from "60 GREATEST CONSPIRACIES OF ALL TIME"
The World According to Daniel Sheehan
The following text is a transcript of a speech given in late
1986 by Daniel Sheehan, chief counsel for the Christic Institute,
a public interest law and policy center in Washington D.C.
Sheehan gained an impressive measure of notoriety in the
late 1980s with his lawsuit against "The Secret Team," the group
of former and current military men and intelligence agents who,
Sheehan alleged, are responsible for a continuing pattern of
corruption and violence that dates back at least to the JFK
assasination, and further, to World War II -- and in the '80s
manifested itself in the Iran-Contra Affair.
Sheehan's exploits and world view are chronicled in chapter
42 of "60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time." For that matter, a
number of the conspiracies --verifiable and not-as-much-so-- that
he discusses in the following speech (the major assassinations,
the CIA's importation of Nazis, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency's plan to suspend the constitution etc.) are also covered
in greater detail in the book.
This speech, typical of the talks Sheehan delivered as he
traversed the country seeking funds for the always-ailing,
nonprofit Christic Institute, gives a thorough overview of his
"Secret Team" lawsuit and the facts and charges behind it.
[==Sometimes Paraphrased; full text included as attachment==)
"An FBI agent had warned a [Methodist] minister to have
nothing to do with the Catholic Church, explaining that the FBI
was in possession of information that the Catholic Church, under
the guise of a sanctuary movement for Central American refugees,
was smuggling Communist terrorists into the United States.
"He went on to say that, in the event that our President was
forced to undertake direct military action in Central America,
those Communist terrorists smuggled into the US were going to be
organizing themselves to launch strikes against American military
bases, communication centers, and water resource systems.
"Later, [the Jesuits] and I were contacted by yet a second
minister from another Protestant church who had been approached
by a different FBI agent telling him exactly the same thing.
"[The Christic Institute] had reason to investigate, in
order to find out just where these stories were originating. If
the Justice Department really believed those stories, we were
confronting an unjustifiable degree of militancy ...
"I established contact with some investigative reporters and
some former federal agents, who are now private investigators,
whom I had encountered earlier [in my career]. I new they had
very good sources, so I asked them to investigate for us, as a
favor to us, if they would. They did.
"I learned that President Reagan, on April 6, 1984, had
signed a highly classified National Security Decision Directive,
initiating a highly secret readiness exercise in the United
States. But this was a domestic readiness exercise undertaken to
determine what types of steps had to be taken by various federal
agencies here in the event that the President were to authorize
use of US troops in Central America.
"The domestic readiness exercise was code-named 'REX 84.'
The military action in Central America --with which this exercise
was associated-- was to be code-named 'Operation Night Train.'
"As we began to investigate, we discovered that the domestic
readiness exercise was going to be undertaken and supervised by
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). That came as a
surprise to us, since FEMA was supposedly only concerned with
hurricane and flood relief and civil defense.
"The [planners of the exercise] were the same geniuses who
brought you the post-nuclear war scenario, detailing how they
could move the entire population of Los Angeles out to one small
town in the Tehachapee mountains in only a couple days ...
"Further investigation revealed that the Reagan
administration had brought a man by the name of Louis Guiffreda
to Washington DC to run the FEMA exercise.
"Guiffreda had begun as the chief of the California-based
Crime Training Institute, which specialized in anti-terrorist
training for police departments. "El Commandante," as Guiffreda
liked to be called, was later made general of the California
National Guard under Edwin Meese, Governor Reagan's assistant
attorney general, so that he could take charge of a special
secret program code-named "Operation Cable Splicer."
"Under 'Operation Cable Splicer,' then-Governor Reagan,
Meese, his assistant attorney general, and Guiffreda, general of
the National Guard, were preparing to declare martial law in
California if Black nationalists joined forces with the white
anti-Vietnam War community."
[[**There may be an important overlap here with President
Richard Nixon's 'Huston Plan,' of SIMILAR nature, originating in
the same late-Sixties period of FBI and CIA paranoia about anti-
war protest evolving into a literal 'revolution'.**]]
"Noting the fact that [Guiffreda] was now heading up a
similar 'preparedness exercise' on the federal level, I pursued
the investigation.
"From a source inside FEMA itself, we learned of a plan
whereby FEMA would first deputize members of the Department of
Defense and then state National Guard groups. The latter would
then organize civilian groups called 'State Defense Forces.'
"In the event of US military intervention in Central
America, the job of these 'State Defense Forces' under 'REX 84'
was to round up 400,000 [Hispanic 'sympathizers,' who were
potential 'anti-war protesters' and 'potential terrorists'] and
transport them to 10 military detention camps in the US already
prepared for them, all within a two-week period."
"Continuing the investigation, we discovered that there was
a second part to REX 84, designated REX 84 Bravo.
"That particular part of the operation had to do with moving
large amounts of military equipment from the Department of
Defense to state National Guard units and finally to the level of
these 'State Defense Forces.'
"We learned that these 'State Defense Forces' had recently
been created by the passage of obscure statutes in three Deep
South states, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas.
