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11/02 - Etats-Unis – Reagan et Bush - Quand les
Etats-Unis étaient une République bananière...
Declassified:
Covert Crime
by Matt Ehling Declassified Radio/Indymedia January 04, 2002
"Declassified"
radio presents an interview with former military
criminal investigator and Iran-Contra
whistle-blower Gene Wheaton. In this episode,
Wheaton reflects on the Iran-Contra scandal, and
on ongoing covert crimes of the executive branch.
DECLASSIFIED TRANSCRIPT: "Covert Crime"
(Music cue)
GENE WHEATON: When Harry Truman signed the
National Security Act creating the CIA, he
specifically stated in that act that they could
not have any police powers, and they could not
operate domestically in the United States, because
he feared a secret police coup. By creeping in a
little at a time, that coup has taken place.
NARRATOR: You are listening to "Declassified",
an ongoing interview and documentary series
dealing with America’s national security
establishment. In this episode, "Declassified"
discusses covert operations and covert crime with
former military criminal investigator, Gene
Wheaton.
(Music out)
At the end of World War II, the United States
government reorganized its military bureaucracy,
restructuring the armed forces under the newly
created Department of Defense. It also
created an entirely new federal bureaucracy - a
collection of agencies that has come to be
informally known as the intelligence community.
This new bureaucracy was initially centered around
the CIA, or Central Intelligence Agency -- an
offshoot of the World War II Office of Special
Services -- which coordinated intelligence
gathering and clandestine operations. With the
growth of the Cold War, the intelligence community
grew to include numerous other agencies, including
the National Security Agency, or NSA, tasked with
electronic eavesdropping, and the National
Reconnaissance Office, which operates America’s
satellite reconnaissance network.
The intelligence establishment took on two
distinct functions during and after the Cold War.
The first was intelligence gathering, which had
existed under the auspices of various federal
offices for many years previous. The second, and
more controversial function, was participation in
covert operations, which included propaganda,
paramilitary operations, and assassinations. These
covert functions were widely employed during the
Cold War, and their use continues today.
The intelligence establishment was designed to
operate under a veil of official secrecy, in order
to make its functions opaque to foreign espionage.
A body of secrecy laws and protocols grew up
around these agencies, shielding them from foreign
spies, but also from scrutiny by much of the
American public. Congressional oversight of the
intelligence establishment is limited to a select
few committee members, intelligence budget
information is restricted and classified, and even
the existence of entire agencies, such as the NSA,
has been hidden from the public at various time in
the past.
Critics of the intelligence community have long
contended that the institutional secrecy these
agencies operate under allows them too much
latitude, and too little oversight. This secrecy,
they contend, has led to violations of the
Constitution, and to violations of the law. The
Pike and Church Committee hearings of the 1970s
revealed broad-based abuses of the intelligence
community, including CIA surveillance of legal
American political groups, and CIA sponsored
mind-control experiments performed on unwilling
subjects. The Iran-Contra hearings of the 1980s
uncovered a massive operation that involved
illegally selling weapons to avowed enemies of the
United States, and the arming of paramilitary
militias in violation of laws passed by Congress.
Congressional oversight of the intelligence
community was increased after the Pike and Church
hearings of the 1970s, but in the wake of the
September 11th terrorist attacks, many of the
restrictions placed on America’s intelligence
agencies are being lifted. Civil libertarians and
intelligence agency critics have been quick to
warn that an increase of secret police powers in
the United States will do little to defend the
country against terrorism, but will do much to
erode traditional constitutional protections.
One such critic is Gene Wheaton, a former military
criminal investigator and security contractor, who
has worked as a counter-terrorism consultant for
Rockwell Corporation, the Saudi Royal Family, and
the Shah of Iran. Gene Wheaton was also recruited
into the early stages of the Iran-Contra
enterprise, and he is best known for his role in
exposing elements of the Iran-Contra affair during
the mid-eighties.
