of the forces most prominent in defining the underlying international drug trade are the Mafia, the anti-Castro Cubans, and the CIA, with the CIA shielding the other two entities at every turn. Of the three, the Mafia is the most pervasive. Its underworld figures, like Arnold Rothstein who, besides running drugs, fixed the 1919 World Series, helped establish a need for a law enforcement agency that focused specifically on drugs. The anti-Castro Cubans were often Mafia figures unhappy about the Commies cleaning up their little island whore house. No more could a U.S. Congressman be lured to Havana with promises of unlimited sex with eight-year old boys in exchange for political favors.

The CIA’s connection, of course, began with ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s old OSS and its recruitment of Lucky Luciano and the Corsican mafiosi to beat and murder Communist union dockworkers in Marseilles and elsewhere along the Mediterranean Coast, and to seize Sicily from the Communists. With CIA blessing, and using drug running as a way of financing activities, the Mafia set up drug supply routes back to the U.S. Many an FBN operation would trace the drugs back to Mafia sources, in turn supplied through Lebanon, Turkey, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East, only to be thwarted by the far more powerful CIA stepping in and terminating the investigation on national security grounds.

But nowhere has CIA drug smuggling been more pervasive, longstanding, and crucial to the financing of black ops and low intensity conflict than in the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia. This raw opium and heroin preserve straddles northern Burma/Myanmar, southern Yunnan province in China, and northern Thailand stretching to Vientiane in southern Laos. The CIA officially took over drug smuggling operations from the French after Dien Bien Phu and along with the Corsicans, and especially the darlings of Washington political establishment, Reader’s Digest, and Claire Chennault, Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang.

The Kuomintang were involved in the drug trade in southern China well before there was an American presence in the region. But corrupt allies like Meo tribal leader Vang Pao who now resides in Orange County, California, were actually enlisted by the Agency. Vang Pao, a persistent critic of the godless and comparatively drugless Vietminh and Pathet Lao, helped organize the recent anti-Vietnam protests, in advance of George Bush’s visit to Hanoi, with the help of the California Republican Party, as the two have done on many occasions.

Competition for the drug trade remains fierce in the Golden Triangle to this day. As Valentine points out, the CIA then as now remains in the thick of it, even as the FBN proved ineffectual or too corrupt or bureaucratically incompetent to be effective. Drawing from Alfred McCoy’s earlier classic The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Valentine reprises a popular story of the CIA’s heroic defense of its opium trade and life-and-death free market competition of the Golden Triangle:

As world attention focused ever more closely on America’s conduct in the Vietnam War, the CIA’s need to conceal its major role in the regional drug trade became a top priority. The climactic point came in June 1967, when Burmese War Lord Khun Sa decided to sell 16 tons of opium in Houei Sai. Construing this as a challenge to their precious monopoly over supply, the Kuomintang generals mobilized their forces in Burma and marched across the border into Laos. Apprised of the situation, CIA station chief Ted Shackley in Vientiane informed Pat Landry, chief of the CIA’s major base in Udorn, Thailand. Landry ordered Air Force Major Richard Secord to send a squadron of T-28s to the rescue. Within hours, the battle had ended with both Khun Sa and the Kuomintang in full retreat, and the Laotians in total control.

Most readers probably first heard of Richard Secord during Iran-Contra when he and his partner, Albert Hakim, supplied the U.S. proxy army fighting against the Sandinistas and flooding U.S. drug markets with Contra cocaine. Especially hard hit was South Central Los Angeles, which Contra and Agency asset Danilo Blandon and ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross flooded with Colombian cocaine with the enthusiastic support of the CIA and Reagan administration officials. This is the story Gary Webb broke. And the spread of coke, especially crack, is why you ended up with Crips dealing in Mineola and Duluth and Scranton as well as the AIDS epidemic and the hundreds of millions of dollars made from the mandatory sentencing craze and the penal housing boom it fuels. (The sad saga is also reprised in Cockburn and St. Clair’s White Out, cited above.)

CIA agent Ted Shackley, called the Blond Ghost, the consummate ‘spook,’ shows up in the index of practically every book ever written on the illegal drug trade, political assassination, and sabotage from the earliest days of the U.S. takeover from the French in Vietnam to Operation Mongoose and the Phoenix Program, right through Iran-Contra. He famously said: “I fought the communists for twenty-eight years. I did a lot of bad things for my country. But I loved my country and did what I thought best.”

Of course, the case is easily made that Shackley also did a lot of bad things TO his country. Jonathan Kwitny, in his book The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, sums up Shackley’s career thus: “Looking at the list of disasters Shackley has presided over during his career, one might even conclude that on the day the CIA hired Shackley it might have done better hiring a KGB agent; a Soviet mole probably could not have done as much damage to the national security of the United States with all his wiles as Shackley did with the most patriotic of intentions.”(p.291)

Valentine points out, and as ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross and Contra cocaine confirm, [that the FBN as well as the CIA, DEA, FBI, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post et al.] racism and class warfare play an enormous role in who is the enemy in the so-called ‘war on drugs.’ It was the Danilo Blandon Contra drug connection with ‘Freeway’ Ricky Ross in Los Angeles than led to the pandemic of crack use in the U.S., and the seeming anomaly of finding Crips establishing drug markets all across the heartland. During the 1980's Ted Shackley and his friends Thomas Clines and Felix Rodriguez were part of the drug smuggling operation out of Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador that fueled that pandemic. CIA asset John Hull served the same function forming what was known as the 'Southern Front' from his ranch in Costa Rica along the Nicaraguan border.

Apropos of the customary targets of the FBN, and the FBN’s history of cutting law enforcement corners and corruption, agent Jim Attie summarized his experience as an agent as follows: “I’m not proud of what I did. It was dirty job. It was a form of amorality, and to this day I feel tremendous guilt and have unending nightmares as a result of what I did as a narcotic agent.” Attie himself exited the FBN after his fellow agents in the New York office, where he had recently been reassigned, slipped LSD into his coffee. Attie merited the reassignment because he had called his boss Anslinger “a manipulator and a cheapskate” who knew nothing about real narcotics work.