[[**And possibly in ARKANSAS as well, whence the link to
Contra coke-smuggling at MENA AIRPORT under Gov. Clinton?**]]
"In those states, the only people who had heard of the plan
for 'State Defense Forces' were [government-trained "Special
Forces" mercenaries] and [far-right-wing, racist, 'death squad'-
type 'militias' such as those overseen by Maj-Gen. SINGLAUB] at
'survivalist' training camps during their weekend 'war games'
['fortuitously' coinciding with the government exercise].
"THOSE were the kind of men from whom members of the future
'State Defense Forces' were to be be chosen ...
"Vast quantities of US military equipment were delivered by
the National Guard to these pretend 'State Defense Forces' -- but
interestingly, after millions of dollars of armaments had been
distributed during readiness exercise [REX 84 Bravo], HALF of it
disappeared, covered up only by a trick of bookkeeping ..."
"When we began to investigate who was participating in such
enterprises on a federal level, we were visited by a former
military intelligence agent who said, "Don't you realize who the
people are that you're dealing with?"
"We didn't know whether to pretend to be very knowledgeable
--and therefore stupid, in being so reckless-- or to say like we
always do, 'No, we don't know any more than the American people
do about what the facts are.'
"He said, "I'll tell you WHO they are. After you're done
investigating, you'll know WHAT they are."
"'Theodore Shackley, Thomas Clines, Richard Secord, Albert
Hakim, Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero, and Eric Von Marbod.'"
"So we went off to find out who these people were.
"An extraordinary series of events began to unfold which
resulted in the ruling of a federal court in Miami. The court
said, 'What you have here is an ongoing criminal enterprise
dating from [at least] 1960.'
"What we discovered is that the person who had been
directing the operations [of the 'Secret Government'] was a man
by the name of Theodore Shackley.
"After 1976, Ted Shackley had been the director of covert
operations worldwide for the CIA under George Bush when Bush was
CIA Director. Back in 1961, Shackley ran counter-intelligence
against Castro's government in Cuba. But even BEFORE the Bay of
Pigs, the United States had fought a SECRET war against Cuba,
about which the American public knew virtually nothing.
"When Fidel Castro drove dictator Batista from Cuba in 1959,
he also drove out, with it, an organized crime syndicate -- Meyer
Lansky's 'Resorts International,' which ran Cuba's casinos and
hotels, prostitution rings, and the heroin trade in Havana.
[Meyer Lansky's Mafia] indeed was Batista's business partner.
"Driven from Havana in 1959, the exiled Cuban Mafia fled to
Southern Florida, where they were contacted by RICHARD NIXON, at
the time President Eisenhower's vice president and [in consort
with the CIA's Allen Dulles] the director of 'covert ops' for
Einsenhower's National Security Council ..."
<to be continued in Part 2>
60 GREATEST CONSPIRACIES OF ALL TIME
The World According to Sheehan
Editor's Note: The following lengthy text is a transcript of
a speech given in late 1986 by Daniel Sheehan, chief counsel for
the Christic Institute, a public interest law and policy center
in Washington D.C. Sheehan gained an impressive measure of
notoriety in the late 1980s with his lawsuit against "The Secret
Team," the group of former and current military men and
intelligence agents who, Sheehan alleged, are responsible for a
continuing pattern of corruption and violence that dates back at
least to the JFK assasination, and further, to World War II --
and in the '80s manifested itself in the Iran-Contra Affair.
Sheehan's exploits and world view are chronicled in chapter 42
of "60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time." For that matter, a
number of the conspiracies --verifiable and not-as-much-so-- that
he discusses in the following speech (the major assassinations,
the CIA's importation of Nazis, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency's plan to suspend the constitution etc.) are also covered
in greater detail in the book.
This speech, typical of the talks Sheehan delivered as he
traversed the country seeking funds for the always-ailing,
nonprofit Christic Institute, gives a thorough overview of his
"Secret Team" lawsuit and the facts and charges behind it.
DANIEL SHEEHAN: Well, good afternoon. It's a real pleasure.
After the years of fighting in the trenches against the contra
supporters here in the United States, it's finally time for the
American people to find out who those supporters are, what
they've been doing, and what it is that's going to result in
their going to federal prison. Now, everyone here has heard about
the scandal, the downing of Eugene Hasenfus and the C-123 cargo
plane he was piloting on Oct. 5 [1986], and later in November
[Nov. 25] the startling revelations by Attorney General Edwin
Meese about the secret sales of arms, spare parts for the F-14's,
and the TOW missiles to Iran, and the diversion of some of the
profits from those sales to the contras in Central America.
We also know that, as a result of these scandals, the
legislative branch of our government has established two select
committees, one in the U.S. Senate and one in the House of
Representatives, to investigate the need for additional
legislation and supervisory structures over the executive branch
of our government. We also know that within the executive
department there has been appointed a special prosecutor, Mr.
Walsh, to investigate potential criminal wrongdoing of those
involved in this affair.
What is less known is that there is an investigation and
prosecution going on in the judicial branch of our government
since May of 1986. There has been on file a federal racketeering
charge in the federal court of Miami. This is the case that you
may have read about Friday morning [Jan. 30, 1987], where the
U.S. District Court of Miami has thrown out all of the motions of
the defendants to dismiss that case. As a consequence, we are
authorized to proceed with federal subpoena power to investigate
the criminal racketeering activity of these people.