In this episode of "Declassified", Gene
Wheaton shares his reflections on the Iran-Contra
affair, and his critique of how elements of the
intelligence community have come to undermine
American democracy. Gene Wheaton:
WHEATON: I've served in the Marine Corps, the Air
Force, and the Army, primarily as a criminal
investigator and counter-intelligence agent. After
Marine service I went back to my hometown of
Tulsa, Oklahoma and was a police officer there for
a couple of years, and then came back into the
service as an OSI agent in the Air Force, and
served about nine years in the Air Force that way.
And then during the build-up for the Vietnam war,
by the time I got enough university credits to get
a commission, I was too old for it, so the army
offered me an inter-service transfer if I would
transfer from the Air Force to the Army as a CID
agent, Criminal Investigation Division. So I
switched from the Air Force to the Army and served
at Fort Ord California, and in Vietnam. In ’71,
my family and I were transferred to Iran where I
was the narcotics and counter-terrorism advisor to
the Shah of Iran, and was on the embassy staff as
the ambassadors’ back-door liaison with the
Iranian police intelligence agency. I came back
from Iran in ’73, was stationed in Chicago till
’75, retired from the army and went back to Iran
as a civilian working on contract doing generally
the same stuff - counter-terrorism and security on
major projects. My last assignment was in Iran ...
for two years I was the executive assistant to one
of the vice presidents of the Rockwell
Corporation, and director of security for a
program over there called the IBEX program; it was
an airborne electronic intelligence program plus,
uh, mountaintop border sites to monitor the
airwaves of the neighbors ... I was brought on
board after the assassination of three Rockwell
managers on the program. It was a billion-dollar
program, and if any more of their people died,
they were going to cancel the whole program.
Rockwell was fronting for the CIA on this program
with the Iranian government.
I have worked on and off on projects with CIA
people because of being a military investigator. I
consider myself a policeman, not an intelligence
agent. But in the 70s ... when I was advisor ... I
was in civilian clothes . . . I wore civilian
clothes for 20 years even though I was a military
man, and I carried federal agent’s credentials.
But in Iran, when I was the narcotics and
counter-terrorism advisor to governments over
there, I got very close with people in the CIA. I
was a Farsi linguist, and I had Iranian security
clearances and American security clearances and I
just ran with that crowd, and they just sort of
adopted me into their subculture. And that’s how
I became an insider with these people was because
of all of that.
When I went back to Iran in ‘75 after I retired
from the army, I went back with a, I guess you
could say, an electronic handshake: some people in
the agency in Washington told people over there I
was coming and that I was one of the good guys and
an insider, and had these clearances, and they set
me up for a point of contact in the embassy if I
ever needed their help, and on the outside if they
ever needed mine. Mutual back scratching type
thing. I’ve never in my life worked for the
agency per se; the closest thing was working for
Rockwell as a contractor, and I had a CIA security
clearance at that time.
My really broad-based knowledge of the covert
operations peaked out when I was really brought
into the inner circle of these covert operators in
the mid 80s. I had been in different compartments
of the same batch of people, where even their own
people -- a lot of them didn’t know the big
picture -- but I was considered a fair-haired boy
with Middle East background and aviation
background, and different cells in the
intelligence community needed me for different
things, and I was so close to a bunch of these
people, that I was gradually, I was almost
considered one of them. They treated me just like
I was a CIA covert operator.
While running back and forth to Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan and Egypt in the ‘80s, early, mid 80s
... I kept my contacts with the embassies around
the world and with the State Department, and with
the Agency, so that I could get quicker access
into countries whenever I got a project that I
could work on. In 1985 I became the vice-president
of a cargo airline called National Air. It was
during that period, summer of ’85, that some of
my old CIA contacts -- who were no longer
full-time employees of the agency -- but when they
retire these guys they usually give them a
contract as an outside contractor on the side, and
then they have deniability for working for the
agency. They can say, "No, he’s not an
employee of the agency," but in fact they are
contractors and they still carry security
clearances and have to be polygraphed once in a
while. I was recruited into Ollie North’s
network by that group during the summer of ’85
because they wanted my airplanes for missions to
the Contras, and they wanted my Middle East
background for helping devise a plan for movement
of weapons to the Mujahadin in Afghanistan. I had
traveled across Afghanistan before, and again, I
speak the language, and had been in and out of in
Afghanistan and Pakistan more so than anybody they
could find within the agency.
