-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Secret War Against The Jews John Loftus & Mark Aarons©1994 ISBN 0-312-11057-X 658pps - St. Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY, 10010 --[4a]-- CHAPTER 17 REHEARSAL IN ANGOLA Most of the Western histories of Israeli intelligence are quite negative. The book Dangerous Liaison, for example, portrays the Mossad as a group of gunrunning maniacs, shipping arms to Africa and Latin America for personal profit. Israeli arms deals have been widely exposed and just as widely criticized by the media. Our sources in the Western intelligence community have a slightly different perspective.[1] In their opinion, the Mossad's arms transfers were quite small in scope, usually conducted at the behest of other Western nations, and often were submerged by much larger arms deals by Western intelligence services that have escaped public attention. Israel is a lightning rod for the media. Over the years it has become a convenient scapegoat for other countries' operations. "The Jews get paid to take the blame for our screw-ups," one former Pentagon official admitted candidly. "The American Government cannot be seen in public as propping up violent dictators who torture their own citizens. The Mossad trains the security teams for America's clients. That is the price of doing business."[2] According to our sources, a small but significant portion of U.S. military assistance to Israel is diverted to fund operations of which Congress would never approve. It is a kickback that Israel must pay to the Pentagon, State Department, and CIA in return for their support on Capitol Hill.[3] Our sources believe that Israel would not get a cent out of Congress were it not for the support of the military, the defense industry, and the intelligence community.[4] The myth of the powerful Jewish lobby is, unfortunately, just a myth, as is the claim that Jews dominate the American media. At 6 percent of the population, Jews are one of the tiniest minorities in the United States. Half of all American Jews live in the New YorkNew Jersey area and another group is concentrated on the southeast coast of Florida. All the rest of the states have less than 3 percent of Jewish voters. Jews account for less than 1 percent of the population in 80 percent of the U.S. congressional districts. They just lack the votes to get a foreign aid bill through on their own. They need help.[5] Many Israelis privately fear that their country has become an eco- nomic colony of the American "military industrial complex." Annually that complex contributes $3.8 billion to Israel-almost ten times the amount raised by the United Jewish Appeal in the United States. "When 20 percent. of our nation's budget depends on American largesse, we do as the Americans ask," said one retired Israeli officer. Whether it is training security forces for an African dictator or running guns to the Contras, the Jews do what they are told to do.[6] In fairness, the Israeli involvement in under-the-table arms and covert operations is relatively small. Jews are small-time players in the world of international arms sales. When it comes to covert operations, the Mossad is almost insignificant compared to the American intelligence community. When compared to the British secret service, the Jews are Boy Scouts. For the really dirty tricks, heavy-duty arms deals, and outrageously illegal covert operations, the Americans turn to Britain, not Israel. The British government has the most repressive combination of libel laws, press censorship, and criminal sanctions against disclosing intelligence operations of any country in the democratic world. It knows how to keep a secret from its own press, public, and Parliament. More important, it knows how to shift the blame to others when an operation is exposed. While Israel has been roundly criticized for training Africans how to kill, smuggling guns to the Contras, and shipping arms to Iran, the British secret service was doing much worse, much earlier, and in complete secrecy. The Western public has no idea that the Jews were set up to take the blame for a series of British operations. To this day, the Israeli public believes that its intelligence service originated the Iran-Contra affair in 1985. They have never been told that the British secret service was running the arms pipeline several years earlier, at the request of Vice President George Bush. To understand just how thoroughly the Jews were conned into taking the blame for recent covert intelligence scandals, we must examine how the British-Bush back-channel evolved. According to our sources, we must look back to Bush's largest covert operation as CIA director: the Angolan civil war. In fact, the Angolan war was the beginning of a web of scandals that is known by a number of names: Irangate, the Iran-Contra Affair, and the BCCI. Compared to this, the CIA's phony oil estimates in 1976 were only a minor fraud and had a very minor impact on Israel. In this chapter we examine the following allegations: During the 1970s British mercenaries supplied PLO terrorists with weapons so the British secret service could infiltrate Middle Eastern intelligence organizations. M16 did not warn either Israel or the United States of impending attacks by the Palestinian terrorists. o When a British agent defected to the United States, the British secret service was compelled to supply mercenaries for the Angolan war after Congress banned CIA funding. o The British secret service established