Now, the questions that are floating around in our nation
today have been highlighted in a Senate Intelligence Committee
Preliminary Report, which was released on Thursday. This report
left over one dozen major questions. Some of these are: Did
President Reagan know of the diversion of funds to the contras
arising from the sale of arms to Iran? Did President Reagan
approve of the activities of Lt. Col. Oliver North: dealing with
the Iranians, and dealing with the diversion of funds from the
Iranian gun sale to the contras?
Who, indeed, are these shadowy arms merchants that we are
beginning to hear about: Ghorbanifar, Hakim, Khashoggi? Who are
these people? What role did the government play in the transfer
of these arms to the Iranians? Who is this Theodore Shackley, who
Khashoggi says, is the man who first suggested the idea of
trading arms for hostage in the Middle East? What role is it that
this Mr. Buckley plays inthe exchange of arms, this man who was
the CIA station chief in Beirut and who was one of the hostages?
And more generally, when, and where in the world will this end?
Now, these are a few of the questions that we know the special
prosecutor is looking into and the select committees of our
Congress are looking into.
What we want to do today is to share with you the charges
that have been placed against these people in the judicial branch
of our government, so that you can have a road map. You can't
tell the players without first looking at the program. This,
indeed, is the program of the upcoming criminal indictments which
we'll be hearing about over the course of the next year, which in
our judgement will precede the impeachment of the President of
the United States.
What we want to do first is review briefly the history of
our common experience that sets the context for these
extraordinary hearings and investigations.
We all recall the days which seem to be in the dark distant
past, in January of 1979, when there was still a Democratic
Senate and a Democratic House of Representatives, and President
Carter was in the White House. We remember that Tom Harkin from
Iowa and a number of his colleagues succeeded in passing the
Harkin Amendment, which prohibited the distribution of military
hardware and military assistance to any government that was
systematically engaging in the violation of the human rights of
their own citizens.
Under that resolution of Congress, signed into law by
President Carter in early 1979, there was a resolution cutting
off all military aid to the dictatorial government of Anastasio
Somoza in Nicaragua. This was taken up in accordance with the
condemnation, which had spread across our world, of that regime
-- even resulting in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops
formally condemning that government. The bishops declared that
the Somoza regime had no legitimacy. Indeed, they came as close
as we've ever seen to expressly authorizing the rising up of the
people against this government on the grounds of justification.
After the passage of these resolutions cutting off all
military aid to the Somoza government, a peculiar thing happened.
Somehow, the flow of arms did not stop completely. It was
discovered that there was some secret source of funding and
supplying of arms to that dictatorship that was not stopped after
the Congress condemned it, after the president of the United
States prohibited it, and, indeed, even after Stansfield Turner,
the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had
forbidden it.
The flow of arms did not sustain that criminal government,
however. In July of 1979, Anastasio Somoza was forced to flee
his country and fled to the Bahamas. And very soon thereafter,
we began to hear rumors of some group of former Somoza generals
setting themselves up in Honduras and mounting a war against the
new Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the government that was
recognized across the world, indeed, even by the U.S. government,
which had for so long supported the dictatorship of Anastasio
Somoza.
However, there were other things that were capturing the
attention of the American public. There were the hostages who
were being held in Iran. Indeed, these hostages became the
Achilles' heel of the Carter administration. The weakness, the
vacillation demonstrated by that administration in the face of
this type of humiliation of our country, led to the rise and the
challenge of Ronald Reagan.
Many of us said to each other, "Who would have ever believed
that Ronald Reagan could have been considered a serious candidate
for the presidency of this country?" But because of vacillation,
the lack of effectiveness demonstrated by the Carter
administration in the face of that humiliation, Ronald Reagan
rose to the occasion and became the Republican nominee for
president and was elected.
Now, we all recall that peculiar scene I think, back during
the inauguration, watching Ronald Reagan being sworn in and
Carter going out. And at the same time, we saw the bulletins
flashing as the hostages in Iran were being released, being
shipped out, being put on planes and sent back. This was a
strange relationship between the outgoing administration and the
incoming of another in that terrible hostage crisis.
But when the hostages had been returned and President Reagan
had been sent to the White House, we immediately began to hear
from the administration about this horrible Sandinista regime
down in Central America, how they were a threat to our national
security. The President came on and told us how this rising
communist government in Central America was only a couple days'
drive from Harlingen, Texas. And each time he came on to talk
about this, the distance decreased. Soon it became a day's drive.
Then it was just a couple hours away.
Indeed, when questions began to arise about this government
down there, we began to hear about this so-called contra force,
this force of former Somoza generals, the very men who had led
the torturing and the mass slaughter of their own citizens, and
who are now being talked about by the president of the United
States as persons who were the moral equivalent of our Founding
Fathers.
We recall together, I believe, the early protestations of
President Reagan, that he had nothing to do with these contras.