The guys that I had known for several years, uh,
primarily Carl Jenkins, who was a long-time career
CIA paramilitary mercenary operator, uh, probably
the most highly respected of those people in that
division of the agency ... he was the commander of
the biggest CIA base in Laos while Shackley was
over there, and while Bill Sullivan was over as
ambassador. Carl and I became very close friends
in the early 80s, to the point where I would keep
a bedroom in his home in Washington with clothes
and papers and things so I didn’t have to carry
them from California. I was commuting regularly
back and forth when I was going overseas, and Carl
and his wife, who was an active super-grader in
the agency -- he was her case officer and she had
been his interpreter, and then he got her a
master’s degree and then she got her Ph.D. She
went on to head one of the branches of the agency
-- we became like brothers and sisters, between me
and them.
So I was back in Washington trying to drum up
business for this little cargo airline, and Carl
agreed to be my Washington representative, uh, for
marketing purposes to open doors for me in
Washington, D.C. ... to see if I could get some
cargo contracts. It was in that vein that Carl
told me it was time ... that the guys in the
national security council wanted to bring me into
the inner circle. And that’s where I sort of got
at the very national level of this. I had
previously attended some black-tie functions with
Bill Casey and the veterans of the OSS; had been
invited to a party where the guest of honor was
Vice President Bush. My wife and I were invited.
We were running with a fairly high-level crowd. In
December of, uh, ’85 was the scheduled time for
me to actually meet with Ollie North, so they had
a black-tie dinner at the Palm Restaurant in
Washington D. C. on the 4th of December. It was
the day that Bud McFarland resigned as national
security advisor.
At that black tie party at the Palm Restaurant on
the 4th of December in 1985, I was specifically
invited by Neil Livingston and to come in and meet
Ollie North, and it was a party to promote Neil
Livingston’s book, called "Fighting
Back", and the subtitle was "The War on
Terrorism". He and a State Department/CIA
spook by the name of Terry Arnold wrote that book
together and this was the coming-out party for the
book, and all the covert operations community, the
real snake eaters, were going to be there with
black ties. Ollie North was there and Bud
McFarland and I don’t know, 75 or 100 people in
black ties, having drinks and dinner and
hobnobbing and they felt like ... the atmosphere
at that party was one of ‘We are the shadow
government running the United States.’ It was
almost like a diplomatic party or a State
Department coming out party for a regime. These
guys were in charge, and that was how they
presented it.
There was a plan that was approved later on by the
Congress in August, no, excuse me, October of 1985
-- Congress was going to vote in 27 million
dollars in non-lethal aid for the Contras and it
was going to be a legitimate but covert, uh,
program to supply the Contras with everything from
medicines to tents and uniforms and food and
whatever else they might need that was non-lethal,
but as it turned out, that program became a lethal
one too, because they would ship what they would
laughingly refer to as hard rice, meaning weaponry,
in with the $27 million worth of stuff.
Carl took me to the, what they called the
Humanitarian Aid Office for the State Department
in Roslyn, Virginia, and I met with Chris Arcos
who was the deputy for that program to a guy, an
Ambassador Dumeling. We were trying to get some of
the 27 million dollars of cargo to haul to
Honduras for the Contras that Congress had
approved, and we were told several times in no
uncertain terms that the only way we could do it
was to work through Dick Secord and that aviation
supply route, and I refused to do that because I
knew that Secord had an unsavory reputation; he
been forced into retirement out of the Air Force
as a major general in ’83 over the Ed Wilson
scandal in Libya. So I was advising the people
around Ollie North, the liaison people between me
and him, that they were dealing with a bunch of
unsavory characters that had a reputation, an
official public reputation, of causing extreme
embarrassment to the government. At that time I
didn’t ... I thought the contractors -- Secord
and that group -- I thought they had a legitimate
covert contract with the government, but they were
also diverting aircraft and hauling illegal cargo
on the side, and I was receiving direct
information about their movement.