The FBN was involved in myriad aspects of the investigation of the infamous French Connection. The French Connection had its origins in French intelligence, the SDECE, operating in French Indo-China. This drug smuggling operation provided essential funding to the French military and enhanced its ability to wage war against insurgencies in that region. This is the operation the CIA would inherit working with the traditional drug lords in the Golden Triangle and the French Corsican mob. Further, “In 1963 Laos would withdraw from the UN’s 1961 Single Convention and, under the guidance of the CIA, start mass-producing narcotics to support the CIA’s own secret army of Laotion hill tribesmen, some 450 more of whom just surrendered to Laotian authorities in December of 2006.”

The FBN also made the initial bust on Joe Valachi, laboriously working their way up through his contacts. They also elicited some of his notorious revelations about the mob. A rookie agent in late 1958, Frank Selvaggi, along with his senior partner Art Mendelsohn and veteran NYPD narcotic detective Harold Kunin, arrested Helen Streat, a heroin addict and a prostitute in Harlem. Eventually through a series of busts, payoffs and ‘vigorous’ interrogations, a Selvaggi informant, Robert Wagner, ‘gave’ the FBN Valachi and he was arrested. Facing sentencing in court, Valachi began to set up and talk about members of the Genovese crime family.

#########################################

IN LIGHT OF THE ABOVE:

SO Ruby doesnt go to his regular superiors and check on Morales getting himself involved in killing the POTUS ?

Edited October 18, 2014 by Steven Gaal

[Paul Trejo]

see

http://harveyandlee.net/Ruby/Ruby.html

============================

by Doug Valentine

<snip>

#########################################

IN LIGHT OF THE ABOVE:

SO Ruby doesnt go to his regular superiors and check on Morales getting himself involved in killing the POTUS ?

Steven, in that entire long excerpt that you quoted from that link, Jack Ruby's name wasn't mentioned even once. This is what I mean when I say that your logic makes leaps. You're connecting dots with generalities.

It's true that the CIA hired the Mafia to help kill Fidel Castro. (This was poaching on FBI territory. Actually, the CIA was supposed to work only in foreign countries, and leave all domestic issues to the FBI. The FBI hired the Mafia for dirty little jobs, too, including snitching and spying on each other. The FBI didn't like it when the CIA started poaching Mafia boys for AMTRUNK).

HOWEVER -- that doesn't automatically connect Jack Ruby with David Morales. Somebody has to show the connection.

The narrative you provided fails to show a connection. It subsists on innuendo -- the way most CIA theories of the JFK murder subsist.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited October 20, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Steven Gaal]

Steven, in that entire long excerpt that you quoted from that link, Jack Ruby's name wasn't mentioned even once. This is what I mean when I say that your logic makes leaps. You're connecting dots with generalities. ......

The narrative you provided fails to show a connection. It subsists on innuendo -- the way most CIA theories of the JFK murder subsist

==============

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You dont mention Ruby link and have removed via <snip>

Doug Valentine quote about

FBN Ruby connections. Your response is disingenuous.

see

http://harveyandlee.net/Ruby/Ruby.html

============================

Doug Valentine

George White was the guy the CIA went to when they wanted to start up the MKULTRA program at Bedford Street. But prior to that, in 1947, he was head of the Chicago office and one of his informants was Jack Ruby.

Jack Ruby went to Dallas in 1948 working for White and actually infiltrated Bugsy Siegel’s Mafia drug connection with the Kuomintang in Mexico. As far as I know nobody was ever arrested. Bugsy Siegel was killed because he was getting a little out of control.

++++++++++++++++++
RUBY WOULD CHECK WITH HIS CIA and FBN CONTROL BEFORE HELPING MORALES KILL THE POTUS. THIS IS COMMON SENSE.

Edited October 18, 2014 by Steven Gaal

[Paul Trejo]

============================

Doug Valentine

George White was the guy the CIA went to when they wanted to start up the MKULTRA program at Bedford Street. But prior to that, in 1947, he was head of the Chicago office and one of his informants was Jack Ruby. Jack Ruby went to Dallas in 1948 working for White and actually infiltrated Bugsy Siegel’s Mafia drug connection with the Kuomintang in Mexico. As far as I know nobody was ever arrested. Bugsy Siegel was killed because he was getting a little out of control.

++++++++++++++++++

RUBY WOULD CHECK WITH HIS CIA and FBN CONTROL BEFORE HELPING MORALES KILL THE POTUS. THIS IS COMMON SENSE.

Let's see here -- according to Doug Valentine:

(1) In 1947 in Chicago, George White of the CIA used Jack Ruby as an INFORMANT.

(2) Also, in 1948, George White of the CIA used Jack Ruby as an INFORMANT to spy on Bugsy Siegel's Mafia operation in Mexico -- although nobody was arrested.

Now, based on this somebody is jumping to the conclusion that George White of the CIA was Jack Ruby's BOSS?

What, did George White pay Jack Ruby a fortune for giving him street Information on Mafia figures? Did Jack Ruby never have to work for anybody else? This was a full-time career for Jack Ruby?

This is what Valentine suggests -- that the CIA was controlling Jack Ruby from 1947 and forever, and that Jack Ruby didn't make a move without checking in with his CIA BOSS.

But that's exactly what Doug Valentine needs to PROVE! He can't just ASSUME it!

Then, on top of THAT, Steven, you imply (only by assumption) that GEORGE WHITE was somehow connected with the JFK murder! How? Well, simply by being a CIA Officer!

Sorry, that's not a solid connection. That's a generality.

This is the sort of error that Joan Mellen makes throughout her otherwise excellent book, Farewell to Justice (2005), namely, that all these people who were loosely associated with the Mafia and the CIA (like David Ferrie, Jack S. Martin, Fred Crisman and Thomas Beckham) should be counted as official CIA Agents -- just by proximity.

It was a running joke with them. Once the CIA stooped to hiring the Mafia for its AMLASH project, every wise-guy in America started puffing his chest out that much further, and making wild claims about being a super-spy, and super-patriotic. What nonsense. That sad thing is that Joan Mellen herself falls for this pose.

The people that Joan Mellen names (and most of those named by Jim Garrison) in connection with the JFK murder (and some of them even confessed) were virtually all CIVILIANS.

You can't just go on blaming the CIA based on generalities. Jack Ruby was connected with the CIA through George White for two INFORMANT contracts. So what? Where's White's connection with the JFK murder?

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

<edit typos>

Edited October 18, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Steven Gaal]

TREJO BELOW

=

Let's see here -- according to Doug Valentine:

(1) In 1947 in Chicago, George White of the CIA used Jack Ruby as an INFORMANT.