the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) as an intelligence collection center to track the movement of terrorist money. The bank was later used as a covert back-channel for arms deals and hostage ransom. o The involvement of CIA director George Bush with the British backchannel in 1976 provided the model for his subsequent involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. o The Carter administration was completely excluded from the BCCI-British connection. The CIA unwittingly purchased arms for the Afghan resistance from a PLO terrorist in the employ of the British secret service. o Both the British and American participants agreed to exclude Israel from the back-channel intelligence and to use Israel as the scapegoat in the event of exposure. Bush may not have realized it back in 1976, but the British secret service had replaced its Nazis with the Palestine Liberation Organization. The secret war against the Jews had entered a new phase. Where once British intelligence and its allies among the Dulles clique had relied on the Fascist emigres, the modern espionage war would utilize the Arabs and their terrorist units. In 1976 the era of Palestinian and Syrian mercenaries had just begun. The shroud of secrecy around George Bush's policy toward Israel can be unraveled by tracing the history of a British intelligence agent who defected to work for the CIA. His name was Leslie Aspin, not to be confused with the American politician of the same name, or with Michael Aspin, his brother, the convicted arms dealer. After Leslie's death in 1988, his family discovered the archives of his employment as a contract agent for the British secret service. Peggy Robohm, an American writer and researcher, passed them on to us.[7] To put it mildly, Leslie Aspin left behind an intriguing record of financial deals, covert operations, and under-the-table deals. We have spent several years attempting to corroborate his information because it seems to contradict so much of the conventional history of the Iran-Contra affair. Leslie Aspin's records indicate that he was the British intelligence agent who became the White House bagman to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. It was Aspin who played a major role in Bush's plans to rescue the American hostages held in Lebanon by pro-Iranian fundamentalists in the mid-1980s. it was Aspin who helped Bush to cir cumvent the congressional ban on U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras. More important for the story of the secret espionage war against the Jews, it was Aspin who then helped the White House to set up the Israelis as scapegoats for the Iran-Contra affair, in which arms were sent to Iran and part of the proceeds used to fund secret, illegal assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras. Because of the importance of the issue, and the widespread confusion and disinformation spread by a number of intelligence services, it may be useful to start at the beginning of Aspin’s career. No one seriously can contend that he was a reliable source. In the absence of extensive indepen-dent corroboration, we would have dismissed his allegations out of hand. His own 1975 autobiography begins with some candid admissions: "Leslie Aspin is not a hero. He is a crook. He has never shot anyone, except from behind. He became a British Secret Service Agent, not out of patriotism, or even for money; but because he was blackmailed."[8] Even this confession is not entirely true. There was more to Aspin than he let on. He was not really as bad as he pretended to be. In fact, he was extraordinarily loyal to causes he believed in, as well as to friends and family. He was a tough kid who grew up in Britain, bold, brash, and very, very bright. In a way, he was quite modest. Throughout the Iran-Contra affair, he preferred to let everyone think that he was just a bit player. Aspin was, by all accounts, a charming rogue with an exceptional skill for espionage, a sort of working man's version of James Bond. Before dropping out of the British military, he became a qualified paratrooper and a member of the elite British commando force, the Special Air Service. The SAS, as we shall see, does the British government's dirty work. It is not unusual for former SAS men to enroll with one or more of the numerous firms specializing in security operations, including providing mercenaries for secret and proxy wars. There is more to such operations than adventure and moneymaking. British intelligence carefully promotes these activities, especially when they are consistent with London's foreign policy objectives.[9] Aspin did not wish to become dependent on the British government for his livelihood, so he became a smuggler. He was, by everyone's account, very good at what he did. By 1968 Aspin had a reputation in the Middle East as the kind of man who could move anything, anywhere, anytime, and without getting caught. Whether it was black market cigarettes smuggled out of Yugoslavia, or guns through Malta, Leslie Aspin was the man to see.