He was in no way participating in supporting them. But he wished
them well. And, when the media and the American people failed to
believe that, and began to turn up evidence that the Central
Intelligence Agency had, since June of 1981, been providing
military equipment, arms, explosives, and training to these
contras, our President, who had been on television swearing that
it wasn't true, then said, "Oh, you mean THOSE contras. Yes, by
the way, we have been giving them support. But let me give you my
word once again that the only reason that we're supplying them is
to interdict the flow of guns and arms from the terrible
communist government of Nicaragua to the rebels in El Salvador."
When the American people failed to believe that, and the
American journalist community failed to believe that, Reagan
assigned the CIA to do an evaluation [of alleged Nicaraguan arms
being sent to El Salvador]. Indeed, a man by the name of David
McMichaels from the CIA was assigned to do the investigation. And
when McMichaels concluded that there was no evidence of any sort
of shipments of arms going from Nicaragua to El Salvador, he was
terminated. And then the President gave us his word once again.
He said, "Oh yes indeed they had been doing more than just trying
to interdict the arms." In fact, he said that what he was trying
to do was to apply pressure to the new Sandinista government, to
force them by military pressure form the contras to live up to
their promises made during the revolution against Somoza -- all
of those promises, which, we were supposed to recall, President
Reagan supported so much during his election.
The hypocrisy of it is astonishing. So astonishing, indeed,
that the American people did seem to remember that President
Reagan had totally opposed the Sandinistas. And now his
protestation as trying to make them live up to their promises
rang hollow once again to the American public.
Nothing demonstrated the falsehood of his accusations so
much as the revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency in
the end of 1983 had been caught mining the harbor of Corinto in
Nicaragua, and, indeed, passing out manuals recommending that the
contras undertake political assassinations of the mayors, town
clerks, and other functionaries within the civilian government of
the Sandinistas.
That was too much for the American public, and they began to
demand that all support for the contras cease. That was the point
at which President Reagan began to insist that it was essential
to supply the contras and to adopt them as our allies to "stop
the establishment of a Soviet military base in Central America."
Now, we then saw the growing of a full-scale war going on in
Central America. You recall the extraordinary comments of our
President saying --in the midst of the thousands of people being
slaughtered, the mass of civil wars going on in Central America
-- that unless our Congress gave $100 million to these contras,
there was going to be a major disruption in Central America. The
extraordinariness of it all seems to leave the American people
numb.
Then, in March of 1984, the U.S. Congress passed the Boland
Amendment, explicitly forbidding the White House and any of the
executive deparment agencies involved in intelligence activities
from giving any aid whatsoever to the contras -- either direct or
indirect. This is where we were in March of 1984, with some 73
percent of the American people totally refusing to give any aid
to the contras.
Then we began to hear of the private group that was coming
to the fore, the one led by Major General John K. SINGLAUB, then
president of the World Anti-Communist League, to undertake a
major private operation in support of the contras. The we saw the
President of the United States on television stating, "I am a
contra." This was the situation that we face in March of 1984.
I, and the rest of us at the Christic Institute, with the
rest of our fellow Americans, simply watched in amazement as the
events surrounded us. But then, in March of 1984, we had a phone
call that began the long road that has led us here today. We were
contacted at the Christic Institute by the Catholic Bishop of
Brownsville, Texas. This is the Harlingen District of Texas,
which, in fact, had been the base for the first stop on the
underground railroad in the sanctuary movement. The Bishop of
Southern Texas in Brownsville, John Fitzpatrick, contacted us and
told us that some of the people at Casa Ramiro (the sanctuary
home that he had established within his diocese) had been
arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The unfortunate fact was that they had been bringing two
Central American refugees out of the Harlingen District in the
Bishop's car. This immediately attracted the interest of the
Bishop, and, indeed, of the U.S. attorney in Brownsville, who
brough criminal indictments against Catholic Sister Diane
Mullencamp.
Sister Mullencamp had been driving the care with the two
refugees from El Salvador, a translator --a woman by the name of
Stacey Merkt-- and a young reporter from the Dallas Times Herald,
Jack Bishop.
All of these people had been arrested and charged with
unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens. The Christic
Institute ws asked by the church to come to Texas to undertake
the first of the criminal defenses for the people from the
sanctuary movement.
When we arrived (myself and my chief investigator on that
case, a Catholic priest named Father Wally Kosabowski, who had
served in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were still struggling
there), we began to prepare for the preliminary hearing in that
case. Then we were contacted by a Methodist minister who came to
us in a very high state of anxiety. He said to us that he had
been preparing to discuss in his church the establishment of a
sanctuary when he was approached by a field agent for the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.
This FBI agent had told this minister that he and he
parishioners should have noting to do with the Catholic Church or
the sanctuary movement, stating that he was in possession of
information that the Catholic Church was, under the guise of the
sanctuary movement, smuggling known Communist terrorists into the
United States. He went on to say that in the event that our
President was forced to undertake direct military action in
Central America (either in El Salvador or Nicaragua) that these
known communist terrorists were going to be organizing themselves
into military cadres and launch military strikes against U.S.
military bases, communication centers, and water resource
systems.