(2) Also, in 1948, George White of the CIA used Jack Ruby as an INFORMANT to spy on Bugsy Siegel's Mafia operation in Mexico -- although nobody was arrested.

Now, based on this somebody is jumping to the conclusion that George White of the CIA was Jack Ruby's BOSS?

What, did George White pay Jack Ruby a fortune for giving him street Information on Mafia figures? Did Jack Ruby never have to work for anybody else? This was a full-time career for Jack Ruby?

This is what Valentine suggests -- that the CIA was controlling Jack Ruby from 1947 and forever, and that Jack Ruby didn't make a move without checking in with his CIA BOSS.

But that's exactly what Doug Valentine needs to PROVE! He can't just ASSUME it!

Then, on top of THAT, Steven, you imply (only by assumption) that GEORGE WHITE was somehow connected with the JFK murder! How? Well, simply by being a CIA Officer!

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

##################################

Not according to Doug Valentine but from the diaries of George White himself as interpreted by Peter Dale Scott.

On pgs 169-170 of Peter Dale Scott's DEEP POLITICS and THE DEATH OF JFK. In his, Scott's, analysis of the diaries.

George White, "met with Ruby" and made him FBN INFORMANT.

Greorge White is not CIA but the head of the FBN,however, it seems he did a lot of work for the CIA, so much so it seems he wanted to be CIA.Whites CIA patron at the CIA was none other than James Jesus Angleton.

Ruby was a INFORMANT from 1946 (not 1947) at "25/week" per diaries.(per Valentine Ruby still working with FBN in Dallas).

Ruby couldnt get out of the INFORMANT position not because of the "25/week" but because White could put a murder wrap on Ruby. Per the interpretation Of White's diaries by Scott ,Ruby was part of the mob Ragen killing and White had the 'goods' on Ruby. This was no ordinary killing but was a significant part of a major organized crime 'reorganization'.

• Valentine never suggested that CIA was controlling Ruby from 1947. From the Armstrong link (which you do not address) it shows Ruby in CIA operations. The best interpretation of know facts is that Ruby was handed over to the CIA thus having CIA deniability per Ruby's Mob operations as cover. White seemed to want to ingratiate himself with the CIA and sharing assets was part of his modus operandi to do this.
• RUBY would check with both his FBN and CIA controllers before going into any POTUS killing schemes. Morales would know this. Thus its illogical to assume that RUBY wouldn't be in any assassination plan without CIA HDQ approval. Ruby is attached to TWO intel agencies and thus no ROGUE would use him because of the risk of being caught.

Edited October 19, 2014 by Steven Gaal

[Paul Trejo]

...Greorge White is not CIA but the head of the FBN,however, it seems he did a lot of work for the CIA, so much so it seems he wanted to be CIA.Whites CIA patron at the CIA was none other than James Jesus Angleton.

Ruby was a INFORMANT from 1946 (not 1947) at "25/week" per diaries.(per Valentine Ruby still working with FBN in Dallas).

Ruby couldnt get out of the INFORMANT position not because of the "25/week" but because White could put a murder wrap on Ruby. Per the interpretation Of White's diaries by Scott ,Ruby was part of the mob Ragen killing and White had the 'goods' on Ruby. This was no ordinary killing but was a significant part of a major organized crime 'reorganization'.

• Valentine never suggested that CIA was controlling Ruby from 1947. From the Armstrong link (which you do not address) it shows Ruby in CIA operations. The best interpretation of know facts is that Ruby was handed over to the CIA thus having CIA deniability per Ruby's Mob operations as cover. White seemed to want to ingratiate himself with the CIA and sharing assets was part of his modus operandi to do this.
• RUBY would check with both his FBN and CIA controllers before going into any POTUS killing schemes. Morales would know this. Thus its illogical to assume that RUBY wouldn't be in any assassination plan without CIA HDQ approval. Ruby is attached to TWO intel agencies and thus no ROGUE would use him because of the risk of being caught.

Steven, thanks for clarifying that George White was neither CIA nor FBI, but a top officer in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN).

For some people, all of these groups are simply equal; sort of Anything = Anything = Anything.

But it makes a lot of difference for the relationship that Jack Ruby had with George White. Jack Ruby was used as an INFORMANT to snitch on other Mafia figures, because he was making deals with the FBN to keep himself out of prison on narcotics charges (or worse).

OK. That's clear. But that in itself has nothing at all to do with the JFK assassination.

So, now let's talk about Jack Ruby and these alleged, so-called "CIA operations" in which he was supposedly involved. Certainly nobody can suggest that Jack Ruby was a CIA Officer, or anything like it. Jack Ruby was a Mafia punk; a Mafia bag-man; a Mafia pimp; a Mafia drug pusher; perhaps a Mafia hit-man.

Jack Ruby dealt in narcotics, probably supplying the strippers and hookers in his nightclub narcotics to keep them hooked on Organized Crime. Jack Ruby was useful to the Mafia because he could then use vice to blackmail Dallas Police and get concessions from them. That's one plausible reason that Jack Ruby was said to be on friendly terms with scores of Dallas Police (including J.D. Tippit, Jesse Curry and even the DA).

But this only shows that if Jack Ruby took ANY part in any CIA operations, it was as a flunky -- a gopher -- a punk who would do almost anything for MONEY or to keep out of PRISON.

To sum up, you've shown nothing to link George White with the CIA. Nothing to link the CIA with the murder of JFK. Nothing to prove that Jack Ruby was working for George White for the CIA to murder JFK.

Now -- we do agree on some things. We agree that at least two CIA Officers were involved in the JFK murder, namely, David Morales and Howard Hunt (because both of them confessed before they died).

However, I disagree with you (and perhaps the majority here) when I say that no other CIA Officers can be proven to have participated in the JFK murder -- and therefore Morales and Hunt were acting as Rogues.

As CIA Rogues, they would also have known all the punks, pimps and bagmen that were available on the street to be used and thrown away like the FBI and CIA would routinely do.

So, Jack Ruby didn't need to ask George White or anybody else, whether to kill Lee Harvey Oswald or not. Jack Ruby was emotionally challenged, anyway -- as amply proved by his behavior during the Warren Commission hearings.

