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Information gathered by Alex Constantine
"[McVeigh's attorneys] said they believe the FBI
still has information that others helped McVeigh....
They have even suggested that some government
authorities might have known about the bombing
plot in advance. "
- Los Angeles Times, 6-7-01
The carping martinets of the OpEd pages and televised political banter
fests consider themselves informed enough to dismiss out-of-hand the
possibility that the government had anything to do with the bombing of
the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. But David Hoffman, a reporter in San
Francisco, begged to differ. He wrote a dense book, The Oklahoma
Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Feral House), noting numerous
connections of Iran-contra's "Secret Team" to the bombing.
Unfortunately, the FBI's Oliver "Buck" Revell sued Feral House when he
found a single fact in the book about himself that was unsubstantiated.
The book was recalled as a result of Revell's lawsuit and it is no longer
available (although Amazon.Com still has a limited number of copies and
scalps them for $100 apiece). Hoffman's investigation led him to conclude
that elements of the "Octopus," or "Secret Team" (associated in a "small
world " way with Buck Revell) were deeply involved in the bombing.
My own Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America
(Feral House, 1997) has a chapter on the devastation in Oklahoma City.
That book is still on the shelves but no major publication has ever
reviewed it and its contents on the bombing have been completely
ignored by the revisionist press at large. I also came to conclude that the
Iran-contra crowd was responsible for the bombing and subsequent
cover-up.
The Team's ties to known terrorists are already thoroughly documented.
The Iran-contra affair itself involved arms deals with terrorists. After the
bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, Bob Woodward reported in
the Washington Post (12-4-88) that sensitive documents aboard the
plane would have linked Oliver North to Abu Nidal, the most dangerous
terrorist operating at the time. Nidal had access to a quantity of Semtex H
plastic explosive and air-pressure-sensitive detonation bombs sold to
Libya by the CIA's Edwin Wilson (see: Los Angeles Times, 12-28-88). In
1989, Americans for Middle East Understanding reported in The Link, a
newsletter, that Donald Gregg, an advisor to George Bush, Sr., was the
administration's contact to the Mike Harari network. Harrari, an Isreali
Mossad agent, led an assassination squad in the 1970s that targeted
Palestinians. One of the Harrari group's most notorious acts was the
murder of a Moroccan waiter in Norway - mistakenly identified as an agent
of the Ali Salameh's Black Septembers.
There is a concerted attempt by Vincent Cannistraro, an Iran-contra
player, federal "experts" and CIA spin doctors to pin ultimate
responsibility for the Alfred P. Murrah FB bombing on Osama Bin Laden's
mystery terorists. Cannistraro ONCE blamed the murders In Oklahoma
City on "ENVIRONMENTALISTS out to DESTROY all human life on earth." He
NOW claims (see the June 11, 2001 issue of The New American, published
by the fascist John Birch Society) that he had intelligence information
BEFORE the blast concerning Middle Eastern terrorists. The contradiction
is glaring: If his claim has any weight, if he indeed KNEW that Muslim
extremists had designs on a major American target, WHY did he tell
reporters immediately after the blast that ENVIRONMENTALISTS were
responsible?
In The Boston Globe, on May 16, 1995, another CIA Iran-contra figure,
anti-terrorism "expert" Neil Livingstone, also claimed that Middle Eastern
terrorists engineered the Oklahoma blast. A veteran of Air America, the
notorious CIA opium courier in Southeast Asia, Livingstone once publicly
defended the Agency's assassination manual. He was recruited to Air
America by James Cunningham, its founder - later a central participant in
CIA "renegade" Edwin Wilson's arms sales to Ghaddafi. Livingstone has
long-standing ties to Israeli intelligence and the fascist Popular Alliance
Party of Spain. He was also an executive at Robert Keith Gray's public
relations firm Gray & Co. in the District of Columbia. He was brought into
the firm by Charles Crawford, who ran the International Division that
served as a branch office of Oliver North's civilian supply network.
Openly tying a Middle Eastern terrorists to the bombing diverts attention
from possible CIA involvement: "There is a remarkable similarity between
the methods used by Islamic terrorists in the bombing of the Marine
barracks in Beirut, the attack on the World Trade Center, and the bombing
in Oklahoma. The truckload of explosives is almost a signature or calling
card and it is the weapon of choice among these groups. " Livingstone
noted: "Very typically, these terrorists have found homegrown radicals to
use as dupes in the actual bombings. They have supplied the money and
the technical expertise and highly skilled operatives to guide a project and
then get out of town before they can be apprehended. " This is also the
modus operandi of a certain American intelligence agency.
For the record, there WAS indeed a Middle Eastern connection - but like
McVeigh and Nichols, the Muslim terrorists involved were linked to the
Iran-contra players and other ranking Pentagonians who remained in the
background of the 1987-88 congressional investigation of Irangate (it
focused on Oliver North's civilain network almost exclusively and bent
over backwards to avoid discussion of the core military and intelligence
ties).
The following text includes complementary segments from Hoffman's
book and my own dealinbg with participants in the Iran-contra scandals
linked to the Oklahoma bombing. The original Hoffman chapter is featured
here, and from Virtual Government I've included only segments that also
explore the bleak, fascistic wasteland of the "Octopus."