Now, this caused some distress to the Methodist minister,
and after some consultation with the Bishop's staff in the
Harlingen District, he came to me. And he said, "Look, I
understand that you served as general counsel for the U.S. Jesuit
Headquarters Social Ministry Office in Washington. I know that I
can trust you and you'll tell me if there's anything going on." I
had to become a bit serious, and I said to the minister, "Listen
Reverend, if that were going on, at least the Jesuits would know
about it. And as their lawyer in the Social Ministry Office, I
would have been informed, and I had not been."
And I was positive that it was not true. I gave him our
assurances that he could return to the discussions at his church
without the anxieties with which he had come to us. Well, that
was kind of humorous until, approximately a week later, Father
Kosabowski and I were contacted by yet a second minister, who in
another church had been approached by yet a different FBI agent,
and had been told exactly the same thing. Well, now that was much
more serious.
Now, we had a reason to investigate, to find out just where
these stories were coming from. Because if the Justice
Department, against whom we were defending in this case, really
believed those stories, we were obviously going to be confronted
with a much higher degree of militancy than we had any
justifiable right to expect. And so after the preliminary
hearing, we returned to Washington, D.C.
I established contact with some investigative reporters and
some former federal agents, who are now private investigators,
whom I had encountered in a number of my former incarnations as
an attorney for the New York Times, NBC, and as an attorney in
the offices of F. Lee Bailey. I had come to know a number of
these people and knew they had very good sources. I asked them to
investigate for us, as a favor to us, if they would. They did.
I learned in the second week of April 1984, that President
Reagan, on April 6, 1984, had signed a highly classified National
Security Decision Directive, initiating a highly secret readiness
exercise in the United States. But this was a readiness exercise
which was to be undertaken domestically to determine what types
of steps had to be taken by various federal agencies here,
stateside, in the event that the President was required to
undertake direct military action in Central America.
The readiness exercise was going to be code-named "Rex 84."
The operation in Central America --the direct military operation
in conjunction with which this readiness exercise was to be
undertaken-- was to be code-named "Operation Night Train." As we
began to investigate this, we discovered that the whole readiness
exercise ws going to be undertaken and supervised by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). That came as somewhat of a
surprise to us since the Federal Emergency Management Agency was
supposed to be involved in hurricane relief, flood relief, and
civil defense. These are the geniuses who brought you the
post-nuclear war scenario: how they would re-establish the phone
system after an all-out nuclear attack on the United States; how
they would move the entire population of Los Angeles out to, I
think, one of the small towns out here in the mountains in a
couple days, which is what they figured it would take them.
VOICE: The Tahachapee.
SHEEHAN: The Tahachapee. That's right. If this was the group that
was supervising this readiness exercise, then that did not
instill a great deal of confidence in us that that readiness
exercise was a serious operation. However, our further
investigations revealed to us that the Reagan administration had
brought to Washington to run the Federal Emergency Management
Agency a man by the name of Louis Gifrada. Louis Guiffreda has
been the "comandante" [commander] of the California-organized
Crime Training Institute, which had specialized in anti-terrorist
training for police departments. And the comandante, as he liked
to be called, had been made the general of the National Guard of
California under Edwin Meese, the special assistant attorney
general at that time. And they had undertaken here in your state
a special secret program, which was code named "Operation Cable
Splicer."
This secret program was one whereby the then-Governor Ronald
Reagan, his assistant attorney general, and the comandante, the
general of the National Guard, would undertake to establish a
state of martial law in California in the event that Black
nationalists joined forces with the anti-Vietnam War community
and tried to replace the established authority of the State of
California.
Now, I pursued the investigation, seeing that his was a
strange person who was heading up this operation. We learned
through a source that we developed inside FEMA that there was a
plan whereby FEMA would deputize members of the Department of
Defense, and then the state National Guard group. They would
then organize civilian groups called "State Defense Forces."
Their job, under the readiness exercise (Rex 84), was going to be
--in event of direct military action in Central America by the
President-- to round up 400,000 undocumented Central American
aliens and place them in 10 military detention camps throughout
the United States, all within a two-week period.
Now, any similarity that this program might have to the
Japanese-American roundup after Pearl Harbor is not coincidental.
The fact is, everyone in our generation has continued to be
appalled by that mass internment of the Japanese-Americans, and
yet the administration still dares to go forward with this. This
contradiction is explained only by the legal brilliance of Ed
Meese. For, you see, Ed Meese has made a distinction here,
saying, "Well, these 400,000 people aren't even Americans.
Therefore, since they're not even supposed to be here anyhow,
it'll be perfectly legal for us to incarcerate them since they
will be a threat to the national security during a direct
military operation."
Well, given the fact that we were working with the sanctuary
movement at the time, you can imagine the degree of distress that
this caused. I communicated this information to the leadership of
the sanctuary movement.
Then, continuing the investigation, we discovered that there
was a second part to Rex 84. This is designated, originally
enough, Rex 84 Bravo. This particular part of the operation had
to do with moving large amounts of military equipment from the
Department of Defense to the state National Guard unit, down to
these State Defense Forces. And we learned that these State
Defense Forces had recently been created by means of the passage
of these very little-known statutes in three states: Alabama,
Louisiana, and Texas. In these states, the only people who had
heard about the setting up of these State Defense Forces were the
men who participated in the weekend war games at "survivalist"
training camps and in the "Soldier of Fortune" groups.