You say that no ROGUE would risk using Jack Ruby because he was so well connected to CIA, FBI, FBN and so on, but I must laugh at this, because there was never any risk in using a punk, pimp or bagman for any purpose at all, as long as one had enough MONEY. There was always plausible denial.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited October 20, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Steven Gaal]

So, now let's talk about Jack Ruby and these alleged, so-called "CIA operations" in which he was supposedly involved. Certainly nobody can suggest that Jack Ruby was a CIA Officer, or anything like it. Jack Ruby was a Mafia punk; a Mafia bag-man; a Mafia pimp; a Mafia drug pusher; perhaps a Mafia hit-man......
To sum up, you've shown nothing to link George White with the CIA. Nothing to link the CIA with the murder of JFK. Nothing to prove that Jack Ruby was working for George White for the CIA to murder JFK.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo
==========================================
????? Have you no knowledge of George White ????? He is connected to numerous very TOP HDQ CIA people.
###############
http://visupview.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-lsd-chronicles-george-hunter-white_25.html
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http://visupview.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-lsd-chronicles-george-hunter-white_14.html
=
White was involved in the spy trade since the birth of the modern
US intelligence community at the time of World War II. White was an officer in the Office of Strategic Services, the WWII-era predecessor to the CIA. He was also involved in the highly secretive Division 19, a joint venture of the OSS and the National Defense Research Committee. Division 19 was involved in a host of black op activities, including assassinations, Mafia alliances, and the search for a 'truth drug.' White was a student of Division 19's Camp X, an 'assassination and elimination' training program that he later described as "the school for mayhem and murder."
White later became a trainer himself. Several of his students included Richard Helms, William Colby, Frank Wisner and James Jesus Angelton, among others. Helms and Colby would later become CIA directors while Wisner and Angelton would head several of the CIA's most powerful departments.
##############
http://mindcontrolblackassassins.com/tag/col-george-hunter-white/

Col. White was recruited for Project Artichoke by CIA counterintelligence agent chief James Jesus Angleton, White established a domestic Artichoke team that operated out of a CIA-funded safe house located in New York’s Greenwich Village. White’s operation was funded by MK-ULTRA Subproject 3.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Please note + Per the George White Diaries, Ruby and White "met" ,White personally recruited Ruby. THUS one way to think of it is that RUBY was :
one degree of seperation from Angelton,Helms ,Wisner and Colby.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

????? Have you no knowledge of Ruby government connections ?????

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Gunrunner Ruby and the CIA
by Lisa Pease
http://www.ctka.net/pr795-ruby.html

==oooooo+oooooo==

Ruby's Smuggling Operation, 1956-1958
http://jfklancer.com/mobconnections.html

=======================================================

Jack Ruby by John Armstrong

In the early 1950's Robert Ray McKeown was a 42 year old engineer from Texas who owned and operated a manufacturing plant in Santiago, Cuba, with the blessing of Cuban President Carlos Prio Socarras. On March 10, 1952 General Fulgencio Batista, with army backing, staged a coup, ousted Carlos Prio and took control of Cuba. McKeown soon began working with Prio in an effort to help restore him to power. Prio was a very wealthy man (a fortune estimated at $50 million) and began backing Fidel Castro and his small band of rebels with arms and munitions in their attempts to overthrow Batista.

NOTE: as early as 1952 Robert McKeown was the subject of an FBI Neutrality Act Investigation in connection with arms smuggling to Prio and rebel forces in Cuba. In a letter to J. Lee Rankin of the Warren Commission, Hoover wrote: "The neutrality and registration act investigation related primarily to the activities of Carlos Prio Socarras, who, with a number of others including McKeown, was involved in a conspiracy to ship arms, munitions, and other war materials to Fidel Castro to assist him in his efforts to overthrow the Batista regime in this investigation."

In 1952 Jack Ruby sold the Silver Spur nightclub to Gimpel and Willie Epstein. He then began commuting from Dallas to Daytona, Florida where he became involved in supplying counterfeit currency, guns, and munitions to leftist rebels in Cuba.

NOTE: Ruby was not seen in Dallas for several months in 1952. In an interview with the FBI Ruby said that he went broke in the night club business, was "mentally depressed, hibernated in the Cotton Bowl Hotel for three or four months, and then returned to Chicago for 6 weeks.” Nonsense; Jack Ruby was in Florida.

In Florida Ruby soon became acquainted with former Cuban President Carlos Prio, who was supplying arms and munitions to Castro. It was during this time that Ruby met gun smuggler and CIA operative Donald Edward Browder. The two men contracted with Joe Marrs (Marrs Aircraft, Miami) to transport weapons and munitions to Cuba. Ruby soon purchased an interest in two aircraft that he used to illegally transport the arms, and also acquired partial ownership in a Havana gaming house in which Carlos Prio held majority ownership. Donald Browder knew Jack Ruby well and said, “During the pre-Castro years (pre-1959), the CIA and Customs would not oppose gun shipments to Castro.”

NOTE: Blaney Mack Johnson (FBI informant “T-2”) knew a lot about Ruby's and Browder's gun-running activities in the early 1950s. In 1964 Johnson provided the FBI with detailed information concerning their activities and gave the Bureau the names of three people who he said could corroborate his story: Joe Marrs of Marrs Aircraft, with whom Ruby had contracted to make illegal flights to Cuba; Leslie Lewis, former Chief of Police in Hialeah, Florida, who knew of Ruby's gunrunning and smuggling operations; and pilot Clifton T. Bowes, Jr., formerly a captain with National Airlines in Miami. When questioned by the FBI, following the assassination of JFK and Ruby's nationally televised murder of Oswald, these three individuals denied being involved with the illegal transportation of firearms and, of course, denied knowing Jack Ruby.

On August 1, 1953 Fidel Castro and 123 armed men and women supporters attacked the Moncada military barracks in Santiago (where Robert McKeown lived and worked) in an attempt to begin the overthrow of the Batista regime. Castro was arrested and given a 15 year prison term. Ruby's gun-running activities suddenly came to an end and he returned to Dallas where he re-opened the Silver Spur nightclub, took over the Vegas Club with partners Joe Bonds and Irving Alkana, and was soon operating a third nightclub, “Hermando's Hideaway."

In May, 1954 the United States indicted former Cuban President Carlos Prio and seventeen other persons on charges stemming from their purchase, exportation, and transportation of arms and munitions to Cuba. Prio did not contest the charges, plead “nolo contendere," and was fined a mere $9,000. Jack Ruby, Prio's business partner and gun-running accomplice, was not charged, indicted, nor even questioned by US government authorities.