[10] He would have stayed happily on the fringes of the law for many years, had he not taken on the wrong client, in the wrong country, at the wrong moment in history. Aspin began to smuggle weapons for a PLO terrorist group known as Black September, which was sponsored by both Libya and Syria. In 1970 the original Palestinian population of Jordan, swelled by refugees from Israel, were an unwelcome majority in their own country. The Hashemite Bedouin kingdom, established by Lawrence of Arabia, Jack Philby, and the British secret service many years before, ruled the native Palestinians with an iron fist. The Syrian government, against the wishes of the Kremlin, fomented a revolution to topple the pro-Western Jordanian government. When the Palestinians took to the streets, a small Syrian tank column invaded Jordan to aid the rebellion. The CIA, Mossad, and the British secret service worked hard to keep King Hussein on the throne. The rebellion was crushed ruthlessly and thousands of Palestinians were killed. The Syrian tanks pulled out under international pressure, to say nothing of Israeli threats to intervene in a most brutal way, and the entire leadership of the PLO was expelled from the country. To the Palestinian radicals, the events of that month became known as Black September. The Kremlin was appalled at the Palestinian debacle. The Soviets had warned the Syrians against premature uprisings. It was Soviet policy to engage the West not by direct military confrontation but by drawn-out guerrilla wars that would bleed the Western allies and provoke the democracies into harsh, reactionary policies. The protracted war in Vietnam had given Moscow the whole idea, but in-the Middle East the Syrians had cost the PLO its best base on the very borders of Israel. The Soviets engineered a coup and installed a new puppet in Syria, young Colonel Hafez Assad, who would follow the Kremlin's wishes more closely. As president, Assad established a series of low-profile training camps for Palestinian terrorists inside Syria. The new group called itself Black September, in memory of the events in Jordan. Over the next two decades, this militant terrorist organization would seize an influence in the Middle East in inverse proportion to its size. Assad directed his chief of Military Intelligence, Ali Douab, to supply the Palestinian terrorists with all the arms and equipment they needed. In order for the Syrian government to be able to deny its role, most of the arms would have to be smuggled carefully to the Black September cells in Syria and around the Middle East. President Assad also directed his own brother, Rifaat Assad, the head of Syria's secret service, to work with Douab's Military Intelligence in handling the sensitive smuggling assignment. The two Syrian spy chiefs knew just the people to hire as agents: the Al-Kassars, a local family specializing in drug-smuggling. Monzer Al-Kassar was one of three brothers who handled clandestine movement of money, drugs, and guns for the Syrians. His best friend was "the Prince of the Coast," Rifaat Assad, the president's brother, a decorated war hero from the Yom Kippur War and secret service chief.[11] When Monzer's brother married Ali Douab's sister, the Syrians kept the intelligence business all in the Al-Kassar family. At the time it was Soviet policy to have their terrorist proxies become financially self-sufficient through the sale of drugs. Syria had a small but lucrative opium-heroin trade, which would, after the takeover of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, become a multibillion-dollar industry supplying 20 percent of the heroin sold in the United States. Monzer Al-Kassar had offices in Spain, Poland, and East Germany, but his financial transactions were laundered through a series of bank fronts in Switzerland.[12] After being briefed by Rifaat Assad, Al-Kassar in turn recruited Leslie Aspin. Aspin would not handle drugs under any circumstances, but he loved the lucrative arms trade and helped recruit British advisers for the Libyan intelligence service. Aspin freely admits in his autobiography that he recruited a team of ex-SAS mercenaries, some of whom had already been training members of Black September." In his published writings, Aspin never referred to Al-Kassar by name, but simply called him the head of "the Bank," which directed the smuggling network. Aspin did good work and soon rose to the top of the motley crew of former French Legionnaires, British mercenaries, and American ex-military who worked on the smuggling ships. These high-speed boats ran cargoes past blockades all across the Mediterranean. In 1969 Aspin graduated from smuggler to shipper. Al-Kassar sent him to Libya.[14] At the time, Libya's colonel Mu'ammar al-Gadhafi, was working with the Soviets and the Syrians to arm terrorist groups in Spain, Ireland, and Germany. Aspin was escorted to the secret school for terrorists in the desert, which one colonel in Libyan intelligence boasted trained "people who will strike fear into the very heart of Israel and anyone who helps them," and asked Aspin to supply some of his "many friends to fight for money-mercenaries," who were needed to assist in this fight against the Jews.[15] So, Aspin's smuggling shop branched out from arms to human cargo. He escorted Irish Marxists to Libya for training and recruited several of his old British comrades to teach the terrorists how to kill, bomb, and attack more effectively. Both the Syrians and Libyans were delighted. Al-Kassar was pleased, and Aspin was getting rich. What none of them knew was that British intelligence had its own source inside Black September and was watching Aspin with growing interest. In February 1970 he had made a big mistake. Life had been hectic for Aspin, channeling men to the secret training camp and smuggling weapons from Libya to the Basque terrorists in Spain, so he decided to take a long holiday in England.