Was Carl Shoffler working for Interpol

[Douglas Caddy]

Was Carl Shoffler working for Interpol

when he set-up the Watergate burglars?

Carl Shoffler and Robert Merritt became roommates in 1970 after Shoffler recruited Merritt to become a Confidential Informant. Early in 1972, before Watergate broke, Shoffler accidently left a card from his wallet on a table in their apartment. Merritt picked it up and looked at it. Shoffler immediately grabbed it from his hand and told him he had no right to do so. Merritt responded that since they were lovers and worked together he did not see what the big deal about the card was.

The card was from the Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C. The name on it was Karl Maurice Schaffer.

Shoffler subsequently told Merritt that in addition being a detective for the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police (and a Military Intelligence agent) he also worked for Interpol. His assignment for Interpol was to monitor the Intelligence Agencies of Israel and the United Arab Emirates. This work included not only gathering information about the agencies’ activities but also disseminating true and false information to those same agencies in a form of cointelpro.

Merritt on a number of occasions accompanied Shoffler to the Riggs Bank where Shoffler withdrew large sums of cash using the card bearing the name of Karl Maurice Schaffer.

About ten days after the Watergate case broke, Shoffler told Merritt that if it ever became known what he and Merritt had done in the previous two years while living and working together, their lives would be worth nothing and that there was no place in the world where they could hide and not be found. Merritt interpreted this to encompass their pre-Watergate illegal efforts to infiltrate and destroy New Left and Peace groups but also their knowledge of the planned Watergate break-in gained two weeks before the event took place and Shoffler’s secret relationship with Interpol.

In light of Merritt’s claim that Shoffler worked for Interpol, the article below is of special interest:

Missing American feared a victim of ‘dirty war’

By Guy Dinmore in Washington and Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran

Financial Times (U.K.)

April 13 2007

Just why Robert Levinson, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and now private investigator, should venture into Iran to meet a American fugitive wanted for murder in the US remains a mystery that the highest Bush administration authorities are trying to unravel.

As the Financial Times revealed this week, Mr Levinson disappeared on March 8 after a six-hour meeting on the Iranian island of Kish with Dawud Salahuddin, an American who converted to Islam and was recruited by revolutionaries to assassinate an Iranian opposition activist near Washington in 1980.

Friends of Mr Levinson are mystified that he took the risk of travelling for such a meeting. They fear he is the victim of a sting operation by Iranian secret services engaged in an escalating “dirty war” between the US and Iran, involving hostage-taking and covert cross- border operations.

Mr Salahuddin, who fled to Iran after the 1980 murder and has at times expressed interest in returning to the US to face justice, told the FT in Tehran that he, too, feared Mr Levinson was an “innocent victim” of the clash between what he calls Iran’s paranoia about the US and Washington’s misguided foreign policy.

Mr Salahuddin said they registered a room in the Maryam hotel before he, too, was detained that night but released the next day after his Iranian passport was checked. Mr Levinson has not been heard from since. Iran’s foreign ministry says it does not know where he is. The US believes he is in ¬detention.

Although it was the first meeting of the two men, Mr Salahuddin and Mr Levinson had been in contact for some time and they share contacts.

Mr Levinson is 59. His long career in and out of the FBI focused on counternarcotics and organised crime, mostly Russian.

British American Tobacco told the FT it had employed Mr Levinson through Bishop International security consultancy to take on cigarette smuggling/counterfeiting work in South America. But BAT denied an assertion by Mr Salahuddin that Mr Levinson had been contracted to work for them in the Middle East. “Our discussions had nothing to do with money but operational procedures and how to approach the officials in Tehran [about cigarette smuggling],” Mr Salahuddin said.

Over the years, Mr Salahuddin – who goes by the name of Hassan Abdulrahman in Iran, where he is married to an Iranian and works as an editor – developed an intense relationship over the telephone with Carl Shoffler, a legendary Washington DC police detective.

Mr Shoffler, who died in 1996, followed the 1980 murder file and tried to persuade Mr Salahuddin to return to the US. Mr Salahuddin says he nearly did. In the meantime he helped Mr Shoffler liaise with an Iranian criminal investigator on tracking down drug smugglers bringing heroin from Afghanistan through Iran and on to the west. Mr Levinson shared those same interests.

There is another theory for Mr Levinson’s journey to Kish – a possible media connection. In 2002, Ira Silverman, a former NBC chief investigative producer, went to Tehran to meet Mr Salahuddin and wrote about him in the New Yorker magazine. He noted that his capture “would be a triumph for law enforcement”, but also argued that “from an intelligence perspective” he would be “more useful left in place” because of his access to the inner circles in Iran .

Mr Silverman was also a friend of Mr Levinson and Mr Shoffler. Acquaintances believe he introduced Mr Lev¬in¬son to the fugitive with a documen¬tary in mind. Mr Silverman declined to be interviewed for this article.

A US official, who asked not to be named, said US authorities also suspected that Mr Levinson was on a media mission. He did not name Mr Silverman.