NOTE: in 1954 one of Donald Browder's contacts was Efrom Pichardo who was charged with conspiracy to ship arms to Cuba on behalf of Carlos Prio. Another co-defendant, Marcos Diaz Lanz, was a close associate of CIA operative Frank Sturgis (Fiorini).

On May 15, 1955 Fidel Castro was released from prison and fled to Mexico where he met Dr. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a physician from Argentina. Castro soon visited the US in search of wealthy people who he thought would be sympathetic to his cause and offer financial aid to support his coming revolution.

On November 25, 1956 Castro purchased an old yacht, the “Granma," and set sail from Tuxpan, Veracruz to Cuba with 82 armed revolutionaries. Upon landing they were attacked by Batista military forces and many were killed. The Castro brothers and Che Guevara escaped, fled into the Sierra Maestra Mountains, and began recruiting people sympathetic to their cause.

In 1957 Robert McKeown lost his manufacturing business when Cuban President Batista deported him, allegedly for not paying kickbacks, but more likely for helping Carlos Prio supply arms to Castro. By this time Prio, McKeown, and Jack Ruby had known each other for 5 years. But it was McKeown who began to develop a close, personal friendship with Castro as he delivered boatload after boatload of arms and munitions from operations based in Miami, Tampa, and later from Seabrook and Kemah, Tex (where McKeown lived). For his services McKeown was always paid in the office of an attorney who was counsel for Haiti, in cash, with $100 bills bundled in paper wrapping marked “Pan American Bank, Miami."

NOTE: In a letter from Hoover to Rankin on April 17, 1964, the FBI informed the Warren Commission that McKeown was one of the persons "in an extensive investigation conducted by the Bureau since 1952 concerning the activities of Carlos Prio Socarras." The FBI said that Prio, along with others including McKeown, was engaged in assisting Castro in his revolutionary pursuit against Batista. The Bureau also had reports that “Jack Ruby/Rubenstein” was involved in supplying arms to Castro, but never provided those reports to the Commission, thereby helping to conceal any connections Ruby may have had with CIA operatives.

By 1957 Castro and approximately 300 rebels were waging a guerilla campaign against Batista's government troops with weapons and munitions supplied by CIA-sponsored gun-runners. Once again, Browder and Ruby began to smuggle guns from Florida and Texas to Castro, while their activities were being monitored by the CIA and US Customs. The FBI had a 1000 page file on Browder, but in 1964 they released only three to the Warren Commission. The Bureau knowingly helped to conceal Ruby's gun-running with CIA operative Browder from the Commission. In the 1970's Browder testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations and admitted that he used to work for the CIA. He told the Committee that he purchased arms from a CIA-proprietary company, the International Arms Corporation (InterArmco, of Alexandria, VA), and then smuggled the arms to Castro.

Browder was a former Lockheed test pilot who, at the time of his HSCA interview, was serving a 25-year prison sentence for "security violations." Browder told the HSCA that one year after the assassination of President Kennedy he leased a B-25 bomber under the name of a non-existent company and flew it to Haiti. He then cashed a check in the amount of $25,000 that was signed by George DeMohrenschildt's Haitian business associate, Clemard Charles. The HSCA used Browder's testimony in their report relating to George DeMohrenschildt. But the HSCA did not use any of ex-CIA operative Donald Browder's testimony in their report that related to Jack Ruby. The HSCA helped to conceal Ruby's connections with CIA operative Browder, just as the FBI had helped to conceal Ruby's gun-running activities from the Warren Commission. The FBI file on Browder contains more than a thousand pages, yet the Bureau released only three to the Warren Commission. The reluctance of government authorities to properly investigate Ruby's connections to CIA operatives during most of the 1950's and early 1960's make sense as we begin to understand the extent of CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy and Ruby's televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.

As Castro and his growing number of rebels were attacking Batista's troops, Ruby was commuting between Dallas and the Houston waterfront community of Kemah, TX. James E. Beaird, a poker playing friend of Ruby's, told both The Dallas Morning News and the FBI that Ruby used to store guns and ammunition in a two-story house between the waterfront and railroad tracks in Kemah, TX., in Galveston Bay. On the weekends Beaird personally saw Ruby and his associates load "many boxes of new guns, including automatic rifles and handguns" onto a 50-foot long military-surplus boat. It was Robert McKeown who often piloted the boat to a drop-off point in Mexico, where Castro himself would land his yacht, the Granma, and pick up the arms. As McKeown delivered more and more arms to Castro, these two men developed a close, personal relationship. Their relationship became so close that shortly after Castro took over in Cuba he flew to Houston, TX and met with McKeown in an attempt to persuade his good friend to return to Cuba. Castro promised McKeown that he would be given a high government position or a business concession. When later questioned about Ruby's gun-running activities in Galveston Bay, Beaird said “many people knew all about this because he (Ruby) was so open with it." But unlike Prio, McKeown, and dozens of other people who supplied arms to Castro, Jack Ruby was never charged, indicted nor even questioned by US government authorities. Ruby appeared to have no fear of being arrested for his gun-running activities from 1952 through 1963. Not only did US government agencies overlook Ruby's illegal gun-running activities, but so did the Warren Commission, HSCA, the Church Committee, and the ARRB.

In early 1958 the FBI learned that some of Castro's forces were planning a raid on Cuba from Texas, and it was McKeown who was busy arranging the procurement and shipment of arms. The FBI also documented McKeown's involvement with Mario Villamia, a CIA-connected associate of Carlos Prio who lived in Miami and later participated in the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion.

On February 18, 1958, the San Antonio FBI office provided information to US Customs that McKeown had purchased a yacht called the “Buddy Dee.” A few days later US Customs officials seized the Buddy Dee while the vessel was cruising from Patterson, La. to Houston with a load of arms and munitions. On February 25 Federal agents arrested McKeown and charged him with conspiracy to smuggle guns and related equipment to Cuba for the benefit and use of Castro. McKeown's co-defendants included Carlos Prio, Jorge Sotus, Manuel Arques, Mario Villamia and Evelyn Archer. On October 24 the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, convicted McKeown and sentenced him to 60 days in jail, fined him $500, and imposed a 5-year probation period, to terminate on December 11, 1963. Carlos Prio plead guilty, but his sentence was soon suspended by authorities. But Jack Ruby, who never tried to conceal or hide his gun-running activities, was never once questioned, charged, nor indicted.