- Alex Constantine
1: The Octopus
"This underground empire is controlled by a handful of
people for money - that's the only secret of the temple."
- Danny Casolaro
The nomenclature of the Lockerbie and World Trade Center bombings
provide a unique and unparalleled insight into the dynamics of the
Oklahoma City bombing. Each event gives the reader a glimpse of how the
Shadow Government operates, utilizing drug dealers, criminals, and
terrorists to do its bidding.
All three bombings were sting operations that utilized, and were utilized
by, terrorists bent on causing destruction.
But the question still remained: who was controlling the terrorists? To
understand that, one must peer through the doorway of time stretching
from WWII to the present.
To prepare for the invasion of Sicily during WWII, the OSS (which later
became the CIA) collaborated with the Corsican Mafia. The arrangement
permitted the Mafia use the port of Marseilles for heroin smuggling in
exchange for its assistance in defeating the Nazis.[1117]
After WWII, the heroin operation moved to Vietnam and Laos, then to
Afghanistan and Pakistan, as the CIA embroiled itself in a covert war
against the Soviets. Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security
Affairs Richard Armitage sat on the "208 Committee," which oversaw
military aid to the Mujahadeen. Fazoe Haq, the governor of the Northwest
Frontier Province (the largest heroin growing province in Afghanistan),
who was originally worth $100,000, was suddenly was worth $200 million
after the war. Armitage was his main contact.[1118]
Vince Cannistraro (Mr. "Libya done it") also sat on the 208 Committee,
representing National Security Advisor Robert "Bud" McFarlane, Oliver
North's supervisor.[1119]
Shortly after the start of the Afghani operation, the CIA began arming the
Contras in Nicaragua. Cannistraro himself [along with Duane "Dewy"
Clarridge, then Chief of the CIA's Latin American Division] headed Casey's
original operation to arm the Contras, based on Reagan's March, 1981
decision. As former Green Beret Andrew Eiva said, "Cannistraro was up to
his ears by 1985. " This is significant, considering the Boland Amendment,
prohibiting aid to the Contras, was passed in 1984.[1120]
Some of these are the same players who moved into other Central
American countries, setting up security services (death squads) for
U.S.-backed dictators, and profiting handsomely from the cocaine trade.
If anyone thinks these are outrageous allegations, consider the
statements of Mike Levine, one of the DEA's most highly decorated
veterans: "For decades, the CIA, the Pentagon, and secret organizations
like Oliver North's Enterprise have been supporting and protecting the
world's biggest drug dealers, " including the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan,
the Contras in Central America, the DFS in Mexico, the Shan United Army
in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, and "any of a score of other
groups and/or individuals like Manuel Noriega. Support of these people
has been secretly deemed more important than getting drugs off our
streets.... "[1121]
As "Special Consultant to the Pentagon on the MIAs," in Bangkok in 1975,
Armitage reportedly spent more time repatriating opium profits then
recovering POWs. In 1976, when Khun Sa was still selling heroin to CIA
officials, the head of the CIA was none other than George Bush.[1124]
Former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, who was appointed
presidential investigator for POW/MIA affairs, came upon the same
information, and was warned by former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci
to stop pursuing the connections to Armitage. As he sadly explained to a
group of POW/MIA families in 1987: "I have been instructed to cease and
desist. "[1125]
Ironically, between 1987 and 1991, Vice-President Bush served as head of
the South Florida Drug Task Force, and later as chair of the National
Narcotics Interdiction System, both set up to "stem" the flow of drugs into
the U.S. While Bush was drug czar, the volume of cocaine smuggled into
the U.S. tripled.[1126]
Celerino "Cele" Castillo, the DEA's head agent in El Salvador and
Guatemala from 1985 to 1991, told reporters and Senate investigators of
numerous known drug traffickers who used hangers controlled by Oliver
North and the CIA in El Salvador's Ilopango military airbase. When Castillo
naively tried to warn Bush at a U.S. embassy party in Guatemala, Bush
"just shook my hand, smiled and walked away…"[1127]
"By the end of 1988," added Castillo, "I realized how hopelessly tangled
the DEA, the CIA, and every other U.S. entity in Central America had
become with the criminals. The connections boggled my mind. "[1128]
"The CIA - they're making deals with the Devil," adds Mike Levine.
"Unfortunately, the Devil is smarter than they are."[1129]
Some of those devils, like Monzer al-Kassar - "business partner" of Richard
Secord and Oliver North - would be utilized to do the Octopus's dirty work.
Another name Khun Sa mentioned repeatedly was Ted Shackley.[1130] A
long-time CIA player, Theodore G. Shackley (known as "The Blond Ghost")
began his Agency career as CIA Station Chief in Miami, where he directed
the CIA's JM/WAVE Operation, a post-Bay of Pigs attempt to assassinate
Fidel Castro and wreck havoc within that sovereign nation. Utilizing Cuban
expatriates, the CIA conducted hundreds of sabotage raids against Cuba
in direct violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act. Shackley also worked in close
partnership with Mob figures John Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santos
Trafficante.[1131]
While the operation was shut down in 1965, due mainly to revelations of
organized crime connections and drug smuggling, many of the
participants remained in Miami, continuing their illegal activities.