These were the men who were signing up to participate as
members of these State Defense Forces. We discovered that there
was a source that we had developed who was talking with a colonel
in the National Guard, who said, "Yes, there was going to be this
great readiness exercise coming up." Quantities of military
equipment were coming down to the National Guard to go to these
State Defense Forces, but very interestingly, when these millions
of dollars of equipment were distributed during the readiness
exercise, half of it would later disappear, and a neat
bookkeeping trick would cover the tracks.
For example, say $25 million is the original cost to the
United States of this military equipment. After the equipment is
transferred to these State Defense Forces for the readiness
exercise, about one-half of it is logged back into stores at the
end of the exercise, but valued at its replacement cost. The
replacement cost is typically twice the original cost because of
the increased paperwork, handling, and manufacturing costs
associated with small orders. So the books balance [with repect
to dollars and cents], and yet half of the originally issued
military equipment has "disappeared."
And then we discovered that it was to be smuggled to the
contras in Central America.
So, by pure happenstance, we, who have been working with the
churches, the synagogue groups in the Sanctuary Movement, had
stumbled across a program whereby the administration was trying
to smuggle embezzled military equipment to the contras, here in
April and May of 1984. When we learned this, I re-established
contact with a number of our investigators and journalists to
ascertain if they had learned anything similar to this.
And at that point, I was contacted by a journalist, an old
friend of mine, who brought the next piece of startling
information to me. He told me that he had gone down to Florida
over the holiday season [the Christmas holidays and the holiday
season of 1983] and had discovered a contra military training
base inside the United States, down in lower Florida (down below
Miami). And he had gone there to interview these people in late
1983 and had come to know that there was an American group
organizing itself here in the United States to provide military
assistance and financial assistance to the contras.
They, indeed, were going to be holding a meeting down in
Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in January of 1984. And so, this young
reporter, being the enterprising soul that he was, went back to
his newspaper and asked if he would be allowed to go and report
that meeting. He was told no, that he could not go. Well then, he
recommended that some other reporter, more experienced than he,
go. And they said no.
So he took a leave of absence from the paper, and on his own
nickle went down to Honduras and went to the hotel and went to
the lobby of the hotel, bought a newspaper, put the newspaper up
in front of him and sat around the lobby and watched all these
guys coming and going in their Gucci camouflaged suits and
trading their patches, comparing the length of their guns. They
were engaged in this rather extraordinary convocation.
He simply sat there and watched all of these people.
Finally, he started talking to a man sitting next to him, and
said, "Look, I'm a writer. I'm really interested in what's going
on down here." And this man said, "Hey, well look, I know all
these guys, why don't I show you around? Why don't I introduce
you to all these people?" And he did.
He took this young fellow under his arm and brought him
around and introduced him to everyone. This man was Tom Posey,
the founder of the Civilian Military Assistance Group for the
United States (CMA). And, lo and behold, this young journalist
was ushered into the inner sanctum of the Civilian Military
Assistance Group.
Indeed he sat in on Executive Committee meetings of CMA and
he didn't know what in the world he was supposed to do with what
he was learning, because he was learning about the National Guard
in Alabama, the 20th Special Forces declaring all kinds of arms
surplus and giving them to the Civilian Military Assistance
Group, who were then bringing them to Florida and flying them out
to Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador.
When I began to discuss this with him, we discovered that
the particular military equipment in Louisiana was supposed to be
brought to a particular warehouse and flown out to Ilopango,
where it, along with this stuff from Alabama, was all going to
the farm of a millionaire rancher down in Costa Rica. This
rancher is a man by the name of John Hull, who had become the
major ally for the contras there. Well, we were quite distressed
by this and felt that we should hurry up and find ourselves a
client, since we are an organization that is tax-exempt, a
public-interest organization like the American Civil Liberties
Union or the NAACP. We're allowed to engage in fomenting
litigation.
We began that quest there in the beginning of June of 1984.
At that point, I had to go down to Texas to do the sanctuary
trial. We did the trial. We won the thing on appeal -- had all
the charges dismissed against the sanctuary workers -- and
provided what we hoped was an important base of law. At the
conclusion of that trial, I returned to Washington and was
contacted immediately by this young journalist, and he said,
"Dan, you've got to come meet me. Something very important has
happened."
I went along with my investigator, Father William J. Davis,
to meet him. We had a meeting out in a public park where he
wanted to meet. He said, "Look, while you were gone, Tom Posey
came to Washington. He met me and brought me to a public park and
introduced me to a man by the name of Rob Owens. This man, Rob
Owens, began to explain to me that he was going to be the private
liaison with the National Security Council, working for a man by
the name of Lt. Oliver North, and that he, Rob Owens, was going
to be the man who met with the contra leaders and took their
orders for weapons, made sure they got their weapons, and
maintained liaison with the White House in direct defiance of the
Congressional ban against White House support for contras."
This young journalist wanted to know, asking my advice as a
lawyer, whether that was as illegal as it appeared. I, indeed,
explained to him at some length (this is now at the end of June
1984, sitting in his living room) that what we had here was a
full-scale criminal conspiracy inside the White House to violate
the United States' Neutrality Act, to violate the United States'
Arms Export Control Act, to violate various banking laws for the
transfer of these monies -- and that, in fact, what we were
looking at is the impeachment of any U.S. government official who
was participating in that program.