NOTE: Some of Prio's co-defendants were working for the CIA. Mario Villamia, of Miami, FL., participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion and continued to work with the CIA during the 1960's. Juan Orta, while secretly working for the CIA, was director of Castro's ministerial office in Havana.

In March, 1958 the US government announced the suspension of arms sales to Batista. It was now just a matter of time before Castro and his growing army of rebels (now numbering around 3000) succeeded in overthrowing Batista.

While Prio and McKeown were facing charges for conspiracy to smuggle guns to Cuba, Jack Ruby was once again commuting between Dallas and Florida. In May (1958) Dolores Rhoads, her husband Richard Rhoads, and her mother (Mrs. Mary Thompson) visited her aunt and uncle, James and Mary Lou Woodard, in Islamorada, Florida. Dolores and Richard spent the first night in a small two-unit motel operated by “Jack” and “Isabel” who were acquaintances of her uncle. “Jack”, who was originally from Chicago, said his first name was “Leon” but he went by “Jack." Jack Ruby's middle name was Leon. Mrs. Woodard said that Jack had a trunk full of guns that he was going to supply to the Cubans. Mrs. Thompson was told there were supplies of guns hidden in the marshes near Islamorada that were to be sold and delivered to the Cubans. Mary Thompson and her daughter said that “Jack” was driving a late model grey colored Buick with Texas license plates. Dolores recalled that when drunk one evening her uncle, James Woodard, said he was going to help Jack run guns to Cuba.

NOTE: Charles G. Watters was a CPA and worked for an accounting firm that kept Ruby's books until early 1960. Watters told the FBI that Ruby drove a second-hand Buick automobile.

The FBI interviewed James Woodard in September, 1963. Woodard said that he had participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion and had furnished ammunition and dynamite to both Castro and his anti-Castro forces. On October 8, 1963, Woodard was questioned again, this time concerning dynamite found at his residence in South Dade County, Florida. He said the dynamite was to be used by Cuban exile forces fighting the Castro regime. Apparently the FBI did not ask Woodard if he knew or associated with Jack Ruby, “Leon," or “Rubenstein."

Following the assassination of President Kennedy, and the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby, James Woodard's sister said that her brother had been in Texas a lot, and that she had asked James if he ever knew Ruby. He said no, but then promptly disappeared and hasn't been seen since November 25, 1963.

In 1958 a boat load of Cubans came ashore at a dock in Marathon Shores, Florida, and a young American placed a telephone call to a man in Dallas named “Ruby."

In 1958 the Oklahoma State Crime Commission linked “Abe Rubenstein," owner of a night club in Dallas, to a carload of guns and ammunition destined for Cuba.

In 1958 “Jack Rubenstein” wrote a letter to the Office of Munitions Controls requesting permission to negotiate the purchase of firearms and ammunition from an Italian firm.

In 1959 an Army Intelligence Report, related to importers of armaments (11/26/62), listed “Jack Rubenstein” as the representative for Saunders Import Company, New York, NY. (click here)

NOTE: It is interesting, and noteworthy, that while multi-millionaire and former Cuban President Carlos Prio Socarras, Robert McKeown, and numerous CIA connected co-defendants were arrested and convicted for running guns from 1953 through 1958, Jack Ruby was never once questioned, detained, nor arrested for the very same activities. Ruby never seemed concerned about his gun-running activites, but following the assassinations of President Kennedy and Oswald, Ruby was deeply concerned. Ruby warned his attorney (Tom Howard) about his CIA connections, and feared that if these connections were revealed it would expose the CIA's role in JFK’s assassination. A year later Tom Howard died, allegedly of a heart attack, at age 48; but reporters and friends thought he had been murdered.

In the summer of 1958, while awaiting trial for gun-running, McKeown entered into a partnership with a “Mr. Jarrett” and opened the J and M Drive-In on Red Bluff Road near Kemah, TX. His good friend Carlos Prio funded their venture with a loan. According to McKeown, Prio had also promised him a one-half interest in the Seria Biltmore, a hotel in Havana. After his arrest, Prio's days of securing and arranging shipments of arms and munitions to Castro were over, and the multi-millionaire and former Cuban President turned his attention to developing real estate in Miami and Puerto Rico.

NOTE: On April 5, 1977, while being sought for questioning by the HSCA, Carlos Prio was found lying on the ground outside the garage of his luxurious Miami Beach home, dead from gunshot wounds. He allegedly committed suicide—one week after George DeMohrenschildt allegedly committed suicide by gunshot, and three months after CIA asset and former US Ambassador William Pawley allegedly committed suicide on January 7, 1977. The HSCA could have asked Prio to explain how and where he acquired arms and munitions, how they were transported to Cuba, how and by whom he was paid, and his connection with Ruby, McKeown, and numerous CIA operatives including the notorious Frank Fiorini/Sturgis. Prio's testimony would have shown that Jack Ruby had been involved with CIA operatives and CIA gun-running operations for many years.

On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro and his rebels finally succeeded in overthrowing Batista, and there was no need for Ruby to continue supplying arms and munitions to Castro. But concerns over political conditions in Cuba began to surface and did not appear to be in the best interests of the USA.

Four months prior to Castro's takeover Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, wrote in the September 1958 issue of American Opinion that Castro “is a Communist agent carrying out Communist orders...." Soon after taking over Cuba, Castro's communist tendencies began to surface. There were confiscations of U.S. Property; banks and large industries were nationalized; schools became propaganda factories; civil liberties were suspended; free elections were dismissed; the courts were overtaken. As soon as the anti-Batista forces laid down their arms “revolutionary justice" began and purges with mass executions followed. Years later Castro explained, “back in 1959 the U.S. wanted us to make a strategic and tactical error and proclaim a doctrine as a communist movement. In fact, I was a communist .... (however) I think that a good Marxist-Leninist would not have proclaimed a socialist revolution in the conditions that existed in Cuba in 1959. I think I was a good Marxist-Leninist in not doing that, and we did not make known our underlying beliefs." (Le Figaro magazine, June 1986).