Well, in May of ’86, I personally briefed CIA
director Bill Casey, and of course he looked
startled. I had no idea at the time that he was
one of the masterminds behind all this illegal
stuff, but he said he’d look into it and get
back to me. And he said he had to leave the
country the next day, and would be back in touch
with me in two or three weeks. It was exactly the
same weekend, or the week, I think the 30th of
May, when I met with him, or the 31st, when Ollie
North was on that secret trip with Bud McFarland
to Tehran. So I suppose Casey was going over to
Israel to brief them about it. I didn’t know
that at the time. Casey sent a message to me after
he got back saying that the agency wasn’t
involved in any of this stuff, and that the
government wasn’t involved in this illegal
diversion, and "If you think you can do
anything about it, let the chips fall where they
may," as a bluff. I’m just a raggedy little
old Oklahoma country boy, retired chief warrant
officer, and I guess he figured I couldn’t do
it.
Anyway, as result of those briefings in the summer
of ‘86, and I was kind of – this struck me as
being treason and grand larceny on a major scale,
stealing from the taxpayers’ money, -- and
having been a cop all my life, I thought it was
kind of wrong. So I got with a couple of
Washington D.C. journalists that I knew. And one
of them was a two-time Pulitzer prize winning
journalist by the name of Newt Royce. And Newt
Royce and Mike Icoca, who was a free-lancer who
was writing with him – Newt at that time was
with the Hearst newspaper chain in Washington D.
C., with their bureau. I had information -- direct
knowledge from the Saudi royal family -- that
kickbacks were being, from the Saudi AWACS program,
were being used to help fund the Contras, to buy
weapons from different countries around the world.
And I furnished Newt with the names of other
people that could back up what I was saying, and
that this was a scam because Secord, who was on
active duty after the Iranian revolution, was the
chief architect of the Saudi AWACS program. The
Saudi AWACS program was identical to our Iran IBEX
program that we had to close down in Iran. They
just moved it across the Persian Gulf to Saudi
Arabia and renamed it. It was an 8 billion dollar
program, and those guys were talking about 10 % or
15%, so you’re talking about an 800 million
dollars minimum, estimate, that that these guys
could get whenever they wanted it, out of the bag.
And Newt and Mike Icoca wrote it up on the wire
service for Hearst newspaper chain, and it went
out on the wires and was made a front page
headline of the San Francisco Examiner on the 27th
of July of 1986. As a result of that article in
August of ‘86, Congressman Dante Facell wrote a
letter to then secretary of defense Casper
Weinberger asking him if it was true that foreign
money, kickback money on programs, was being used
to fund foreign covert operations. And in
September of ‘86 Cap Weinberger wrote a letter
back to Facell denying that it was being done by
the U.S. government, with any knowledge of it
being kickback money. That eventually, one of
George Bush’s last acts -- and Larry Walsh, the
special prosecutor, indicted Weinberger as a
result of that correspondence -- and Bush pardoned
him as one of his last acts. And that’s how this
whole mess got started.
The covert operations subculture and the pyramid
system of it is difficult for the average citizen
to understand. And I understand it because I saw
it, but it’s awfully hard to describe. This
stuff goes back to the scandals of the 70s ... of
Watergate and Richard Helms, the CIA director,
being convicted by Congress of lying to Congress,
of Ted Shackley and Tom Clines and Dick Secord and
a group of them being forced into retirement as a
result of the scandal over Edmond P. Wilson’s
training of Libyan terrorists in conjunction with
these guys, and moving C-4 explosives to Libya.
They decided way back when, ‘75-’76, during
the Pike and Church Committee hearings, that the
Congress was their enemy. They felt that the
government had betrayed them and that they were
the real heroes in this country and that the
government became their enemy. In the late 70s, in
fact, after Gerry Ford lost the election in ’76
to Jimmy Carter, and then these guys became
exposed by Stansfield Turner and crowd for
whatever reason ... there were different factions
involved in all this stuff, and power plays ...
Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci
and Ving West and a group of these guys used to
have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in
McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear they
conversations. They basically said, "With
our expertise at placing dictators in power,"
I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their
comments, "why don’t we treat the United
States like the world’s biggest banana republic
and take it over?" And the first thing they
had to do was to get their man in the White House,
and that was George Bush.