At that point, the young journalist brought his information
to his board of editors, who looked at the information and told
him that he would not be allowed to write any stories on that
unless he could talk to someone who was directly involved and who
made their statements under oath. Now, that's not something that
a journalist usually encounters. You don't usually go to a guy
and say, "Hello. I've brought with me here a stenographic
reporter and a notary public to sign you up under oath. Let me
interview you here."
So, he was quite distressed and thought that something had
to be done. Given the resources that we had at the Christic
Institute, the experience that we had in doing the Karen Silkwood
case, prosecuting the Klan and doing the Three Mile Island case,
and others, we decided to devote our resources, time, and energy
to making this happen. We decided to work and find a client.
In the beginning of July 1984, I had to fly down to get the
depositions of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party people down in
Greensboro, N.C., in that police department, and in the Alcohol,
Tobacco & Firearms Division. We went forward, prosecuted those
people, won a half-million bucks, and kicked them around and won.
We finished that case.
So, I was out of town some months at that point. And when I
came back to town, we then began to have more meetings. We
learned, that while we'd been engaged in these cases, an
extraordinary event had taken place in Nicaragua. What had
happened was that Eden Pastora, who was the famous Comandante
Zero, the Sandinista hero who had led major military operations
against the dictator Somoza, had become disenchanted with the
Sandinista government.
The Sandinista government, in response to the attacks and
harassments by the contras, had begun to take less and less
popular positions on things, had shut down some of the media, had
taken steps that made it very difficult for them to provide
supplies to the stores for the people. It was becoming more and
more difficult for them.
And this Comandante Zero, Eden Pastora, had become
disenchanted and had decided that he was going to leave
Nicaragua. Indeed, he was going to go south into Costa Rica. He
was going to set up a new contra group (ARDE), an independent
contra group. This was not a contra group working with the
generals up in Honduras, who were working with the CIA under Bill
Casey. They were going to set up an independent contra force. But
while we were doing the St. Croix trial and the Greensboro trial,
there had been pressure applied to this group, ARDE, (down in
Costa Rica) and to Eden Pastora, to force them to come under the
command of the Honduran military generals. These were the
selfsame old Somoza generals.
In May of 1984, Eden Pastora called a public press
conference and there he was going to denounce the FDN (the major
contra movement, the one in Honduras) and the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency for attempting to co-opt and subvert his
nationalistic contra group. At that press conference held in a
jungle camp of Eden Pastora on May 30, Memorial Day of 1984, you
can see the videotape to this day as they came up the river into
the jungle camp and the numerous journalists climbed out. You can
see among them a Danish journalist with a large, aluminum camera
case with a baseball cap on, walking with them, chatting merrily
as he went into the building where the press conference was to be
held. You see this man, Per Anker Hansen, move to the front of
the room on the videotape and place his camera case next to the
table where Eden Pastora would hold his press conference.
When Eden Pastora comes into the room and all of the
journalists begin to surge to the front of the base camp room,
and then, as the press conference starts, you see a young woman,
Maria, bring a cup of coffee to Comandante Zero and accidentally
kick over the camera case. It falls on its side, and no one pays
much attention. She gives him the coffee and the press conference
commences. What you then see is this alleged Danish journalist
begin to skulk out of the room, moving across the side of the
room on the video tape and out the door.
Immediately thereafter, a deathly roar engulfs the building,
destroying everyone in sight, killing eight people immediately,
killing three international journalists, including an American
journalist (Linda Frazier), blowing off the arms and legs,
blinding, tearing off the limbs of the journalists assembled.
Twenty-four people were massively injuried and, indeed, everyone
would have been slaughtered by the bomb had it not been for the
fortuitous event of it having been turned over on its side.
Because, it turns out, the bomb had been made of deadly C-4
explosives. This type of explosive is second only to nuclear
devices in its explosive capacity, a type which is very difficult
to obtain unless you have contact with the Central Intelligence
Agency or other intelligence groups. Because it had been turned
on its side, it blew the entire roof off the building and blew
the entire floor out instead, laying waste to everyone as it
exploded laterally.
Now, when the bulletins went out across Costa Rica that this
had happened, one of the people listening at home on the radio
was a young reporter by the name of Martha Honey. She was an
American reporter, but she reported for the Canadian Broadcast
Corporation and for the London Sunday Times. Her husband, Tony
Avirgan, had been at this press conference. Tony Avirgan was the
ABC television cameraman who had been assigned to film the press
conference. He had been devastated by the bomb. It tore out a
portion of his side, had burnt one whole arm and his hand, and
blown shrapnel into his face and chest. He was in critical
condition and was flown out by helicopter to the hospital and
later to the United States, where he underwent months of plastic
surgery.
Martha Honey, being the person that she is, insisted upon
going to the United States Newspaper Guild asking for a grant to
look for who it was that had perpetrated this horrendous bombing,
and asking to work with her fellow journalists to bring these
people to justice. She began her investigation and then had an
extraordinary event occur.