On March 31, 1959, deep undercover CIA agent Frank Sturgis (real name Frank Fiorini) was interviewed by FBI SA Krant and SA V.H. Nasca, upon referral from the Director's Office of the FBI. Fiorini was then a Captain of Cuban Rebel Army, and was on a confidential mission to the US at the behest of the head of the Cuban Air Force. The real purpose of his trip was not known to Fidel Castro or his supporters. Sturgis/Fiorini identified members and leaders of the Cuban Government who were either communists or communist sympathizers. He also furnished information concerning Cuban plans for potential revolutions in Caribbean countries. Sturgis/Fiorini, without revealing that he was working for the CIA, offered his services to the FBI as an "agent" in the fight against infiltration of Cuban Government by communists. He then requested aid in fighting communism in the Cuban Government (click here to view the FBI report on Fiorini).

NOTE: the HSCA asked Robert McKeown if he knew Frank Sturgis (CIA agent). McKeown answered, “I seen him one time over at Prio's house....” McKeown, Carlos Prio, Ruby, and others who supplied armaments to Castro were constantly surrounded and monitored by CIA operatives and US Customs.

In response to the growing threat of a possible Communist government within 90 miles of the US, the CIA began training and arming thousands of former Batista supporters, anti-Castro Cubans, and Cuban refugees who fled their homeland and were living in south Florida. Donald Edward Browder told the HSCA, “During the pre-Castro years, the CIA and Customs would not oppose gun shipments to Castro. After Castro turned Communist, the CIA and Customs encouraged shipments to anti-Castro forces.” People were beginning to fear that Castro was, as many had suspected, a communist, and should be removed.

On March 11, 1959, Dallas FBI agent Charles Flynn wrote, "on the basis of preliminary contacts and information developed to date, I recommend the captioned individual (Jack Ruby) for informant development." Flynn further wrote, "PCI [Potential Criminal Informant] advised he was willing to assist Bureau by supplying criminal information, on a confidential basis, which comes to his attention. On November 6, 1959, Flynn wrote, "contacts (with Ruby) have been negative to date, it is felt that further attempts to develop this man would be fruitless."

On March 15, 1959 Ruby telephoned and met with CIA-connected gun-runner Thomas Eli Davis III in Beaumont, TX. A year earlier, in June, 1958, Davis received a sentence of five years of probation for robbing a bank. While on probation Davis worked for the Agency training anti-Castro units in Florida. Soon, Ruby and Davis were supplying arms and munitions to Anti-Castro Cubans, apparently without the fear of arrest.

NOTE: When JFK was assassinated, Davis was in jail in Algiers, charged with running guns to a secret army terrorist movement then attempting to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. Davis was released from jail through the intervention of the CIA’s foreign agent code-named “QJ/WIN," who was identified by the top-secret CIA Inspector General’s Report as the “principle asset” in the Agency’s assassination program known as ZR/RIFLE.

After Ruby's arrest for killing Oswald, his defense attorney (Tom Howard) asked Ruby if he could think of anything that might damage his defense. Ruby responded and said there would be a problem if a man by the name of "Davis" should come up. Davis was later identified as Thomas Eli Davis III, a CIA-connected gun-runner and “soldier of fortune." In December, 1963 the Moroccan National Security Police informed the US State Department that Davis was arrested for an attempted sale of firearms to a minor. When Davis was searched, the police found “a letter in his handwriting which referred in passing to Oswald and to the Kennedy assassination.” Ruby told Howard that “he had been involved with Davis, who was a CIA connected gunrunner entangled in anti-Castro efforts and that he (Ruby) had intended to begin a regular gun-running business with Davis”. Ruby warned Howard about this connection, and feared that if it were to be revealed by either an investigative reporter or a witness it would blow open the CIA's role in JFK’s assassination. IT IS MPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT RUBY TOLD TOM HOWARD ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH A CIA OPERATIVE. Tom Howard died of a heart attack within a year at age 48. The doctor, without an autopsy, said that he may have suffered a heart attack. But some reporters and friends thought Howard had been murdered.

The HSCA, under Robert Blakey, was intent on covering up any CIA connection or gun-running activities connected with Ruby and failed to investigate the Ruby/Davis connection. They explained, in typical government prose, “Due to limitations of time and resources... it was not possible to confirm these (Seth Kantor's) allegations."

In April, 1959 Fidel Castro flew to the United States and met for three hours with Vice President Richard Nixon in Washington, DC. Following their meeting Nixon wrote a confidential memorandum in which he expressed concern over Castro's communist leanings. The memo was sent to the CIA, the State Department, and to the White House. The CIA soon began to organize and train anti-Castro groups in Florida, while Ruby and Davis helped to supply them with arms and munitions.

After leaving Washington, DC Castro flew to Houston and met Robert McKeown at the airport. A photograph on the front page of the Houston Chronicle titled “Castro and the Gunrunner" recorded the event. An article accompanying the photograph quoted Castro as saying that if McKeown would return with him to Cuba, he would be given a high post in the government, a franchise.....whatever he wanted. McKeown politely told Castro that he could not legally leave the United States because of his probation. Castro said not to worry because US authorities would not bother him in Cuba. But McKeown declined his offer and Castro departed for Havana.

McKeown's close friendship with Castro prompted many people to ask him for assistance in affairs pertaining to Cuba. On one occasion McKeown's brother asked him to contact Castro and attempt to obtain the release of three friends who were being detained because they were caught fishing in Cuban waters. McKeown personally telephoned and spoke with Castro and the men were quickly released. On another occasion Jack Porter, a campaign manager for Eisenhower, contacted McKeown about approaching Castro.

In early 1959 Ruby made preliminary inquiries concerning the possible sale to Cuba of some surplus jeeps located in Shreveport, La., and asked about the possible release of prisoners from a Cuban prison. The jeeps, the prisoners, and Ruby's visit to Cuba in August, 1959 all suggest that his activities were sponsored and directed by others.

Prior to visiting Cuba, Ruby asked McKeown to write a personal letter of introduction to Castro so that he could talk with Castro about releasing some unnamed friends that were being detained in Havana. McKeown also said that Ruby "had a whole lot of jeeps he wanted to get to Castro."

In 1959 Cuban travel records show that Jack Ruby entered Cuba from New Orleans on August 8, left Cuba on September 11, re-entered Cuba from Miami on September 12, and returned from Cuba to New Orleans on September 13, 1959. But bank records, Dallas police records, and FBI records show that Ruby was in Dallas on August 10, 21, 31, and September 4. Someone was helping Ruby to get into and out of Cuba without going through Cuban customs and immigration.