Reagan never really was the president. He was
the front man. They selected a guy that had
charisma, who was popular, and just a good old
boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually
run the White House. They’d let Ronald Reagan
and Nancy out of the closet and let them make a
speech and run them up the flagpole and salute
them and put them back in the closet while these
spooks ran the White House. They made sure that
George Bush was the chairman of each of the
critical committees involving these covert
operations things. One of them was the Vice
President’s Task Force On Combating Terrorism.
They got Bush in as the head of the vice
president’s task force on narcotics, the South
Florida Task Force, so that they could place
people in DEA and in the Pentagon and in customs
to run interference for them in these large-scale
international narcotics and movement of narcotics
money cases. They got Bush in as the chairman of
the committee to deregulate the Savings and Loans
in ’83 so they could deregulate the Savings and
Loans, so that they would be so loosely structured
that they could steal 400, 500 billion dollars of
what amounted to the taxpayers’ money out of
these Savings and Loans and then bail them out.
They got hit twice: they stole the money out of
the Savings and Loans, and then they sold the
Savings and Loans right back to the same guys, and
then the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation --
the taxpayers money -- paid for bailing out the
Savings and Loans that they stole the money from
... and they ran the whole operation, and Bush was
the de facto president even before the ‘88
election when he became president.
See, when Harry Truman signed the National
Security Act creating the CIA, he specifically
stated in that act that they could not have any
police powers. And they could not operate
domestically in the United States, because he
feared a secret police coup. By creeping in a
little at a time, that coup has taken place.
This crowd really believes that the unwashed
masses are ignorant, that we are people who are
not capable of governing ourselves, that we need
this elitist group to control the country, and the
world -- these guys have expanded. They look at
the United States not as a country, not in any
kind of patriotic mode now, but they look on it as
a state within a world that they control. And
that’s this attitude that they have. They’re
not unlike any other megalomaniac in the world.
They’re nutty as fruitcake, but they’ve got
distinguished gray hair, three-piece dark suits
and they carry briefcases, and they’ll stand up
and make speeches just as articulate as anybody in
the world, but they don’t socialize and function
outside their own little clique. My experience
with them is that they could be certified as
criminally insane and put away in a rubber room
and have the key thrown away. That’s how
dangerous they are. But they’re powerful, and
they’re educated. And that makes them twice as
dangerous. And that’s basically what’s running
the world right now.
If I had not been part of this, and hadn’t seen
it first hand, I would not believe a word I’m
saying. You couldn’t convince me that something
like this -- and the American people will not
believe it. Because you can’t get the average
citizen . . . I’ve talked to judges and lawyers
who have invited me in to talk to them. Some of
them really patriotic concerned people. It turns
them off, because it changes their entire life
experience, and the reason that they have existed,
and the things they have believed in all their
life if you tell them this.
I have sat on the banks of the Potomac in
restaurants with 75 and 80-year-old retired CIA
people and retired generals, West Point graduates,
honorable people ... these old men have sat with
tears in their eyes and told me that, "Gene,
what you’re into, you understand it more than we
did, and it’s absolutely true, but it’s just
so big you can’t do anything about it." I
guess if I believed that, I’d go off to some
South Sea island and drink a few Cuba Libres
laying in the sand or something, but somebody has
to keep charging in there, you know. The biggest
chink in their armor – and it would take
somebody smarter than me to figure out how to
exploit it -- is their insecurity. They are afraid
of a peasant with a pitchfork. And the reason they
react so strongly and violently against anybody
who opposes them, is because they’re afraid
someone will grab a thread and unravel it, and
their whole uniform will come unraveled ...
The only way I can think of to get this thing
exposed, would be to coordinate with all of the
different independent small newspapers and radio
stations in the United States -- and television
networks -- and get them to start blasting this
thing -- and some universities -- because the
major media’s not going to do anything about it.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to "Declassified",
an ongoing interview and documentary series
dealing with America’s national security
establishment. Copies and transcripts of this
program are available at http://www.declassifiedradio.com.
That’s http://www.declassifiedradio.com.
Please refer to "Covert Crime" when
ordering this episode.
END.
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