Sexual Blackmail in U.S. Oil Policy

I published the article below at this blog on March 30, 2011 before I had ever heard the name Jeffrey Epstein. While reviewing the blog to correct dead links and otherwise clean up the posts, I realized once again how events from the past tend to repeat themselves in the present day. Unfortunately, the past events which were hinted at in the excerpts quoted below as "Deep Politics in Dallas," were never fully grasped by historians or the general public. The men in Texas and Missouri involved in the honey traps described below, for the most part, got away scot-free with their escapades. Their true motives were never revealed during their own lifetimes.

Only as we look back, knowing what we know now, can we begin to see the pattern that emerges. The Texas men owned vast oil resources, not just in Texas, but worldwide. Although they claimed to be "independent" oilmen, they had strong ties to "big oil," as well through relationships with other families in Texas connected to the old Standard Oil banking and securities industries. They also had deeply embedded connections to organized criminal enterprises throughout the country. This is only one part of how those combined resources helped them set up a system of sexual blackmail used to control votes in the Senate and later in the Richard Nixon White House.

Linda Minor, January 16, 2026 

 DEEP POLITICS IN DALLAS

An excerpt from Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK:                                                                                

No one has yet documented the rumors one hears in Dallas that Ruby's relationship to the wealthy oilmen and "high rollers" of the Del Charro derived from his practice of supplying girls for them, their parties, and their private clubs.

What remains unexplained is the story of Ruby's relationship in 1963 to Candy Barr, a nationally known stripper and protegee of Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles. In 1957, Barr had been arrested and convicted on trumped-up marijuana charges, by the same players (prosecutor Bill Alexander and Judge Joe B. Brown) who in 1964 would convict Ruby on evidence that led to a reversal; Barr's defense attorneys, Joe Tonahill and Mel Belli, also represented Ruby. 27

In 1963 Ruby was regularly in telephone contact with Candy Barr, who was then out on parole but not permitted to visit Dallas. The rumor persists that the phone calls related to the stripper's attempt to blackmail someone of prominence. The rumor is reinforced by the knowledge that sexual blackmail was a practice for which Mickey Cohen was famous. 28

For some reason the Barr case also drew the attention of Gordon McLendon, who was one of those who told me in 1977 that she [Barr] had been framed on the marijuana charge (by members of the Dallas Police Narcotics Squad). McLendon's brother-in-law Lester May became her first attorney. McLendon told me this when I asked him for information about his friend Bedford Wynne.

While not giving me the answers I was hoping for, he volunteered the detail, which seemed trivial at the time, that Wynne's intimate friend George Owen, later the first [sic] husband of Maureen Dean, had been the man present at Candy Barr's arrest who may have helped set it up. 29

 Maureen "Mo" Biner Dean

He also volunteered to me the detail, which at the time seemed unrelated, that when Bobby Baker emerged in 1972 from his time in prison for tax evasion and fraud, he went to stay with McLendon at his Cielo Ranch north of Dallas. I thought later that McLendon here was possibly standing in for Bedford Wynne and Clint Murchison, Jr., two of McLendon's friends who had been mentioned in the Bobby Baker hearings and were now unwilling to be publicly associated with Baker.

Since recent revelations about Watergate, I now wonder if the real link was not George Owen. Owen was extremely close to Bedford Wynne, and would party with him in Mexico, or even in his law office, where William McKenzie (of whom more in Chapter 18) was a partner.

George Owen also introduced to Bedford Wynne (the friend of Bobby Baker and member of his Quorum Club) to the woman Owen would later marry: Maureen Biner, who played a much-underestimated role in Watergate as the girlfriend, and then the wife, of John Dean.

27. Gary Mills and Ovid Demaris, Jack Ruby (New American Library, 1968), 64-68.

28. Davis, Mafia Kingfish, 262, where it is asserted that Marilyn Monroe knew both Mickey Cohen and John Roselli.

29. Mills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, 66.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A second excerpt from Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), p. 236:

The most important of these [scandals in Washington involving politicians, call girls, and assignations recorded by intelligence experts for intelligence purposes] is Heidi Rikan's call-girl operation, a few doors from the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Watergate, which two separate and well-researched books have now seen as the key to the 1972 Watergate break-in and scandal.

According to both books, the phone line inside the DNC which was supposed to be tapped by Howard Hunt's Watergate burglar (including Frank Sturgis) was a special line (not going through the central switchboard), which DNC staffers and friends used to phone the Heidi Rikan call-girl operation. 37 Jim Hougan adds that the phone line was already being tapped by a stringer for Jack Anderson, Lou Russell. 38

Lou Russell was a former FBI agent who had helped Nixon with the Hiss case when he was both HUAC's committee counsel and also Hoover's informant on the Committee. 39 An employee in 1963 of Watergate burglar James McCord, Russell was close to Heidi Rikan's call girls whose line was the target of the Watergate burglars. Russell also had an unexplained financial relationship to McCord's attorney, Bernard Fensterwald (a longtime backer of the Garrison and other investigations of the John F. Kennedy assassination) and may have been working for Fensterwald as well.

The book, White House Call Girl, pictured above, was written as "fully sourced political non-fiction" by Phil Stanford and first published as an e-book in 2013. 

Bernard Fensterwald

Fensterwald

At this point it should be pointed out that James McCord's attorney, Bernard Fensterwald, as early as 1957 was employed as an aide to Democratic Senator Thomas Hennings of Missouri, who became John Dean's father-in-law in February 1962 when Dean was first married to Karla Hennings. An attorney from Nashville, Tennessee, where his father was manager of a clothing store, Fensterwald became an administrative assistant to the Senate subcommittee on Constitutional Rights chaired by Senator Hennings. Fensterwald resigned from that position with the subcommitte in January 1959 to become the top aide of Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

Sen. Kefauver's subcommittee had conducted an investigation into the professional sport of boxing and proposed legislation creating a national boxing commissioner with "power to clean  up the fight game by withholding licenses from boxers, managers and promoters in interstate bouts," a bill not supported by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Soon after that Fensterwald was fired by Kefauver, and soon found a job working for Democratic Senator from Missouri--Senator Edward V. Long, a defender of Jimmy Hoffa.