Later, as Station Chief of Laos, Shackley directed Major General Richard
Secord's air wing in tactical raids against the Communist Pathet Lao, who
happened to be General Vang Pao's main competition in the opium trade.
By keeping the Pathet Lao busy with the help of the CIA and the American
military, Pao's Hmong tribesmen were able to become the region's largest
heroin producers.[1132]
Of course, Shackley, his deputy Tom Clines (who supervised the air base
in Long Tieng), and their colleagues in CIA front companies like Air
America were only too happy to help, smuggling heroin to the U.S. in the
gutted bodies of dead GIs (with the assistance of their old Mob buddy
Santos Trafficante, who had helped form their ZR/RIFLE assassination
team, and Vietnamese Air Force General Nguyen Cao Ky), and laundering
the profits in the Nugan-Hand bank. As a 1983 Wall Street Journal article
stated:
Investigations following Mr. Nugan's death and the failure of the bank
revealed widespread dealings by Nugan-Hand with international heroin
syndicates, and evidence of massive fraud against U.S. and foreign
citizens. Many retired high-ranking Pentagon and CIA officials were
executives of or consultants to Nugan-Hand.[1133][1134]*
Shackley, along with Nugan-Hand's attorney - former CIA Director William
Colby - directed the infamous "Phoenix Program," a largely successful
attempt to "neutralize" by torture and murder approximately 40,000
Vietnamese civilians suspected of being Viet Cong sympathizers. One
Phoenix operative, testifying before Congress, stated that Phoenix was "a
sterile, depersonalized murder program… it was completely
indiscriminate. " The assassinations would continue in Nicaragua under the
code-name "Operation Pegasus."[1135][1136]
After becoming the head of the CIA's Western Hemisphere operations
(Latin American Division) in 1972, Shackley supervised the overthrow of
the Chilean government ( "Operation Track II") by murdering
democratically elected President Salvador Allende. With the backing of the
CIA under Shackley, the military led a violent coup by Right-wing General
Augusto Pinochet, which resulted in the abolishment of the Constitution,
the closing of all newspapers save for two Right-wing dailies, the
outlawing of trade unions, the suppression of all political parties, and the
arrest, torture, and execution of thousands.[1137]
After a brief stint as Director of the Far East Division, Shackley directed
CIA agent Edwin Wilson in training the Shah of Iran's notorious secret
police, the Savak, who routinely tortured and murdered the Shah's
opponents. Later Shackley would assist more directly in these
efforts.[1138]
In 1975, Shackley became Associate Director in the Directorate of
Operations, which put him in charge of Covert-Operations,
Counter-Intelligence, and ironically, Counter-Narcotics, all under the
command of George Herbert Walker Bush.
These associations naturally led to Shackley playing a role in the
formation of the "Secret Team," (to coin a phrase invented by Col. L.
Fletcher Prouty) the covert and illegal enterprise that was the driving
force behind the Iran-Contra operation. Donald Gregg, one of Shackley's
subordinates during his Saigon tenure, would later become Assistant
National Security Advisor during Iran-Contra, reporting directly to
Vice-President Bush.
It was against this backdrop that Shackley served as a "consultant" to
players such as Bush, Secord, North, and Casey in their illegal and bloody
guns-for-drugs network that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and
the flooding of our streets with tons of drugs.
As Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny writes about Ted Shackley
in his book, The Crimes of Patriots:
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 wile as Shackley did with the most patriotic of
intentions.
Between Shackely's Cuban and Indochinese campaigns, more dope
dealers were probably put onto the payroll of the United States
Government, and protected and encouraged in their activities, than if the
government had simply gone out and hired the Mafia - which, in the case
of the Cuban campaign, it did.
CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner forced Shackley to resign from the
Agency in 1979, due to his "unauthorized" dealings with rogue agent
Edwin Wilson, who was selling plastic explosives to Libya (with Shackley's
approval). Had he not left, Shackley would likely have become head of the
Agency.[1139]
George Bush, who headed the Agency in 1976, strongly desired to
continue in that post. He was not reappointed when Jimmy Carter took
office.[1140]*
Moreover, Turner, who had little faith in HUMNIT (Human Intelligence)
sources, decided to reshape the CIA along more advanced technological
lines. As a result of Turner's infamous "Halloween Massacre," the CIA cut
its field agents from several thousand to just over 300. As President
Jimmy Carter would later state, "We were aware that some of the
unqualified and incompetent personnel whom he discharged were deeply
resentful. "[1141]
The old hands of the Agency, who formerly had at their disposal almost
unlimited "Black Budget" funds for covert operations, were suddenly
forced into retirement, or forced into lockstep with Turner's new
guidelines.
Although CIA Director William Casey hired 2,000 new covert operators in
1980, many CIA critics felt Turner's actions had already caused the secret
cells of the good-old-boy networks to bury themselves - and their illegal
activities - even deeper.
It is this element, birthed in the hysteria of the Cold War, legitimized by
the paranoia of the National Security state, and nurtured by the politics of
greed, that has buried itself in the core of American politics.
As long-time Army Criminal Investigator Gene Wheaton defines it: "An
elite, very clandestine, very covert group within the intelligence
community…. The CIA and DIA is just the lightening rod for the people who
really control things. "
Those who could accept the idea of government foreknowledge of the
Oklahoma City bombing would be hard-pressed to accept the notion that
certain factions within the government might have orchestrated the
bombing itself. Those who have a difficult time accepting this are stymied
by what they perceive as "government."
As Wheaton explains, "The government is just a bunch of monuments,
office buildings, computers, and desks. They don't see the crazies in the
government - the little conspiratorial cliques within the
government. "[1142]
These little conspiratorial cliques - the same players that Shackley
intersects with, going back to Cuba, Laos, Afghanistan and Nicaragua -
have been involved for decades in everything from drug and gun-running,
to assassinations, covert warfare, and outright terrorism. It is a terrorism
that increasingly has no particular face, no ideological credo, no political
goal. It is a terrorism motivated by power and greed.[1143]
By no means the lone man behind the curtain, Ted Shackley represents
one of the more visible of this lexicon of covert operators upon whom the
powers that be depend on for their endless supply of "black ops" and dirty
tricks. Perhaps this is how Shackley knows, or seems to know, the
complex truth behind Oklahoma City. It is a truth that remains hidden
behind a sophisticated labyrinth of covert operatives, all of whom
converge at similar times and places. They are, as David Corn writes, "the
little faceless gray men we never see and seldom hear about. " Those we
call the "Shadow Government," the "Parallel Government," the
"Enterprise," the "Octopus," or a half-a-dozen other names, are carefully
hidden behind an endless roster of official titles and duties, and a plethora
of familiar-sounding organizations and institutions.
These same faceless little gray men would pop up in the Oklahoma City
bombing conspiracy like interminable weeds between the cracks of the
pavement. From the Bay of Pigs to Iran-Contra to Oklahoma City, the
names, faces, and players would coalesce for a brief moment in time into
an indistinguishable menagerie of politicos and spooks, terrorists and
assassins - to commit their terrible deed, then fade into the seamless
world were little distinction is made between assets and criminals.[1144]
Ted Shackley was officially forced to resign from the CIA due to his
dealings with friend and renegade agent Edwin Wilson. Wilson and former
CIA employee Frank Terpil had smuggled two tons of C-4 to Libya, and at
the behest of Shackley, had set up terrorist training camps there utilizing
Green Berets led to believe they were working for the Agency. The
ostensible purpose of this maneuver was to permit the CIA to gather
information on Soviet and Libyan weapons and defense capabilities, and
to learn the identities of foreign nationals being trained for guerrilla
warfare. Upon obtaining their passports and travel plans, Shackley would
alert their home country's secret police, who would then assassinate them
upon their return.[1145]
While Wilson was sentenced to a long prison term, Terpil fled to Cuba, and
has since been involved in numerous dealings with the PLO and other
terrorists, supplying them with sophisticated assassination weapons,
detonators, and communication systems.[1146]
Terpil also supplied torture devices to Ugandan Dictator Idi Amin, who
used a bomb supplied by Terpil to assassinate Kenyan cabinet member
Bruce McKenzie.[1147]*
One month later, Terpil was implicated in the murder of three executives
of the IBEX corporation - a high-technology company that was doing
business with the Savak. John Harper, IBEX's former director of security,
said that while in Tripoli, he saw a mock-up of the ambush site at the
training facility that Terpil and Wilson had set up.[1148]†
Readers will recall this is the same Frank Terpil that was seen by Cary
Gagan in Mexico City with Omar (Sam Khalid?), six months before the
Oklahoma City bombing. "I saw him down in Mexico," recalled Gagan, "in
November of '94, in Mexico City… with Omar. "
Gagan said he and Omar met Terpil at the Hotel Maria Isabelle in the Zona
Rosa district. Gagan didn't know who Terpil was at the time, but described
him as a fat, balding, 60ish fellow, who was "terribly dressed." In other
words - Frank Terpil.
"I heard the name because I knew Wilson's name from the Florence
Federal Penitentiary in Colorado." Gagan said that one of his intelligence
contacts, a man named Daniel, told him about Terpil. "The conversation
came up in reference to the Gander, Newfoundland crash, " said Gagan.
Was Terpil in Mexico to supply explosives to Omar? While Gagan wasn't
privy to the conversation, he believes that was the purpose of the
meeting.
When Wilson and Terpil were selling arms and explosives to Libya, they
were reporting to none other than Ted Shackley. Kwitny notes that Wilson
and Terpil were hiring anti-Castro Cubans from Shackley's old JM/WAVE
program [and Green Berets] to assassinate President Qaddafi's political
opponents abroad:
Some U.S. Army men were literally lured away from the doorway of Fort
Bragg, their North Carolina training post. The GIs were given every reason
to believe that the operation summoning them was being carried out with
the full backing of the CIA.…[1149]
Readers will also recall that while Timothy McVeigh was still in the Army,
he wrote his sister a letter telling her that he had been picked for a Special
Forces (Green Beret) Covert Tactical Unit (CTU) that was involved in
illegal activities. These illegal activities included "protecting drug
shipments, eliminating the [Octopus's drug] competition, and population
control. "
This is exactly what Shackley, Clines, and Secord did in Laos -
assassinating and bombing Vang Pao's opium competition out of
existence.
Could this CTU McVeigh claims he was recruited for be a latter-day version
of Shackley's assassins? Former federal grand juror Hoppy Heidelberg
said McVeigh's letter indicates that he turned them down, while former
FBI SAC Ted Gundersen claims McVeigh actually worked for the group for a
while, then became disenchanted.[1150]
If McVeigh had actually been recruited for such a group, the question
arises of what cover-story he was given. As discussed, it is highly likely he
was told that he was on an important mission - to infiltrate a terrorist
organization and prevent a bombing. Considering McVeigh's background
and character, it is unlikely he is a terrorist who set out to murder 169
innocent people.
Also recall that McVeigh was seen with Hussain al-Hussaini. The Iraqis
would provide a convincing and plausible excuse if McVeigh was led to
believe he was part of a sting operation: "Son, you were a hero in the Gulf
War. Your country needs you now in the fight against terrorism. " It is a
story a young, impressionable man like McVeigh would fall for.
It is also possible that McVeigh was sheep-dipped as disgruntled ex-GI for
infiltration into the neo-Nazi community, which would provide a doorway
into the bombing conspiracy through places like Elohim City.
Or perhaps, as a result of his becoming "disenchanted" and "leaving" the
CTU, he became targeted for "termination," and was set up as a fall-guy.
Such is standard operating procedure for those who attempt to leave the
world of covert operations.
Either way, the fact that there appeared to be two "Timothy McVeighs,"
just as there were two Oswalds, would suggest a sophisticated
intelligence operation, one that was designed to put McVeigh in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
Like Oswald, McVeigh probably believed himself to be a government
agent, part of a secret project. Like Oswald, McVeigh was not told what
the plan really involved, and was trapped, framed, and made a patsy.
This goes a long way towards explaining why an armed McVeigh didn't
shoot and kill Officer Charles Hanger when he was stopped on the
Interstate after the bombing. Why would a man who had just killed 169
men, women, and children balk at killing a cop (a member of the system
that McVeigh allegedly hated) on a lonely stretch of highway? The only
possible answer is that McVeigh believed he was part of a sting operation
- a government asset - and would be protected.
Whatever McVeigh's actual purpose and intent, it is curious, to say the
least, that Ted Shackley would tell D'Ferdinand Carone that the
perpetrator of the bombing was somebody from here.
How did he know?
Roger Moore, the mysterious gun dealer whom the government claimed
McVeigh and Nichols robbed to "finance" the bombing, ran a company next
to Bahia Mar Marina in South Florida (a popular hang-out for the
Iran-Contra crowd), which manufactured high-speed boats. The boats -
sold through Intercontinental Industries of Costa Rica (an Ollie North
"cut-out") - were used to mine Nicaragua's harbors in "Operation Cordova
Harbor. "[1151]
One source I spoke to said Moore had direct contact with Oliver North. "I
don't know who his [Moore's] contact was on Iran-Contra beyond Don
Aranow. I know he had access and would talk directly to Oliver North. He
knew Felix Rodriquez pretty well, he knew Nester Sanchez, Manny Diaz, all
those guys around Jeb [Bush] pretty well. "
This source also claimed that Moore was a "paymaster" for Tom Posey's
Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) - the covert paramilitary operation that
served as the primary nexus for arming the Contras.
A retired CIA/DIA agent I spoke to in Arkansas, said "[Moore] was an
Agency contractor."
Other sources say Moore was an informant for the FBI. He allegedly tried
to sell heavy weapons to the Militia of Montana (MOM) as part of an FBI
sting operation. A call to MOM indicated that Moore had indeed stopped by
for a friendly chat. He told Randy Trochmann, one of MOM's leaders, that
he was traveling the country meeting with militia groups in an attempt to
verify black helicopter sightings and rumors of UN troop movements. This
seems a peculiar pastime for a man who worked for a network of spooks
devoted to bypassing and subverting the Constitution.[1152]*
What is also peculiar is a letter written by Moore to McVeigh in early 1995.
Introduced at the trial of Terry Nichols, the letter, speaks of "a plan… to
bring the country down and have a few more things happen. "[1153]
Robert "Bud" McFarlane went on to form his own consulting firm, and
joined the board of American Equity Investors (AEI), founded by Prescott
Bush. AEI's board of directors reads like a Who's Who of the spook world,
including former CIA officials George Clairmont and Howard Hebert, and
CIA lawyer Mitch Rogovin, who was George Bush's legal counsel when he
was Director of the Agency.[1154]
AEI invested in a Tulsa, Oklahoma company: Hawkins Oil and Gas, from
1988 to 1991. McFarlane was a "consultant" for Hawkins and several other
companies on the Ech power project in Pakistan, which required frequent
trips to that country.[1155] This was during the tail end of the largest
covert operation the U.S. ever conducted - the arming of the Mujahadeen,
who trained in Pakistan. McFarlane sat on the "208 Committee," who's job
it was to procure weapons for the Mujahadeen, and arms contracts for the
Pakistani government.
Recall that Richard Armitage, who was the contact for Fazoe Haq,
governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, also sat on the "208
Committee. " As Alfred A. McCoy writes in The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia:
It's known that the CIA paid the Afghan guerrillas, who were based in
Pakistan, through BCCI.… That the Pakistan military were in fact banking
their drug profits, moving their drug profits from the consuming country
back to Pakistan though BCCI. In fact the boom in the Pakistan drug trade
was financed by BCCI.…
BCCI also served as a conduit for the Iran-Contra operation, largely
through Gaith Pharon, former head of Saudi Intelligence, who operated out
of Islamabad, Pakistan. The Saudis played a major role in funding the
Mujahadeen and [via the request of Secord and McFarlane] the Contras.
McFarlane - who former Mossad official Ari Ben Menashe claims is a
Mossad asset - worked with the president of Hawkins' International
Division, Mujeeb Rehman Cheema, on the Ech project. Was Hani Kamal's
supposed statement that Khalid was connected to the Mossad accurate? A
prominent Muslim community leader, Cheema claims he does not know
Sam Khalid.[1156]
Interestingly, Gagan said that at one point, Terry Nichols rendezvoused
with his Middle Eastern friends at the Islamic society of Nevada. Cheema
is chairman of the Islamic Society of Tulsa. Is there a connection? And
what of Cheema's links to McFarlane? Was McFarlane using Hawkins as a
front for CIA activities in Pakistan?
It is perhaps prophetic that many of the terrorists implicated in the major
bombings of the last decade attended the terrorist conference held in the
Northwest Frontier Province town of Konli, Pakistan in July of 1996. As
noted, Osama bin Ladin, a Saudi who funded the Mujahadeen and was
implicated in the Riyadh and Dhahran bombings, (a close associate of
Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman, implicated in the World Trade Center
bombing), Ahmed Jibril (who bombed Pan Am 103), and senior
representatives of Iranian and Pakistani intelligence, and Hamas,
HizbAllah, and other groups attended the conference.[1157]
Stephen Jones claimed he had learned through the Saudi Arabian
Intelligence Service that Iraq had hired seven Pakistani mercenaries -
Mujahadeen veterans - to bomb targets in the U.S., one of which was the
Alfred P. Murrah Building.[1158]
Just who were these "Pakistani mercenaries," and were they really
working for Iraq?
--------------
2: From: "The Iran-contra Players and the CIA's War on America," Virtual
Government, by Alex Constantine, Feral House, 1997:
[...]
Who should step forward immediately after the bombing but a chorus of
"National Security Experts" drawn from hundreds of propagandists
squatting in the duck-blinds of the corporate press.
The most strident terrorism "expert" consulted by the media was Vincent
Cannistraro, the former CIA officer who ran covert ops for the NSC during
the Iran-contra debacle - with its cocaine backdrop. In 1991, Cannistraro
told the San Francisco Chronicle that sinister "environmentalists" had
mustered into "clandestine cells," plotting to develop technologies to
diminish, even "eliminate" the entire human race.
Cannistraro performed a similar service for the Contragate contingent at
the NSC by blaming the Gander crash on Iraqui terrorists. In fact, the
plane was bearing a score of intelligence agents to the U.S. when it
crashed in Newfoundland. Several of them had gathered damning
information on John Singlaub, North and related Pentagon/CIA
subterfuges abroad.
In December 1990, Gene Wheaton, formerly an investigator for the
Christic Institute, concluded a probe of the Arrow Air jet crash with the
comment, "the official version is a cover-up, and the Canadian and U.S.
government officials who are responsible have been criminally negligent
or worse. " On board had been over 20 crack commandos from the Special
Forces, identified on the passenger log as "warrant officers." Arrow Air
itself was a CIA dummy front, and bore a ton of mystery cargo when the
jet and its 256 passengers went down.
Wheaton discovered that Arrow had transported arms from Israel to Iran
on North's behalf as part of the arms-for- hostages swap. The mid-flight
explosion, he claims, was a retaliatory strike by the Iranians for a swindle
perpetrated by the Reagan administration's pugnacious schemer, Oliver
North.
Five years on, seeds planted by the Iran-contra players resulted in
another bombing - of the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City....
Larry Nichols [a vocal Clinton critic] is a CIA veteran of the contra
guns-for-drugs network. Nichols fought under John Singlaub in Vietnam,
and reported to the World Anti-Communist League official during the
Nicaraguan contra war.
Singlaub is an anti-Communist of the 1950s genus, and it was during that
decade, as deputy CIA station chief in South Korea, that his political
psychopathology found an outlet. During the Korean war he fell in with a
circle of Seoul's most powerful politicians, spies and industrialists. His sole
ambition in life since appears to be fundraising to destroy Communism. In
Vietnam, Singlaub organized the dreaded Phoenix Program under his
Special Operations Group, a bund of 10,000 troops unleashed in the south
to conduct covert raids, assassinations of Viet Minh by the tens of
thousands, psychological warfare and sabotage missions.
Ollie North was one of John Singlaub's second lieutenants.
Claire Sterling writes that Singlaub "the centurion came to be regarded
with awe by a whole generation of military men and intelligence officers,
many of whom shared his conservative views about the way things should
be in Asia. Around him grew a following that developed into an
infrastructure at the Pentagon and CIA. "
The quarter of covert intelligence that took part in the Iran-contra scandal
was represented in the Oklahoma bombing case by Michael Tigar, the
attorney representing Terry Nichols. In the 1960s and '70s, Tigar was
employed by the law firm of Williams, Wadden & Stein. He reported to
Edward Bennett Williams, the head of the firm, a powerful Beltway
attorney on intimate terms with the CIA. Williams often referred to Tigar
as his "most brilliant protégé."
The law firm sprang into existence to cater to the same interagency
intelligence underground implicated in drug distribution, mind control and
a pile of exploding compost in Oklahoma City.
A senior partner of the firm was Brendon Sullivan, the high-strung legal
phenomenon who represented Oliver North during the Congressional
Iran-contra hearings.
Williams, a Jesuit, was offered the post of CIA director by two presidents.
He refused, possibly because he was already a de facto CIA functionary,
and thereby shaped history - Gerald Ford gave the job to George Bush
instead. Robert Maheu, the CIA hit man, attended Holy Cross with Williams
and was a close friend. In 1958, the famed attorney referred Maheu to Los
Angeles mobster Johnny Roselli to plot against Cuban premier Fidel
Castro.
Junk bond magnate Michael Milken, a client of the firm, openly wept at his
funeral in 1988. Williams' client roster included Joseph McCarthy, Mafia
don Frank Costello, Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sinatra, Armand Hammer and
John Connally. He was general counsel to Georgetown University, which
has long maintained a symbiotic relationship with Langley.
Tigar came to the firm after resigning his position as a Supreme Court
clerk. He represented some extremely high-powered clients for a
journeyman attorney. He coached Bobby Baker, the LBJ aide imprisoned
for tax fraud and influence peddling in 1967, before Senate appearances.
Tigar defended John Connally when the former Texas governor was
accused of pocketing a bribe. Connally was acquitted. Tigar was rewarded
with a prize bull. He packed the beast off to Fidel Castro.
One San Francisco reporter described Tigar, with his danger-high-voltage
wardrobe and crewcut, as appearing "more like a Young Republican than
the spell-binding firebrand he was a dozen years ago. " The press has
made much of his radical days at Berekely, his representation of Angela
Davis, but he has more than comforted critical neo- "conservatives" by
taking on far-right clients. One of the most controversial was John
Demjanjuk, the accused Nazi war criminal. Tigar also represented Clayton
Jackson, the California lobbyist convicted for money laundering,
racketeering and offering a bribe to state senator Alan Robbins.
He agreed to counsel Terry Nichols at the request of three federal judges.
Like his mercurial attorney, Nichols was turned out by the same national
security bund behind the Iran-contra swaps and the World Trade Center
bombing, not to mention foreign coups, death squad outrages, drug
imports and a long history of homicidal covert operations.
After his arrest, federal agents discovered that Terry Nichols had a locker
full of gold and silver bullion stored in a locker in Las Vegas. Gold, like guns
and drugs, is a favored currency in the international netherworld of
"spycraft."
Nichols obtained the gold in November, 1994 while on a junket to the
Philippines.
Terry Nichols hid a dagger under his compost-smeared cloak. Lana Padilla,
his ex-wife, called a news conference on July 13 after visiting him in
prison. She said that Nichols made frequent trips to the Philippines since
1989 - so many, in fact, that the farmer from Kansas had charged $40,000
in air fares to his credit cards. Ms. Padilla also claimed that Tim McVeigh
footed the bill for the 1989 trip.
The gold, Padilla said, was given to Nichols by a party unknown in the
Philippines - allegedly a bearded Islamic involved in the World Trade
Center bombing.
Padilla said that Nichols never took Mary Fay, his current wife (a
mail-order bride from the Philippines), when he travelled, even though her
family lived in Cebu. Cebu is a well-known terrorist haunt in the Phillipines.
Nichols told Lana, before departing for his last visit to the Philippines, "I
might not be coming back." He travelled with a gun, she said - and
managed to pass through airport security gates. Before he left, he
entrusted her with $20,000 for McVeigh in case he never returned. He did,
and he was noticeably on edge, "Those people can kill you," he said with a
shudder, "I'm never going back there again."
Critics of the CIA have dismissed Padilla's tale of terrorists in the
Philippines as a ploy to distract attention from the true source of the
funds. One of Padilla'shrillest critics was Tony Sgarlatti, host of "The Truth
(as I see it), " a cable program originating in Minnesota that purports to
raise the lid on secret government. Sgarlatti's video credits include "Proof
that UFOs are Real " and "What the Government isn't telling you about
AIDS. "
"It's very clear that Lana is lying," Sgarlatti argued with prescient
confidence, noting that he'd spoken with an unnamed official of the
bombing investigative team.
"Lana is trying to make money selling her story to the tabloid
newspapers, " Sgarlatti said. "Terry Nichols only knew Tim McVeigh for a
short time, about five weeks. " The court affidavit of Terry Nichols,
however, states that he and McVeigh had experimented with explosives
as long ago as 1992.
Sgarlatti was employing a time-tested technique for discrediting a
troublesome witness - the old tabloid fever gambit. As a matter of fact,
bearded Islamic bomb-tossers with safe houses in the Philippines have
proved useful to the national security crowd.
And the investigation of the World Trade Center bombing was not as
painstaking as it might have been. Sandbags were repeatedly dropped in
the path of investigators by the CIA. One veteran FBI agent, in a Village
Voice story that appeared on March 30, 1993, claimed that Sheikh Abdel
Rahman was a core conspirator. "It was no accident that the sheikh got a
visa and that he's still in the country, " one veteran FBI agent laments.
"He's here under the banner of national security, the State Department,
the NSA and the CIA. I haven't seen a lone-gunman theory advocated [so
forcefully] since the John F. Kennedy assassination. "
Jack Blum, a former investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations
subcommittee, was appalled. "One of the big problems here is that many
suspects in the World Trade Center bombing were associated with the
mujahedeen, " Blum pointed out. "There are components of our
government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path
because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war. "
"We" are a deep cover infantry of counter-insurgent drug smugglers, arms
dealers, money launderers and professional liars.
There is a bridge spanning the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City
federal building. It's in the Philippines.
And it's made of gold - Japanese and Nazi gold buried in underground
vaults once used to imprison and torture American prisoners of war and
local insurgents. Approximately 1,000 tons of the loot was liberated by
Ferdinand Marcos before his ouster. Billions of dollars worth were shipped
overseas by American intelligence agents and the Mafia. Much of the
horde was cabbaged away in a high-security, subterranean storage caché
buried beneath the Zurich airport. This vault was once used to conceal
European gold from Hitler's greedy SS scavengers. Fifty years later, some
of the same bullion has found its way into the campaign coffers of
ultra-conservative political candidates in the U.S., according to the Las
Vegas Sun.
But Marcos didn't recover the lion's share of the pelf. A six-month series in
the Sun reported in 1993 that Marcos abandoned thousands of tons of gold
hidden in his homeland. Gary Thompson, the newspaper's former
managing editor, and journalist Steve Kanigher published copies of gold
certificates from Credit Suisse, deposit records from the Union Bank of
Switzerland, the correspondence of Corazon Aquino and letters to Reagan
administration officials documenting witness accounts that lackeys of the
CIA and Army Special Forces carted off an unknown quantity of the bullion.
They followed one lead after another, flying around the world for 11
months to piece together an elaborate story of political corruption and
greed.
The gold extraction was sanctioned by Lt. General Robert Schweitzer,
President Reagan's senior military liaison to the National Security Council,
and Lt. General Daniel Graham, then director of the DIA and a key
consultant on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Schweitzer and retired
General John Singlaub, the aforementioned veteran of the Iran-contra
affair, joined the board of Nippon Star, a Japanese conglomerate with
branches in the Philippines. As they explained to two plaintive Nippon Star
consultants, "the company is going out of business - the National Security
Council is taking over. "
Among those recruited to run the intelligence front was retired Army
Colonel Dan Myers, a former aide to Watergate celebrity G. Gordon Liddy.
Eldon "Dan" Cummings, a Pentagon staffer, was named vice president.
Schwartz's ambitious aide, Oliver North, was already dabbling in the gold
trade. In 1985, he attempted to sell 44 tons of Marcos bullion, worth $465
million, on the black market. He blithely suggested skimming $5 million to
finance the Nicaraguan contra war, but the deal fell through when North,
true to form, stiffed the Israeli middlemen on the Marcos payroll.
Tapes and documents implicating American officials in the gold transfers
were withheld from the Iran-contra committee by Major General Colin
Powell, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and William Odom, director
of the NSA. "It wasn't so much the mention of gold that concerned them,"
say Thompson and Kanigher. "It was Marcos talking (on tape) about
contributions to U.S. presidential campaigns and the use of the gold
proceeds to fund illegal arms deals. "
To extract the gold, Ray Cline, then deputy director of the CIA, organized a
working group that included a chief regulator of the S&L industry. Citibank
was drawn into the operation to negotiate ownership of a Philippine gold
horde secreted in the Bahamas.NASA pilots drew up a plan to transport
the bullion (a link to Caslpan?)
Bo Gritz, the swashbuckling Idaho militia leader who ran for president with
David Duke as his running mate, also travelled to the Philippines to
participate in the gold dig. Gritz claims that he struck out - but the Special
Forces veteran has been known to spin a plausible denial or two in his
time.
The upshot was that either Lana Padilla was telling the truth about Terry
Nichols' mystery trips abroad, or she is a scholar of national security
studies with an emphasis on black ops. Her allusion to terrorists from the
Middle East was hardly far-fetched. General Schweitzer's crew from the
NSC hired a team of lawyers to sell the gold recovered in the Philippines.
Much of it was sold off to Middle Eastern terrorists. Some of them have
indeed been linked to the World Trade Center bombing, according to
Kanigher and Thompson.
It is not at all unlikely that Terry Nichols should have had dealings with the
rabid foreign clients of the national security sector….
© 2000 Alex Constantine. All rights reserved.