NOTE: The reluctance of the FBI, Warren Commission, HSCA, etc to properly investigate Ruby's connections to Prio, McKeown, Davis, and his various gun-runnings makes sense when one realizes that Jack Ruby's activities had been monitored by the CIA, FBI, and US Customs for years. In 1959 Ruby did not travel to Cuba for pleasure.

At the time of Ruby's visit, Santo Trafficante was being held at the Trescornia detention center in Cuba. English journalist John Wilson Hudson (a.k.a. John Wilson) was detained with Trafficante, and said that Ruby came to see Trafficante in Trescornia. After Ruby shot Oswald, Wilson contacted the American Embassy and reported, "An American gangster called Santo.....was visited by an American gangster type named Ruby." If Ruby was trying to sell jeeps to Castro, as McKeown said, was he trying to negotiate Trafficante's release? Trafficante, as it turns out, was released from the detention center on August 18, 1959, just after Ruby arrived in Cuba.

NOTE: Santo Trafficante was a mafia “Don” and was also one of the gangsters who participated in the CIA's attempt to assassinate Fidel. Trafficante appeared before the HSCA and was questioned by chief counsel Richard Sprague as follows:

Mr. Trafficante, have you at any time been an employee, a contract employee, or in any manner been in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency, or any other agency of the Federal Government of the United States?
Mr. Trafficante, did you know John Rosselli?
Mr. Trafficante, did you know Sam Giancana?
Mr. Trafficante, do you know Robert Maheu?
Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you have information that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated?
Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you advise other people of the assassination of President Kennedy?
Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you know Jack Ruby
Mr. Trafficante, have you ever met with representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency to discuss the assassination of various world leaders, including Fidel Castro?
Mr. Trafficante, is any agency of the U.S. Government giving you any immunity with regard to any plans to assassinate any world leaders?
Mr. Trafficante, did you ever discuss with any individual plans to assassinate President Kennedy prior to his assassination?
Mr. Trafficante, while you were in prison in Cuba, were you visited by Jack Ruby?
Mr. Trafficante, as a result of your appearance here today, have you been threatened by anyone, any group or agency? Has your life been threatened in any way?
Mr. Trafficante, have you been contacted by any agency in the executive branch, say the CIA or FBI, in connection with your possible testimony before or after you received formal subpoena to appear before this committee?"

Not one of Richard Sprague's questions concerned Trafficante's mob connections, but instead were focused on either Jack Ruby or the CIA. To each of these questions Trafficante's response was, "I respectfully refuse to answer that question pursuant to my constitutional rights under the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments." This is the legal response to questions that would otherwise be self-incriminating. Sprague, because his focus of attention was on the CIA, was soon forced to resign as chief counsel and replaced by Robert Blakey, who managed through selective testimony and questioning to shift blame for the assassination of President Kennedy to the mafia.

Due to his focus on CIA involvement, Richard Sprague was removed as the HSCA's chief counsel and replaced by Robert Blakey. Blakey worked very hard to sell the American people on how the “mob” was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. Blakey occasionally asserted that “rogue elements” of the CIA may have been involved, but always directed attention to the "mob." In 1981 Blakey wrote a book titled, The Plot to Kill the President—Organized Crime Assassinated JFK. Most of the evidence and witness testimony presented to the HSCA pointed to individuals at the highest level of the CIA as the principal planners of the assassination, but Blakey cleverly and deceptively ignored the obvious and blamed the "mob."

In 1961 Ruby was involved in a plan to sell British Enfield rifles, obtained from Mexico, to anti-Castro-Cubans in Florida. Nancy Perrin Rich told the Warren Commission about a group running Enfield rifles from Mexico to Cuba in 1961 and returning with Cuban refugees to Florida. Ruby was evidently the “paymaster." During the 10 years preceding the assassination of President Kennedy there is a considerable amount of information that shows the FBI, CIA, and US Customs were very familiar with “Jack Rubenstein” and his gun-running activities. The Warren Commission requested a written response from the CIA for any and all “information on Jack Ruby (aka Jack Rubenstein)." The CIA responded by stating, “Examination of CIA records failed to produce information on Jack Ruby or his activities," but the CIA provided no information whatsoever for “Jack Rubenstein." ****

===========

****Guess when the CIA kills POTUS then its childsplay for the CIA to play a name game with Congress.

Edited October 20, 2014 by Steven Gaal

[Paul Trejo]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

...Per the George White Diaries, Ruby and White "met" ,White personally recruited Ruby. THUS one way to think of it is that RUBY was :

one degree of separation from Angelton,Helms ,Wisner and Colby.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

????? Have you no knowledge of Ruby government connections ?????

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

****Guess when the CIA kills POTUS then its childsplay for the CIA to play a name game with Congress.

Well, Steven, even though George White is clearly a major force in the history of US Intelligence (given the claims of your citations) that still doesn't connect him with the JFK murder -- unless one is already biased in claiming that the CIA killed JFK.

Furthermore, I mock any notion that a Mafia pimp like Jack Ruby would be of SERVICE for the US Government for any other reason than to keep himself out of prison for crimes he clearly committed.

You say that George White "recruited" Jack Ruby, but yesterday you admitted that George White pressured Jack Ruby into cooperating with the US Government because it "had the goods" on Jack Ruby regarding a murder investigation.

You need to decide: was Jack Ruby a favored US Government asset, or a pitiful pawn, a snitch, a bag-man at the mercy of the Justice System?

It's clear to me after perusing Jack Ruby's use of the English language in his many pages of testimony to the Warren Commission -- Jack Ruby was no intellectual. He was a street person and a man-of-action, but those actions were always close to the underworld of crime, of the Mafia, of vice and extortion.

The US Government clearly used Jack Ruby like a low-level flunky.

It is disingenuous to try to compare Jack Ruby with intellectuals like Richard Helms, William Colby, Frank Wisner and James Jesus Angleton -- simply because they all knew George White!

That's not a strong argument. That's a weak argument. Jack Ruby remains a Mafia pimp, no matter how much one squints one's eyes. Ruby was also emotionally disturbed.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited October 20, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Douglas Caddy]

Boston Globe: Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-want-the-secret-government-won-change/jVSkXrENQlu8vNcBfMn9sL/story.html?event=event25

Edited October 21, 2014 by Douglas Caddy

[Douglas Caddy]

Princeton Study: U.S. No Longer An Actual Democracy

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy