Theodore Shackley

[Paul Brancato]

Mr. Caddy recently posted a link to a video lecture by Daniel Sheehan. In it he claims that Shackley worked for Reinhardt Gehlen in Berlin for a decade before becoming chief of JM wave station, and that he was Gehlen's translator when Gehlen was enlisted by the OSS. Does anyone know if this is true?

Sheehan has some tall stories to tell, some of them from his personal experience trying to get anyone in Congress to investigate the Iran-Contra drug connection. Other tales are second hand. One interesting one involves a former deputy Chief of Station in Mexico City named Joe Smith, who claimed that he had been taken to a remote German village in Argentina around 1962 and interviewed by a bunch of Nazi/CIA types who were trying to figure out if they could trust Mr. Smith enough to leave him in place in MC. According to Smith, they wanted to know if he would leave the Medellin Cartel alone, since that drug operation was CIA.

[David Andrews]

I've read Shackley's memoir, Spymaster, which contains some of Shackley's adventures opposing the Stasi. But the gaps left between the lines are so large, it's impossible to read anything into them. His Laos memories are more detailed - but they're innocuous details such as Laotian drinking games.

That particular Sheehan lecture is interesting, but I find his doting elsewhere on extraterrestrials intellectually disturbing.

What type of college pays Sheehan to lecture on persisting CIA-Nazi connections, anyway? I didn't catch the institution's name.

Edited April 7, 2014 by David Andrews

[Paul Brancato]

David - there are lots of questions and loose ends in Sheehan's youtube video. I saw another one where he was addressing some UFO group. But I do admire Sheehan for being practically the only man courageous enough to try to get to the truth of the Iran Contra mess, so I am hesitant to throw the baby out with the bathwater in his case. What I have read about Shackley is that he was working for William Harvey in Berlin, this according to the education forum entry put together by Mr. Simkin, who tries hard to stick to facts. I am struck by the fact that you are the only researcher who responded to my question, because in my view it is an important one. What exactly was the relationship between Gehlen, a leading nazi general who is resurrected by the CIA for Cold War purposes and finds himself heading German intelligence less than a decade after the conclusion of WW2, and Harvey and Shackley? I think that there is little point I looking at post war history with blinders. It seems almost obvious that there would be a close connection there. I just wish that Sheehan would illuminate his sources, or that another researcher here would have some corroboration.

[David Andrews]

A digest of Shackley associations at this link:

http://www.constantinereport.com/the-politics-of-heroin-at-fox-news-rupert-murdoch-the-cia-shackley-nugan-hand-bank-crimes-of-patriots/

"The most intriguing aspect of Nugan Hand Bank was the list of Yankees who were in on the scam. Theodore Shackley, Richard Secord, Thomas Clines, and Edwin Wilson played peripheral roles, while Gen. Edwin Black ran the Nugan Hand Hawaii office, Gen. Erle Cocke ran the Washington office, Gen. LeRoy Manor ran the Philippine office, Colby was their lawyer, former CIA deputy director Walter McDonald was a consultant, Adm. Earl Yates was president of Nugan Hand, and Robert Jantzen, a former CIA station chief in Thailand, got out of Nugan Hand when he smelled drugs. He needn’t have bothered; apart from Kwitny’s Wall Street Journal articles in 1982, Nugan Hand received little coverage and no official interest in the U.S."

Watch out for unreliable narrators.

Edited April 7, 2014 by David Andrews

[Larry Hancock]

Well all I can say is that I did my best to sort out Shackley though his entire career in Shadow Warfare.....if you want to look at what was probably the two worst phases of his total career you should look at his stint in Laos and his total abandonment of the Hmong.....not to mention his totally stupid move to put pressure on the North Vietnamese by setting up a base right on their western border, that got a lot of Laotians killed. Beyond that his negligence during the Phoenix program in Vietnam and then there was his gutting of the DEA informant program in Latin America. I can't totally blame Condor on him but he and Phillips along with Morales shared a lot of guild for what followed in the death squads there.

The amazing thing is that someone with as many failed operations could be promoted so consistently.....given his track record its not all that surprising he would fall in with a bad crowd after retirement...

-- Larry

[Paul Brancato]

David - I think its likely that the network around Shackley was was operative well before the JFK assassination. I read the material you linked, and think you excerpted the most telling paragraph. The presence of so many military men in leadership positions of a bank that was definitely a front for drug running and covert operations - what a surprise. So maybe Sheehan isn't far off when he claims that the Medellin cartel was CIA protected.

Larry - you think maybe Shackley was in with a bad crowd all along? I think where anti-communism is concerned many of us are willing to cut the CIA a lot of slack. But we might as well cut the Nazis a lot of slack as well in that case. I see a continuum that runs from the Bolshevik revolution through the Cold War and beyond. The Bush family, the Dulles and Foster families, all the president's bankers, the pentagon and the military industrial establishment, etc etc, all focussed on preventing the idea of socialism. To that end alliances with criminal organizations was and is perfectly fine, killing so called enemies of the state, like perhaps the Kennedy's, fine and even necessary. How many stories must we read about unexplained timely murders before we see the common threads?

[Larry Hancock]

Paul, I think it was in the same social crowd all along, call it the Georgetown Set, call it the Eastern Establishment...what you will. All devoutly anti-Communist and anti-Socialist and firmly capitalist.

My reference was to the former CIA types like Ed Wilson and others who Shackley became entangled with, you don't go from his position into into consulting in international arms transfers, and a lot

of related activities without exposing yourself and Shackley had never been a great judge of character. We cover those sorts of associations in a couple of chapters.

As to protecting the cartel, I go into exactly how that happened, involving an understanding between the CIA Director and the Attorney General, its part of our overall exploration of drug

and arms smuggling in and around shadow warfare. But I'll stop hyping that here, if you read it you'll see what I mean but its a 600 page book and a few posts here and there can't

really get across the story.