Fensterwald showed considerable animosity against RFK in March 1965 over the Jimmy Hoffa case:

MARCH 3, 1965

By JACK C. VANDENBERG

WASHINGTON (UPI) — Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D - N.Y , clashed with a Senate subcommittee today over its airing of charges that he mishandled an investigation of Teamster boss James R. Hoffa while he was attorney general. Kennedy appeared before the judiciary subcommittee to protest what he called the "implication that I handled myself in some shocking manner while I was attorney general." The former cabinet member made no attempt to hide his irritation over the way the sub-committee handled the charge leveled against him by New York attorney Thomas A. Bolan, a witness at Tuesday's hearing.

Bolan said Kennedy had tried to influence public opinion against Hoffa by instigating unfavorable publicity while the Teamster boss was under indictment. 

Makes Special Appearance

Kennedy, who denied the charge Tuesday, made a special appearance before the subcommittee today to repeat his denial and object to this handling of the matter.

He told the subcommittee he believed it was improper for Chairman Edward V. Long, D-Mo., to make statements about the matter "after hearing only one side of the story. After hearing Bolan's charge Tuesday, Long said he considered it a "shocking matter." The chairman said he would refer the testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee for whatever action that group might want to take. Kennedy, a former chief counsel for a Senate investigation subcommittee, said he believed it was standard practice —when it was known a matter was coming up — to try to present both sides of a story.

Bolan had said that Kennedy arranged in March, 1961, to have Life magazine publish a story based on an interview with Sam Baron, a disgruntled Teamster Union official, at a time when Hoffa was under indictment.

Definition Of 'Fink'

In an exchange today with subcommittee counsel Bernard Fensterwald Jr., Kennedy said he saw nothing wrong with his actions as attorney general. Fensterwald asked Kennedy if he believed it was proper for a government official to "act as an intermediary between the press and a fink."

"What's your definition of a fink?" Kennedy demanded. "A person who is a stool pigeon," Fensterwald  retorted. "That's your definition," Kennedy snapped. "I consider Mr. Baron as a public spirited person who was doing his duty."

Fensterwald asked if Kennedy thought it was proper for a public official to arrange for publicity unfavorable to a person under indictment. "I never did anything like that and that is the implication of the testimony and remarks made by the subcommittee yesterday," Kennedy said heatedly.

At Tuesday's hearing, Kennedy's methods in prosecuting New York attorney Roy M. Cohn also were questioned. Bolan represented Cohn in New York last year when the former McCarthy committee counsel was tried and acquitted of charges of attempting to bribe a U.S. attorney. Cohn, who also testified Tuesday, made only indirect references to Kennedy. But Bolan told the subcommittee that Kennedy planted an article about a dissatisfied Teamster official in Life magazine. 

Denies Charge

Kennedy denied the charge, the New York Democrat said the Teamster official—Sam Baron—came to him "in fear of his life." According to Kennedy, Baron said he wanted to get in touch with some non-governmental official to tell his story. Kennedy said he set up a meeting with Life magazine with the understanding that nothing would be published until something happened to Baron. At the same time, Hoffa was under indictment, and Baron was "cooperating with the FBI," Kennedy said. Bolan was testifying before the subcommittee about a mail over placed on him. Bolan said he came across the information about Kennedy's involvement in the Life story while investigating the circumstances surrounding a similar story on Cohn.

Senator Ed Long, for whom Fensterwald worked for several years as counsel for his committees and subcommittees, would later be accused of business relationships with Hoffa's attorney, Morris Shenker of St. Louis. Shenker's 1989 obituary stated:

Shenker

Shenker, a Russian immigrant who grew up in north St. Louis, first made a name for himself as a young lawyer by doing free legal work for the poor and getting involved in Democratic politics.
He had been recurrently in the national spotlight since representing gambling figures before the Estes Kefauver hearings on organized crime in the early 1950s.

Hoffa, his most famous client, had links to organized crime and disappeared in 1975. He is presumed dead.

Because of his Teamsters connection, Shenker, who operated the Dunes Hotel and Casino in the 1970s, ran afoul of the Nevada Gaming Commission. (Shenker's name had also surfaced often in connection with loans from the Teamsters Pension Fund.)

Despite state and federal investigations, however, Shenker escaped indictment until this year. In February, a federal grand jury accused him of conspiring to conceal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service and bankruptcy creditors. The money supposedly was diverted from a California partnership owned by his children to individuals in Canada and then back to Shenker's secretary in Las Vegas in an elaborate scheme to avoid creditors. Shenker denied any wrongdoing.

Shenker had filed for bankruptcy in 1984 after a $34-million court verdict against him for money he borrowed from the Culinary Workers Pension Fund for resorts in Southern California and other projects. He had been involved in court battles over his finances ever since.

An Off-the-Books Private War

[originally posted in 2013]

Excerpt from:

The Marcos Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave
©1988, Harper and Row, Inc

Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos Family

Reading between the lines of Lieutenant Colonel North's testimony, it is clear that CIA director William Casey was proud of having an "off the shelf" team of private operators funded by unofficial sources. This enabled Casey to avoid the kind of interference from Congress that had been blocking the Reagan administration's initiatives to topple the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But Casey's gambit was not entirely new. The members of The Enterprise were all larger-than-life characters who had worked together for many years, a first generation of colorful old OSS hands, and a second generation of hard-nosed covert action types who cut their milk teeth at the Bay of Pigs. Some of their names have since become familiar:

• John Singlaub, 
• Richard Secord, 
• Ray Cline, 
• Theodore Shackley, 
• Thomas Clines, and others.

Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise

But no longer around is the man who, in a way, started it all going: the CIA's original overseas paymaster and Mister Black Bag. His name was Paul Helliwell.