[16] The British secret service was waiting for him at Heathrow Airport. It wanted Aspin to be an informant. For three days Aspin played dumb and resisted all requests that he turn into a double agent for M16. Finally the British agent played his trump card: He threatened to tell the Libyans and Syrians that Aspin was working for M16 anyway. "We and our friends abroad have just sufficient knowledge to act against a few of the people you have worked with and that will convince your old pals that we are telling the truth," the British officer told him. "They will be convinced that you have betrayed them. That will put you in the same situation that you would be in if you actually did give us the help we require." Offered money as a final inducement, Aspin eventually agreed.[17] When Aspin started to talk to the British secret service in 1970, the revelations first came as a trickle, then became a waterfall of information about the secret world of terrorism in the Middle East. He told the agent about the Al-Kassar family and provided all the other names of his key contacts in the Arab world, including the Libyan colonel and the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the colonel's European associates. He even provided the details of the Swiss bank through which the drug and gun money was laundered, the identities of the Irish terrorists who had been to the Libyan school, and the names of the men, and their boats, who shipped the Arabs' arms around the world.[18] In the space of one conversation, Leslie Aspin became the most important source for the British secret service in the Middle East. He was given the code name Kovaks, then briefed on clandestine communication by his controller, "Homer," and put on the payroll of the secret service. The British had only one kind of intelligence operation in mind for him. M16 did not care about the Jews, so it did not want Aspin to warn the Israelis about arms to the PLO. Nor did the British care about its ally's drug problems, so they did not want him to help the Americans stop Syrian drug-running. All they wanted him to do was stop the shipments of guns from Libya to Northern Ireland.[19] Aspin did this extremely well. In fact, his ability to forewarn British intelligence of IRA weapons shipments earned him a place in Irish history books.[20] According to Aspin's version of these counterterrorist operations, they were debacles, and his secret service controllers thoroughly botched nearly all of them. In fact, Aspin suspected that the British secret service was incredibly incompetent, although he made a lot of money on both sides, from M16 and the Libyan arms dealers.[21] Unfortunately for Aspin, the IRA had penetrated the Irish police counterintelligence force, the Special Branch, and quickly discovered Aspin's true role for the British.[22] He soon realized that he was becoming expendable. From the British point of view, Monzer Al-Kassar was a much more valuable source than Aspin. Al-Kassar was not only a friend to the president's brother and an in-law of Syria's intelligence chief, but also, his bank network handled the bulk of financing for the PLO, including the drug sales and arms purchases. The British had been looking for a way to penetrate the Al-Kassar family for a long time. The father, Mohammed Al-Kassar, was one of the first major drug smugglers in the Middle East. He had four sons, the second of whom, Monzer Al-Kassar, was born on July 1, 1947.[23] Mohammed was a-member of the powerful Alawite minority and an early supporter of the socialist Baath party favored by Moscow. One of their Alawite proteges, Hafez Al Assad, became president of Syria and the lifelong protector of the Al-Kassar family. Mohammed Al-Kassar rose quickly from a smalltime drug runner to Syrian special ambassador.[24] It should be recalled that British intelligence had its own spies inside Syria and discovered that the Kremlin intended to finance international terrorist groups with drug sales. Syria and Bulgaria were to front the networks, exchanging drugs for cash under diplomatic cover. It did not take the British long to suspect which Syrian diplomats were involved in such smuggling activities. Mohammed's eldest son, Ghassan, was arrested in Milan in 1969 in connection with a stolen car ring operating out of Bulgaria.[25] Ghassan was released, but kept under surveillance to see where the trail would lead. On January 12, 1970, Ghassan and his younger brother, Monzer, were arrested in Vienna for the same crime. On February 3 the brothers were arrested again, this time in Trieste. The stolen car investigation had taken on international significance as a possible new method for Eastern Bloc drug smuggling, with its ramifications for the financing of international terror.[26] The British had the Irish end of the drug ring safely under control, but American kids were taking Monzer's drugs, and Israel's very existence was threatened by the Arab terror squads. Aspin, although he knew only a little of the Al-Kassars' drug business, confirmed that the family also was running guns through Libya. He was told to keep working for the Swiss bank network, while the British waited for their chance to get one of the Al-Kassars on their own turf.[27] In 1972 the Danish authorities were informed that Monzer Al-Kassar was smuggling hashish from Lebanon to Copenhagen in stolen cars. The charges were dropped, despite the fact that the Danes found a bag of hashish with Monzer's fingerprints on it. In 1973, however, a warrant was issued for Al-Kassar's arrest for trying to smuggle even more carloads of drugs into Denmark.[28] According to the former intelligence officers we spoke to for this chapter, the British M16 liaison was tipping off the Danes about his every move, trying to keep the pressure on Al-Kassar.[29] Soon after the Danish courts issued an arrest warrant on March 16, 1973, charging Al-Kassar with international drug smuggling, the British secret service made its move. According to our sources, M16 made the same approach to Al-Kassar as it had to Aspin. If he cooperated, the British would reward him handsomely. If he did not cooperate, the British would spread the word that Monzer Al-Kassar was the informant who betrayed all the recent gun shipments by Libya and Syria.[30] There is some circumstantial evidence that Al-Kassar was recruited in Denmark. Soon after the arrest warrant was issued, he was allowed to flee to England, where he set up an import-export firm called Espargo, with a subsidiary in Beirut. The smuggling continued, but this time under British auspices. According to the "old spies," Al-Kassar was the "supersource." Through him, the British could track money moving to every terrorist organization in the world.[31] To protect him, the British were perfectly willing to have the Arabs blame Aspin for all the botched shipments to the IRA. By 1973 Aspin believed that the secret service was about to make him a public scapegoat.[32] Despite the fact that the IRA knew about Aspin, the British wanted him to go back to Northern Ireland to carry out an assassination.[33] He deliberately flubbed the job and escaped back to England, to the great annoyance of "Homer." Aspin realized that his short career with the secret service was coming to an end. In September 1974, just before the British leaked word of his double agent role to the Irish press, he made his own plans to betray the British and flee to the United States.[34] As a safety measure, he had previously tipped off the Americans that the British were not telling them everything they knew about Monzer Al-Kassar's drug shipments to the United States. Aspin contacted Larry Katz, a narcotics agent in the U.S. embassy in London, whom he had known in Turkey, and warned that a trunkload of drugs was about to arrive in New York. "Homer" was not amused when the Americans intercepted the drugs and suspected Aspin as the source of the leak.[35] In order to continue Al-Kassar's bona fides as an Arab terrorist, the secret service was quite willing to let his drug business continue and keep the facts from its American liaison officers. But that was nothing compared to what else the British were concealing.[36] According to Aspin, at the end of 1973 he bumped into one of his old friends from the Black September terrorist movement and got him drunk. The source: ... gleefully told me that his colleagues intended to blow up a Pan American or El Al aircraft at Rome airport before the end of the month. This was in December, 1973.... At the next meeting with Homer, I passed on the information about the Arabs and made a particular point of the Rome threat. He promised to pass on this information to the three governments concerned. I'm almost positive that he never did this and the thought that I trusted him to do so and did not make sure myself that they knew leaves me sick every time I think of it. Before the end of the month a Pan Am plane was blown up on the Rome tarmac. I'll never forgive the bastard for that.[37] The problem with Leslie Aspin was that he had developed a conscience. The British secret service had a good thing going with Monzer Al-Kassar, and Aspin was going to wreck it by telling the truth. Al-Kassar was the British government's best window into the Middle East, and M16 did not want to share him with the Americans. The British intended to promote Al-Kassar's bank network as a cheap and easy way to keep track of the terrorists, who trusted Monzer to mind their money and launder it for them so they could buy weapons and explosives. The Arabs believed in him because he kept the drug profits rolling in, but they were curious why none of his arms shipments was reaching Northern Ireland. In order to protect Al-Kassar, the British decided to publicly expose Aspin as their informant. On September 6, 1974, the secret service planted an expose on Leslie Aspin in the Irish press. The British blew the whistle on their own agent, leaking his true name, passport number, details of his role in one of the arms intercepts, and his relations with the M16 provocateur, the Libyans, and the IRA.[38] Aspin knew he was a dead man if he did not run. He evaded British security, PLO hit men, and Libyan intelligence. In October 1974 Leslie Aspin arrived in the United States. As soon as Aspin's defection was known, the secret service placed Al-Kassar in "administrative detention" in Britain. Officially he was charged with smuggling cannabis oil to Britain. Unofficially, the British wanted to keep him under wraps until they knew what Aspin planned to do. After hiding out for a year, Aspin made his move. In 1975 he published his autobiography, I, Kovaks, candidly admitting his criminal activities, his work for the British secret service, and the manner in which he was betrayed. However, he never used Al-Kassar's name. At the end of the book, he coyly noted that "I have had two offers of work . . . from a government who knows all about me but for whom I haven't yet worked."[39] Our intelligence sources say that the first offer was probably from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Only a handful of top people in DEA, including Larry Katz, knew that the British had recruited Al-Kassar, who was rapidly becoming one of the best drug informants in the world. The problem was that the British could not expose the PLO drug network without exposing their informant.[40] As long as Al-Kassar worked for the British secret service, Aspin had a life insurance policy. That was why Aspin never mentioned him in his tell-all autobiography. Al-Kassar was his trump card over the British government. Aspin made it clear that if he was killed, he would take Al-Kassar with him. By the end of 1975, the British decided to leave well enough alone.[41] So did his new employer, George Bush. In order to provide a steady stream of income, Aspin decided to work for the new director of the CIA. Our sources in the intelligence community say that Aspin's hiring was a closely held secret. None of the CIA section chiefs were briefed. His information about the British secret service's double-dealing gave George Bush the leverage he needed to form a new, and private, relationship with the British government.[42] According to a number of the "old spies," it was a simple trade. The British wanted Bush to keep Aspin quiet, and Bush wanted the British to provide something he desperately needed: a secret army of mercenaries to fight in Angola.[43] The Portuguese colonial rulers finally had pulled out of their African colonies in 1975 after decades of fighting guerrilla insurgencies. In Angola, the pro-Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) had won the battle for power over its pro-Western rivals, Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FLNA) and Jonas Savimbi's Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Before long, the civil war between the groups became complicated by international intervention, first by Western-backed South African forces, then by Cuban forces sent from thousands of miles away. Just as Vietnam had been lost to the communists earlier in 1975, now it seemed that Angola would join the Red Empire. It was an especially bitter pill for U.S. oil companies to swallow, as Angola contained a fabulously rich oil deposit. The Angolan war was Bush's first major covert operation as director of Central intelligence, and it was going badly. According to John Stockwell, the chief of the CIA's Angolan Task Force, it was an impossible assignment. On November 14, 1975, the White House top-secret advisory board, the Forty Committee, "had asked the CIA to outline a program which could win the Angolan war."[44] On December 2 the CIA recommended that the only way to win was to put American advisors on the ground to direct the untrained anti-Communist soldiers. Henry Kissinger just grunted and left without making any decision. No one was willing to authorize another Vietnam.[45] When Bush arrived at the CIA in December 1975, the Angolan problem was the first mess dumped in his lap. He did not want his first operation to be a loser, but the war was going downhill at a rapid rate. Worse, the U.S. Senate was particularly opposed to sending American soldiers to fight in Africa and was on the verge of ordering the CIA to terminate all of its covert operations in Angola. There had to be some way to win the war behind Congress's back. Eventually the White House Forty Committee approved mercenaries as the solution, as long as they weren't Americans.[46] Our intelligence sources insist that the only thing Bush wanted was victory. His political future could be crippled if it were known that the first thing he did as CIA head was to retreat and hand over Angola to the Communists without a fight.[47] If it took foreign mercenaries to win, so be it. So the CIA made formal approaches to the British for mercenaries and missiles. The British government said no to the missile request, as missiles were too easily traceable. However, it had no objections to supplying mercenaries to the CIA behind Congress's back.[48] To avoid embarrassment to the British government, several "private security firms" of ex-SAS men in London are ready to carry out any sensitive operation requested by the British government. One of the "less impressively connected firms," run by John Banks, was assigned to help with Bush's problem in Angola. It was Banks who provided CIA director Bush with "the British mercenary corps for the Angolan civil war."[49] Banks's partner, Leslie Aspin, kept his part of the CIA bargain: No mention of Al-Kassar's name in his book. Soon after the Aspin deal was cut with the Americans, it was safe for the British "supersource" to go back to work. Al-Kassar was let out of administrative detention in October 1975, at the same time the drug charges against him mysteriously vanished because of legal technicalities. By January 1976 the first shipment of arms and mercenaries from Britain were sent to Angola. Two of the Angola recruits, Leslie Aspin, and John Berry later joined Al-Kassar's arms smuggling apparatus.[50] Without informing John Stockwell, head of the CIA Task Force in Angola, British mercenaries suddenly appeared.[51] CIA director George Bush was keeping more than one secret from Stockwell. According to our sources, not only were the British mercenaries being paid for by the CIA, they were being recruited by a CIA agent named Leslie Aspin. Without Stockwell's knowledge, Bush had sent Aspin back to London to help coordinate the mercenary program.[52] In 1976 Leslie Aspin "turned up as an assistant to John Banks in the mercenary recruitment scheme for Angola."[53] --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