Paul Helliwell, a lawyer, had been a colonel in the U.S. Army’s G-2 Intelligence unit in the Middle East, later transferring to O.S.S. as Chief of Intelligence in China, and he had a reputation for buying information with bars of opium. He reputedly met with Ho Chi Minh, leader of North Vietnam, three times in 1945 but was unable to reach an agreement for the U.S. to provide Ho with weapons to use against Japan because Ho would not swear not to use them against the French. When O.S.S. was disbanded, Helliwell stayed in intelligence in the War Department.

He left the military around 1947, when the CIA was created, and joined a Miami law firm — Bouvier, Helliwell and Clark — but still found time to work for the CIA.

[Cite: Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in The Bahamas (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991).]

Chennault with Mme Chiang

Helliwell’s first major assignment after the war was to find a way for the CIA to subsidize the airline, Civil Air Transport, owned by Major General Claire L. Chennault, which had been used to furnish materiel to the anticommunist Chinese in Southeast Asia.

In 1951 Helliwell set up Sea Supply as the CIA’s first proprietary company in order to transport weapons to the Nationalist Chinese troops in Burma and to Thailand police, whose Chief was involved in the opium trade. The planes were not returned empty after the guns were unloaded; they were filled with drugs destined for the United States — usually Florida. The money derived from the sale of the drugs had to be laundered for the CIA, and Helliwell figured out how to do it.

Tommy the Cork

His associates in Sea Supply, and later in the Caribbean area planning the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, were New York attorney Thomas G. Corcoran ["Tommy the Cork"] (one of FDR’s "Brain Trust") and Frank Wisner.

In 1961 Helliwell became "paymaster" for operatives working covert intelligence operations in the Bay of Pigs, although his methods are not clearly apparent. However, in late 1963 he was involved with a bank in the Bahamas called Bank of the Caribbean Limited, which was "picked up" in 1965 by one of his clients, a CIA-connected "insurance conglomerate."

In 1968 the bank’s name was changed to Underwriters Bank Limited, which had been registered by Inge Gordon Mosvold, a Norwegian shipbuilder who may have been a front for an even wealthier man named Daniel K. Ludwig, for whom Mosvold had chartered the Mercantile Bank and Trust in Freeport in January 1962. The corporate shareholders of the Mercantile Bank were Cayship Investment Company, Inc. (Panama); Security (Bahamas) Limited; and Cia. de Navegacion Mandinga S.A. (Panama); as well as two nominees.

Mercantile Bank was parent company for the now-famous Castle Bank and Trust formed by Helliwell, alleged to be "one of the CIA’s finance channels for operations against Cuba," being managed from Andros Island in The Bahamas beginning in 1964. [Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1980.]

Thanks to the CIA's part in rescuing the regime of Generalissimo Chiang in 1949, Helliwell had access to its black resources. In 1949 Helliwell and a handful of other CIA agents salvaged Claire Chennault's Civil Air Transport (CAT) and other American and Chinese aircraft from the mainland, and transferred them by ship to Taiwan.

He spent the years immediately following Mao's victory reorganizing the U.S. line of defense around Red China. With war-surplus Victory ships and Liberty ships, and some of Chennault's planes, he set up Sea Supply Corporation and Air America, using the Philippines and Thailand as staging bases for secret operations throughout Southeast Asia. As a means of harassing Red China from the rear, and gathering intelligence, Sea Supply ferried materiel to Thailand to support the KMT opium armies in Burma and the rebellious Champa tribesmen in eastern Tibet. CAT and Air America flew these supplies from Thailand into the Golden Triangle poppy fields and across upper Burma to the Himalayas, and flew supplies from the Philippines for the beleaguered French at Dienbienphu.

It was an expensive business. The KMT and the CIA paid off General Phao, the commander of the Thai police, who obligingly transshipped heroin from the opium armies down to Bangkok for export. They also paid the KMT's General Li Mi what it took to keep his army of ten thousand going, which Li Mi was not about to do with his share of the opium proceeds. All this took a lot of gold bullion, but Helliwell rose to the occasion. He and other Agency financial experts in the field followed basic rules laid down by the original CIA director of covert operations, Frank Wisner. First get the rich people on your side, including the rich gangsters, then set up channels for black money so you can provide funds across borders to the people who need them to get the job done. Kim Philby said Wisner once told him, "It is essential to secure the overt cooperation of people with conspicuous access to wealth in their own right." The cooperation of rich people hid the transfer of black money.

Helliwell's Family and College Days

What Seagrave failed to reveal, however, are a few small details about Helliwell before he joined the Army. Could any of these facts have contributed to placing him where he ended up later--as the center man in the dirty money laundry for the CIA?

Paul Helliwell’s father, Lionel H. Helliwell, was an English cloth buyer from Yorkshire when he settled in New York. He advanced within the trade to become a broker in the textile industry. In North Andover, Massachusetts, in 1910 he married Nola Harless, a dedicated school teacher and administrator at Hampden Sydney School in Knoxville, Tennessee, who had recently been replaced in her position by a man.

North Andover was where Lionel's brother, William Helliwell, a textile designer at Worsted Mills, lived since his immigration  from Leeds in 1902.

 

See map online

When Paul was five, the 1920 Census found his family in rural New Jersey, ten miles north of Morristown, living in a scenic neighborhood in a home they owned. It appears they remained there until at least past the  date the Florida census would have been taken in 1925. The 1930 Census shows he had relocated his family to Seffner, Florida, a small town east of Tampa, Florida. His brother was also a resident of Seffner when he died in 1929. William's wife then returned to her family back East. Eventually, Lionel and Nola Helliwell would move to Miami.

 

In Tampa Lionel worked for the United States Customs House, then located on the third floor of the building facing Florida Avenue, between Twiggs and Zack Streets (see inset map left). The city directories, however, show more than one location for Customs offices. During these years Paul was attending high school at Plant City, where he graduated in 1933 and still living with his parents.

A 1934 listing in the Tampa, Florida, City Directory, shows him living alone, however, while working for Cuban Rum, Inc., the only company listed under liquor importers those months following the repeal of Prohibition. 

 

Intriguingly, immigration records indicate that Helliwell had a plane ticket for a return trip from Cuba in 1934, but didn't make the flight. 1934 was the same year he began as a freshman at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he was soon in position to make even more powerful contacts. However, Cody Fowler, his partner at Cuban Rum in downtown Tampa appears to have helped him financially with college and law school, and stood ready to give him a job upon graduation.

 

 

Click image to enlarge.

Living in the Chi Phi House in Gainesville, Paul was one year behind future Florida governor, George Smathers, a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon House, where his roommate in 1933-34 was Philip Graham. Pulled out of college for a year because he had developed dissolute habits, according to Carol Felsenthal's biography of Graham's future wife, Phil was allowed to return in the fall of 1934, which placed him in the 1936 graduating class with George Smathers, who would continue law school in Gainesville until 1938. Helliwell completed his law studies there a year later. 

 

Phil Graham got into Harvard Law only after his father sought help from Florida Congressman Claude Pepper, but the young genius had proven himself by the end of his second year when he was named head of the Harvard Law Review. 

 

Another Harvard Law scholar, Ed Prichard, Jr., soon introduced him to Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard professor whom FDR named in 1939 to the Supreme Court, and also key recruiter into FDR's brain trust. It was an auspicious year. 

 

Phil Graham and George Smathers both married in 1939. Paul Helliwell graduated from law school and married Majorie Mae Muller, whose father had relocated his family to Florida and sold insurance. Her mother managed the Astoria Apartments at 1367 S.W. 5th Street (at 14th Avenue), where Marjorie grew up.

By 1945 Paul and Marjorie Helliwell were living in Miami, along with his parents. Paul had joined the military during the war and was already a Lieutenant Colonel. His father still worked as a Customs inspector.


Peter Dale Scott sums up who was directing Helliwell in this one sentence:

In effect, Corcoran was running an off-the-books private war in which a private company, China Defense Supplies, was diverting some of the war materiel destined for China to a private army, the American Volunteer Group. 

 

We'll pick up there later.

 

 

Next: See

Helliwell's First Employer in Tampa

 

 

 

Daniel Hopsicker wants to know

Kris Millegan

Kris Millegan is a musician, who became fascinated with spies after his own father disclosed to him one day that he had been one. But that was not all Kris learned about his father, who had personally worked with a "quiet American" named Colonel Edward G. Lansdale. He learned that the Central Intelligence Agency was into pushing drugs on innocent, well-meaning peaceniks much like Kris himself. You see, that's where the market was. Even before Lansdale was a spy, he had been a marketer, like so many free-enterprise Americans who want enterprise to be not free, but lucrative. What they want to be free is the card they receive that gets them out of jail when they violate the law.

Daniel Hopsicker knows all about those "get out of jail free" cards. He's been writing about them for years since first joining Kris Millegan's research list known as CIA-Drugs.  In May 2000 Daniel was headed for Oregon to attend Millegan's first and only CIA-DRUGS SYMPOSIUM, to be held in Eugene. The event featured:

• Rodney Stich, author of Unfriendly Skies, Drugging America, and Defrauding America; 
• Peter Dale Scott, an authority on the drug trade, as well as on the deep political corruption behind the JFK assassination; 
• Catherine Austin Fitts, who at that time was just starting to discover who was behind the destruction of her own experience with free enterprise; 
• Cele Castillo, 12-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration; and 
• Michael C. Ruppert, former cop turned writer, who was intent on disclosing connection between "the C.I.A." and narcotics trafficking.
  

Kris Millegan would go on to author and edit a treatise called Fleshing out Skull and Bones, dealing with power, money, and the American way. The American way of corrupting the Constitution upon which the country was founded by the descendants of that same elite bunch who founded it, not least of which is Yale's Skull and Bones society itself.

 Daniel would go on to write Barry and 'the Boys': The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History and to produce a video entitled "Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida." Daniel would also create a website called The Madcow Morning News, which, some might say, was obsessed with putting away a man called Rudi Dekkers. 

But Daniel had never heard of Rudi Dekkers in May 2000, when he arrived in Oregon for Kris' symposium. Back then his obsession was still about America's "secret history" and about Barry Seal, a "drug smuggler and aircraft pilot who flew covert flights for the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency and the Medellín Cartel." 

It was the last year that Bill Clinton was in office, and the "crimes of Mena, Arkansas" were soon to give way to conspiracy researchers delving into the real reasons behind the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center buildings in 2001. 

Some members of Kris' CIA-Drugs group were even researching whether former CIA agent Edwin Wilson was still in "the C.I.A." when he sold C-4 explosive in 1977 to Libya, as a consequence of Houston Judge Lynn N. Hughes' appointing a lawyer for the former agent  to consider new evidence in Wilson's case. Hughes' ruling, which took four years, eventually set Wilson free: “Because the government knowingly used false evidence against him and suppressed favorable evidence, his conviction will be vacated.” 

Between the time of the presentation of Wilson's motions and the ruling, Michael Ruppert had written in March 2000 in his emailed [since archived] newsletter, From the Wilderness:

...In the meantime Ed Wilson has just asked for contempt charges against 14 of

Ed Wilson

the biggest legal names in and out of government. And his attorney is moving for summary judgement because Judge Lynn Hughes, in Houston, is sitting on Wilson's explosive motion to dismiss the conviction and not rendering a decision. One Federal Judge, Stanley Sporkin, has already retired and two more, one on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, are on the verge of having their rights read to them and of being accused of perjury and of withholding exculpatory evidence. The CIA risks being exposed as having deliberately armed Moammar Qadaffy at the instigation of George Bush. Retired CIA Associate Deputy Director of Operations (ADDO) Ted Shackley stands on the verge of being exposed for perjury and worse. And the Department of Justice is close to being exposed, in open court, of having hidden crimes by high-ranking members for more than 17 years. Now that's the kind of  edifice-crumbling upheaval that may eventually lead to letting a lot of innocent people out of prison - not just one. But only If it is pursued and capitalized upon.

Edwin Wilson writes to me:

Dear Sir:
I have received your January 28 issue and thank you for a favorable article. My problem is this place [Federal Penitentiary, Allenwood, Pa.] makes it almost impossible to communicate. So I ask you to stay in touch with [Attorney David] Adler who has better, up to date, information than I. Also, I want to cooperate with you. By the way, the article you sent me is missing pages 6&7. Some machine also hates me!

                            Many thanks,
                            Ed Wilson
                            08237-054

The story had first hit the news in the fall of 1999:

Ex-CIA Officer Appeals Conviction

By C. BRYSON HULL

 The Associated Press

HOUSTON (AP) - Former CIA officer Edwin P. Wilson, jailed since 1983 for illegal arms smuggling to Libya, has filed an appeal accusing federal prosecutors of knowingly using a false affidavit to convict him.

Wilson's claims are accompanied by hundreds of secret government memos that his lawyers obtained.

Wilson's main job for the CIA before he retired in 1971 was setting up front companies abroad while posing as a rich American businessman. He lived his cover to the hilt and made himself a multimillionaire in the process. He was arrested in 1982 after being lured out of Libya by a government informant and was sentenced to 52 years in prison.

The appeal is of a 1983 conviction for shipping 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives from Houston's Intercontinental Airport [now intriguingly named George Bush Intercontinental Airport] to Libya. Even if his appeal were successful, Wilson would still face prison time on two other convictions. But his defense attorney, David Adler, believes similar evidence exists that could throw out a Virginia conviction of Wilson for illegally exporting guns to Egypt.

Adler said the secret government memos detail lengthy efforts to hide the use of the false [Briggs] affidavit and prosecutors' failure to release information that would have aided Wilson's defense during his 1983 Houston trial on charges of selling tons of explosives to Libya.

Wilson claims that his dealings with Libya, for which he was convicted, were the result of a CIA request that he ingratiate himself with the Libyans after he officially retired from the agency.

The affidavit by then-CIA Executive Director Charles Briggs, the agency's No. 3 official, said the agency had not asked Wilson either directly or indirectly to provide any service to the agency after he retired.

A four-volume appeal filed Sept. 8 includes more than 800 pages of exhibits that allegedly show government lawyers knew the crucial affidavit was false the night before it was presented in court.

The documents show that Wilson in fact had some 80 contacts with the CIA from his retirement through 1978 and provided a variety of services, including arranging gun sales to a Saudi Arabian security agency and the shipment of two desalinization units to Egypt.

Documents also show prosecutors then spent nearly eight months discussing whether to disclose that fact to the court and Wilson's lawyers.

The evidence was enough to prompt an unusual courtroom admission earlier in March from Justice Department attorney Arlene Reidy.
 

"We have a lot of documents already that I think show that there was a clear problem with the affidavit's accuracy and that the individuals involved were well aware of that problem," Ms. Reidy told U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, according to a transcript.

The former CIA general counsel, Stanley Sporkin, now a federal judge in Washington, D.C., said Tuesday there was no intention to cover up. Rather, he said, officials had a difference in philosophies about how to handle the information about Wilson's activities.

"It would be wrong to think this was in bad faith,'' Sporkin said.

The Justice Department has until mid-January to respond to the appeal. If Wilson's conviction was overturned, he could be retried.

The secret documents were obtained by Wilson's defense under the Freedom of Information Act and through court discovery. They were resealed by Hughes on Sept. 23, but The Associated Press had obtained copies before the order was signed.

Speaking from federal prison in Allenwood, Pa., Wilson said the alleged conspiracy against him was motivated by ambition.

"A few greedy people in the government saw an opportunity to make a name for themselves,'' Wilson said. "The longer I was in prison, the more they had to cover it up and it keeps going higher.''

Another intriguing coincidence? Sporkin would end up being appointed the judge in Catherine Austin Fitts' own civil trial against the man whom she sued for his role in bringing down her business. Business as usual.

It is now 2013, thirteen years later, and another defendant awaits trial in Judge Hughes' courtroom--none other than Daniel Hopsicker's current obsession, Rudi Dekkers. Can there possibly be a connection with that new evidence presented by Edwin Wilson in 1999 relating to his arrest in 1982. The evidence concerned the memorandum signed by Charles A. Briggs, who was then executive director of the C.I.A., as revealed in Hughes' opinion in the Wilson case:

To rebut Wilson’s evidence, on February 4, 1983, the government introduced an affidavit from Charles A. Briggs. Briggs served as the CIA’s inspector general until mid-1982 when he became its executive director—the third highest ranking official of the CIA. In the affidavit, he swore that—with one exception—the CIA did not ask Wilson to work for it after he officially stopped working there. Briggs declared:

“The search [of CIA records] revealed that Mr. Edwin P. Wilson terminated his employment with the CIA on 28 February 1971, and was not re-employed thereafter in any capacity.

According to Central Intelligence Agency Records, with one exception while he was employed by Naval Intelligence in 1972, Mr. Edwin P. Wilson was not asked or requested, directly or indirectly, to perform or provide any service, directly or indirectly, for [the] CIA.”

What will happen? Will Rudi make it to trial? Will he get out of jail free?

Is there somehow a link between George (Poppy) Bush's CIA, for which Edwin Wilson worked and the CIA of his son, Dubya Bush, which was lurking behind the scenes of 9/11?

Daniel Hopsicker wants to know:

CIA=Drugs

Rudi Dekkers is scheduled to go on trial in Houston next month for cocaine and heroin trafficking, unless, that is, something happens between now and then. Courthouse observers suggest the trial will never take place.  They note that Dekkers’ defense lawyers continue to attempt to hammer out a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office before he goes on trial.

Will Dekkers—facing as long as 20 years in Federal prison—get a sweetheart deal? And if he does, will it be in exchange for his testimony…or his silence?
Hanging in the balance is the answer to one of 9/11’s biggest mystery: Where did Rudi Dekkers get his "juice?"

America's Krypto-History: What we don't know does matter

To follow the excellent logic of Peter Dale Scott relative to what is truth and what is true history first requires us to take a short course in a language invented by Dr. Scott himself, as he discusses in the article excerpted below, in which all underlining, bolding and italics have been inserted by me, unless otherwise noted,  for emphasis. Scott embeds the terms and definitions within his essay, but for clarity they are set out here for ease of reference:

• neologisms--invented terms
• parapolitics--manipulative covert politics; "a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished"
• deep political processes--political interactions that emanate from plural power sources which are only occasionally visible, usually repressed rather than recognized; these sources of power that affect political actions are not subject to direct control by anyone whose power or intentions are clearly defined
• parahistory--an account of suppressed events, at odds with the publicly accepted history of this country; reconstructed account of events denied by the public records from which history is normally composed
• kryptocracies--agencies of government which (in contrast to conventional bureaucracies) operate secretly and are not accountable for their actions and procedures, with the power to control US politics through the manipulation of truth. A kryptocracy's power comes in part from its ability to falsify its own records, without fear of outside correction.
• kryptonomy--the power of the independently wealthy, and of the banks that cater to them; a small group of about 100 people who know each other, and in addition often have connections to both the CIA and to organized crime

 ['krypto' derived from Greek kruptos hidden, from kruptein to hide]

 

Excerpt from OVERVIEW: THE CIA, THE DRUG TRAFFIC, AND OSWALD IN MEXICO

By Peter Dale Scott

December 2000

Kryptocracies, Kryptonomy, and Oswald: the Mexican CIA-Mob Nexus 

Those who have spent years trying to assess the role of the Kennedy assassination in US history are accustomed to the debate between structuralists and conspiratorialists. In the first camp are those who argue, in the spirit of Marx and Weber, that the history of a major power is determined by large social forces; thus the accident of an assassination, even if conspiratorial, is of little historical import. (On this point Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn agree with the mainstream US media they normally criticize.) 

At the other end of the spectrum are those who talk of an Invisible Government or Secret Team, who believe that surface events and institutions are continuously manipulated by unseen forces. For these people the assassination exemplifies the operation of fundamental historical forces, not a disruption of them. 

For years I have attempted to formulate a third or middle position. To do so I have relied on distinctions formulated partly in neologisms or invented terms. (I apologize for this: neologisms, like conspiracies, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.) Thirty years ago I postulated that our overt political processes were at times seriously contaminated by manipulative covert politics or parapolitics, which I then defined as "a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished."[1] In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, I moved towards a less conspiratorial middle alternative. I discussed instead the interactions of what I called deep political processes, emanating from plural power sources and all only occasionally visible, all usually repressed rather than recognized. In contrast to parapolitical processes, those of deep politics are open-ended, not securely within anyone's power or intentions. 

In 1995 I brought out Deep Politics II, which I thought of at the time as a case study in deep politics: how secret U.S. government reports on Oswald in Mexico became a reason to cover up the facts about the assassination of JFK. But it was also a specialized study, since in this case most of the repressed records of events, now declassified, occurred within the workings of the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, or their zones of influence. It was hence largely a study in parapolitics. It verged into deep politics only near the end, when it described how a collaborating Mexican agency, the DFS (Direcciòn Federal de Seguridad) was deeply involved in the international drug traffic. Deep Politics, in contrast, looked continuously at the interaction between government and other social forces, such as the drug traffic. 

Both books represented an alternative kind of history, or what we may perhaps call parahistory. Parahistory differs from history in two respects. First, it is an account of suppressed events, at odds with the publicly accepted history of this country. (One might say that history is the record of politics; parahistory, the record of parapolitics.) Second, parahistory is restored from records which were themselves once repressed. In short, parahistory is a reconstructed account of events denied by the public records from which history is normally composed.[2] Thus the parahistory of Oswald in Mexico tells of events, not just ignored by official histories, but at odds with the official record: i.e. officially suppressed and denied. 

A key example concerns a tape of someone calling himself "Lee Oswald," talking on a Soviet Embassy phone about having met a consul there by the name of Kostikov, a KGB agent. As we shall see, this tape should have been preserved and investigated as a prime piece of evidence to frame Oswald as an assassin. We have documentary evidence that one day after the President's murder this tape was listened to by FBI agents in Dallas, who determined that the speaker was in fact not Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet almost immediately this event was denied by other reports, including cables claiming -- falsely -- that the tape had already been destroyed before the assassination. 

A brief but important digression here about history. Most people assume that "history" simply refers to what has happened but is now gone. In fact the dictionary reminds us that the word (cognate to the word "story") refers primarily to a narrative or record of events, and only after that to "the events forming the subject matter of history."[3] What of events whose records are destroyed or falsified? These dictionary definitions seem to assume that what is true is also what is recorded. 

There is thus a latent bias in the evolution of the word "history" that is related to the structuralist, rationalist assumptions referred to in my first paragraph. It is no accident that, with respect to Oswald in Mexico, historians as a class have opposed the parahistory we shall unfold here. History has always been the way a culture chooses to record and remember itself; and it tends to treat official records with a respect they do not always deserve. We shall return to the role of history in our concluding section. 

Deep Politics II only verged from parahistory into deep political history when (as we shall see) it situated actions and reports from the CIA in Mexico City in the social context of actions of a sister agency (the Mexican Federal Security Directorate, or DFS ) which was deeply enmeshed in the unrecorded operations of the Mexican-U.S. drug traffic. Note the methodological distinction here. Parahistory can be partly recovered by the disclosure of previously repressed records. Deep political history must attempt to reconstruct what happened in areas where there are few if any records at all. 

It is reasonable to talk about the CIA records in this book as repressed, as so many of them were never allowed to reach even the Warren Commission. Thus neither the Commission nor the American public were allowed to hear allegations that Oswald had had sexual relations with one or two employees of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, that at least one of these liaisons (with Silvia Durán) had been part of an international Communist plot against Kennedy, and that Durán had admitted this (albeit under torture) in response to questions from the Mexican DFS or secret police. 

More importantly, the CIA and FBI conspired to suppress a major clue to the existence of a pre-assassination conspiracy. This was that an unknown person had falsely presented himself as Lee Oswald in a phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The FBI initially reported that the person making the recorded call "was not Lee Harvey Oswald" (AR 249-50). Later the FBI and CIA conspired, swiftly and clumsily, to conceal both the falsity of the impersonation and the fact that FBI agents had exposed the falsehood by listening to the tape. The Warren Commission learned nothing about these two facts. 

Rockefellers in Mexico

It is important to understand that this suppression was entirely consistent with intelligence priorities of the period. This important clue had been planted in the midst of one of the most sensitive CIA operations in the 1960s: its largest intercept operation against the telephones of an important Soviet base. One can assume that this clue was planted by conspirators who knew that the CIA response would be to suppress the truth. As a result the CIA protected its sources and methods (in accordance with the responsibilities enumerated in its enabling statute). The result was obstruction of justice in a crime of the highest political significance.

In an open society, all of the Oswald facts and allegations would have reached the Warren Commission, whether or not they were true. The absence of objective evaluation and review allowed these facts and allegations about Oswald in Mexico to become enabling instruments of power: first to create the Warren Commission, and later to curtail its investigations. 

The power of these covert agencies to control US politics through the manipulation of truth is only one more reason for us to refer to them as kryptocracies, agencies of government which (in contrast to conventional bureaucracies) operate secretly and are not accountable for their actions and procedures. At this stage, I shall refer to kryptocracies in the plural, to make it clear that I am not talking about some single omnipotent Secret Team. On the contrary, we shall see in Part Three of this book that different kryptocracies or intelligence agencies, and even different branches within these agencies, were in conflict with each other over the matters raised by Lee Harvey Oswald.

 The point is rather that, in major powers like the United States, bureaucratic behavior, which in principle is publicly  recorded and accountable, is in some respects determined by the kryptocratic behavior at its center.  As we shall see in the following pages, one of the important sources of the kryptocracies' power is their ability to falsify their own records, without fear of outside correction. 

But even if we concede the autonomy of kryptocracies, how important are they in determining the course of history? I believe the evidence in this book will justify a limited answer to this question: 

The kryptocracies, and the CIA in particular, were powerful enough to control and defuse a possible crisis in U.S. political legitimacy. They did so by reinforcing an unsustainable claim: Oswald killed the President, and he acted alone.

Kryptocracies and the Kryptonomy (International Drug Traffic)

But the power of kryptocracies to influence history became even greater when, as we shall see, they acted in concert with forces allied to the powerful international drug traffic. Most people are unaware of the size of this unrecorded drug economy. In 1981 U.S. Government analysts estimated that the annual sales volume of illicit drugs exceeded half a trillion dollars.[4] The total of legitimate, recorded international trade, in all commodities, was in the order of one trillion dollars, or twice the estimate for drugs. While estimates of the unrecorded drug traffic remain questionable, it is obvious that this traffic is large enough to be a major factor in both the economic and political considerations of government, even while it does not form part of recorded economic statistics. [italics in original]

For this reason, I propose the word kryptonomy, to name this unrecorded, illicit, but nonetheless important shadow economy. It is no accident that kryptocracies and the kryptonomy work in concert. The kryptonomy is so large, and so powerful, that governments have no choice but to plan to manage it, even before attempting to suppress it.[5]

 

There is a third factor contributing to the invisible alliance of kryptocracies and the kryptonomy: the power of the independently wealthy, and of the banks that cater to them. Informed observers of American politics have more than once commented to me that most of the hundred wealthiest people in the US know each other, and in addition often have connections to both the CIA and to organized crime. There is no shortage of anecdotal examples: James Angleton of CIA Counterintelligence delivering the sole eulogy at the small private funeral of Howard Hughes, or Joseph Kennedy Sr. being a point-holder in the same casino (the Cal-Neva) as Sam Giancana.[6]  More relevant to the milieu of the JFK assassination is the example of Clint Murchison, Sr. Murchison paid for the horse-racing holidays of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the same time as he sold stakes in his investments to mob figures like Jerry Catena, and enjoyed political influence in Mexico.[7]

These connections are no accident. More often than not the extremely wealthy became that way by ignoring or bending the rules of society, not by observing them. In corrupting politicians, or in bypassing them to secure unauthorized foreign intercessions, both the mob and the CIA can be useful allies. In addition drug profits need to be laundered, and banks can derive a significant percentage of their profits by laundering them, or otherwise bending or breaking the rules of their host countries.[8] Citibank came under Congressional investigation after having secretly moved $80 million to $100 million for Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas.[9]

 

When operating within their guidelines, kryptocracies are less powerful than generally believed. Likewise the power of the biggest drug traffickers is not autonomous, but depends on their government connections. But when kryptocracies and kryptonomy work in concert, as they must to sustain the status quo, they share in a source of deep political influence that affects us all. A good example of this is the collaboration in Mexico, between the CIA and the corrupt DFS, to influence history by presenting false stories about Oswald. But it would be wrong to think of the CIA-DFS collaboration as a simple alliance.

One of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create. From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a "license to traffic;" DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance.[10] Eventually the DFS became so identified with the criminal drug-trafficking organizations it managed and protected, that in the 1980s the DFS was (at least officially) closed down.[11]Thus the CIA-DFS alliance was at best an uneasy one, with conflicting goals. The CIA’s concern was to manage and limit the drug traffic, while the DFS sought to manage and expand it.

Management of the drug traffic takes a variety of forms: from denial of this important power source to competing powers (the first and most vital priority), to exploitation of it to strengthen the existing state.  There now exists abundant documentation that, at least since World War II, the US Government has exploited the drug traffic to finance and staff covert operations abroad. Perhaps the most conspicuous example is the massive paramilitary army organized and equipped by the CIA in Laos in the 1960s, for which drugs were the chief source of support. This alliance between the CIA and drug-financed forces has since been repeated in Afghanistan (1979), Central America (1982-87), and most recently Kosovo (1998). 

It is now fairly common, even in mainstream books, to describe this CIA exploitation of the drug world as collaboration against a common enemy. For example Elaine Shannon, in a book written with DEA assistance, speaks as follows of the CIA-DFS alliance: 

 DFS officials worked closely with the Mexico City station of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the attaché of the the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The DFS passed along photographs and wiretapped conversations of suspected intelligence officers and provocateurs stationed in the large Soviet and Cuban missions in Mexico City....The DFS also helped the CIA track Central American leftists who passed through the Mexican capital.[12]

But it is important to remember that such alliances were often first formed in order to deny drug assets to the enemy. In Mexico as in Asia, just as in the US "Operation Underworld" on the docks of New York City, the US Government first began its drug collaborations out of fear that drug networks, if not given USG protection, would fall under that of some other foreign power. "Operation Underworld," like its Mexican equivalent, began after signs that the Sicilian Mafia in New York, like the drug networks Latin drug networks of Central and South America, were being exploited by Axis intelligence services. The crash program of assistance to Kuomintang (KMT) drug networks in post-war Southeast Asia was motivated in part by a similar fear, that these networks would come under the sphere of mainland Chinese influence. 

Thus it would be wrong to portray the CIA-drug alliance, particularly in Mexico, as one between like-minded allies. The cooperation was grounded in an original, deeper suspicion; and, especially because dealing with criminals, the fear of betrayal was never absent. This was particularly true of the DFS  when guided by Luis Echeverría, a nationalist who in the late 1960s developed stronger relations between Mexico and Cuba. Some have questioned whether the increased Cuban-Mexican relations under his presidency (1970-76) were grounded partly in the drug traffic, overseen by his brother-in-law.[13]

 

Even in 1963 the fear of offending Mexico's (and Echeverría's) sensibilities led the CIA to cancel physical surveillance of a Soviet suspect (Valeriy Kostikov); the CIA feared detection by the DFS, who also had Kostikov under surveillance.[14] By the 1970s there were allegations that the CIA and/or FBI were using the drug traffic to introduce guns into Mexico, in order to destabilize the left-leaning Echeverria government.[15]

 

This is perhaps the moment to point out another special feature of the US-DFS relationship in Mexico. Both the CIA and FBI (as Shannon noted, and as we shall see) had their separate connections to the DFS and its intercept program. The US effort to wrest the drug traffic from the Nazi competition dated back to World War II, when the FBI still had responsibility for foreign intelligence operations in Latin America. Winston Scott, the CIA Station Chief in Mexico City, was a veteran of this wartime overseas FBI network; and he may still have had an allegiance to Hoover while nominally working for the CIA.[16] We shall see that on a key policy matter, the proposed torture of Oswald's contact Silvia Durán, Scott allied himself with the FBI Legal Attache and the Ambassador, against the expressed disapproval of CIA Headquarters. 

What is particularly arresting about this CIA-mob nexus that produced false Oswald stories, is its suggestive overlay with those responsible for CIA-mob assassination plots. Key figures in the latter group, such as William Harvey and David Morales, did not conceal their passionate hatred for the Kennedys. It is time to focus on the CIA-mob connection in Mexico as a milieu which will help explain, not just the assassination cover-up, but the assassination itself. 

---

[1]  Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 171.

[2]  There are previous examples where the actual events of American history are at odds with the public record. Allen Dulles represented the conventional view of John Wilkes Booth when he represented Booth to the Warren Commission as a loner, ignoring both the facts of the case and what is known now of Booth's secret links to the Confederate Secret Service (Scott, Deep Politics, 295; cf. Tidwell, William A., with James O. Hall and David Winfred Gaddy, Come Retribution: the Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln. [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988]).

[3]  American Heritage Dictionary, s.v. "history."

[4]  James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace (New York: Dell, 1986), 1139.

[5]  For a candid account of how KMT China was torn between management and suppression of the opium traffic, see Alan Baumler, "Opium Control versus Opium Suppression: The Origins of the 1935 Six-Year Plan to Eliminate Opium and Drugs," in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 270-91. Baumler notes how "The opium trade was a vital source of income and power for most of the colonial and national states of East and Southeast Asia" (270). I believe this state of affairs is less restricted, and has changed less, than his choice of terms implies.

[6] These and other examples in Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Rise and Reign of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000  (New York: Knopf, 2001), 185,290, etc.

[7] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 207, 218-19.

[8] For an instructive example involving Citicorp, America’s largest bank, see Robert A. Hutchison, Off the Books (New York: William Morrow, 1986). This Citicorp scandal (one involving double bookkeeping and tax evasion rather than drugs) was richly documented by first the SEC staff and then a Congressional Hearing, yet it was successfully suppressed through political influence.

[9]  New York Times, 11/11/99:  A Senate Committee “subpoenaed Citibank for transcripts of conversations among its private bankers on March 1, 1995, the day after Mr. Salinas had been arrested for murder. He has been convicted and is in prison in Mexico. In one conversation, the head of Citibank Private Bank, Hubertus Rukavina, asked whether Mr. Salinas's money could be moved from trust accounts in London to Switzerland, which has strict secrecy laws, according to the transcript.”

[10]  Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 39.

[11]  Chapter XII; Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 104-05.

[12]  Desperados, 180.

[13]  Cf. Mills, Underground Empire, 840-43, 550.

[14]  MEXI 7041  24 November 1963; NARA #104-10015-10070.          

[15]  Mills, Underground Empire, 549-50; cf. Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup, 178-79.

[16]  Cf. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 107-08.