In early 1985, during her investigation, a young man by the
name of Carlos Rojas Chinchilla, a young carpenter down in Costa
Rica, was sitting at a restaurant and bar a couple of blocks from
the U.S. Embassy when in came three men. One of them was left at
the door, the other two left. And the man [David] who was left at
the door looked around, and came over to Carlos, and sat down and
told him that he wanted Carlos to help him, that he had to
escape, that he was a participant in the terrorist bombing at La
Penca, which had murdered the people at the press conference. He
said he was part of a terrorist band of contras who were going to
blow up the U.S. Embassy and who were going to assassinate the
U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs.
He went on to say that these terrorists were based on the
ranch of a millionaire American rancher by the name of John Hull;
that these had been the people, indeed, who had carried out the
assassination of the journalists and had planned to kill the U.S.
ambassador. Such a major event, he continued, would provoke the
United States, cause it to blame the bombing of their embassy on
the Sandinista government and to result in a military strike
against that government.
This man shared the information with Carlos, and Carlos in
his utter amazement later learned that some people had been
arrested (a few people from Hull's ranch) who fit the description
of these people. And when he realized that what he had heard was
true, he went to the only North American family he knew to have
them go warn the Embassy. The daughter of that family happened to
know Martha Honey, and went to Martha, and shared the
information. They then went to talk to this man, David.
They began a series of interviews with David through Carlos
-- in the public parks, on tape recorders, in churches, in hotel
basements, all across the city -- gathering the information about
this terrorist group. One day, Carlos and David were caught by
John Hull's terrorists in a park and thrown in the back of a car,
held at gunpoint, and brought to the ranch where they were held
in a wooden shed.
David told them that they were going to be killed if they
didn't get out of there. And so, the two of them, taking their
lives in their hands, leaped on this guard and knocked him down
and broke through a window and ran into the jungle in a fusilade
of bullets, and escaped through the jungle. Eventually they made
their way back to civilization, where they hitched a ride. They
shared their story with the Costa Rican authorities and with the
intelligence people there.
However, the [Luis Alberto] Monge government that was in
power at the time, was sympathetic to the contras, and so, the
journalists themselves had to continue the investigation alone. A
week later they learned that David, who had run off to another
place, had been recaptured by John Hull's men, had been brought
to Hull's ranch, tortured to death, and buried there.
At that point, they had to take Carlos out of the country.
Then, death threats began to come daily to the home telephone of
Martha and Tony Avirgan, telling them that they had to stop this
investigation, that they would be killed, that their children
would be killed if they did not leave.
They then contacted their journalist acquaintances and asked
for help from all across the nation. And they contacted us at the
Christic Institute and asked us to help. That is what we do at
the Christic Institute. That's why we come to people such as you
to ask your help to get this information out across the country.
And when we began to investigate, we began to confirm this story
of this terrorist group and, of course, we had the additional
information about the movement of guns and explosives and
hardware from the United States down to this ranch.
At that point, Martha and Tony prepared a report which they
published in Costa Rica, and John Hull sued them for libel. In
Costa Rica, libel is a felony criminal charge of which you are
presumed guilty unless you can prove that you are innocent. The
Christic Institute went in and undertook the defense of Martha
and Tony, helped them organize witnesses and bring them to the
bar of justice, and brought them on to testify, and defeated John
Hull.
And very, very prophetically, John Hull, in a major tantrum
at the end of the trial, stormed out of the court room, turned
and said, "This isn't over yet!" And little did we know how right
he was. We had resolved at that point to undertake a thorough
investigation and prosecution of these people. What we had
learned from our investigation was that this terrorist band on
John Hull's ranch had been doing yet more.
In addition to bringing in all the military equipment, and
training and dispensing the terrorists in Nicaragua, they had
been funding their operation by the smuggling of hundreds of tons
of cocaine from Columbia. This was possible because they have
virtual carte blanche to bring this military equipment from the
United States down to the ranch, and to Ilopango. In fact, the
U.S. government officials and the Reagan administration were
turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to those shipments. They would
move the planes down with the military equipment down to Ilopango
in El Salvador, then to the Costa Rican ranch, load up with 600
pounds of cocaine, and fly back into the United States, coming
back up the same channel that they had cleared through the radar
when bringing these guns to those who are the moral equivalent of
our founding fathers.
As we began to research the statutes that were available, we
discovered, to our amazement, that there was this federal
racketeering statute. There was, in fact, a federal criminal
statute -- the same one they used to prosecute the eight mob
leaders in New York. At the very bottom of this statute, it said:
By the way, if you run a business and your business has been
injured by the activities of such a criminal enterprise, you can
sue that criminal enterprise and recover three times your actual
damages.
We began to interview people and discovered that Tony
Avirgan was a private businessman. In fact, he was a freelance
cameraman hired by ABC to go to the La Penca press conference.
The bombing had destroyed all his television equipment. His
business had been injured. And, being the defenders of free
enterprise that we are, we determined that we are going to
vindicate the business community of America and close down this
criminal enterprise.
Now, all of this was preliminary to finding out the really
important information in this case. Once we had studied the
appropriate federal statute, we learned that when you undertake
to prosecute a particular overt act of a criminal enterprise
under the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organization Act
(RICO), you also sue all of the members who are participants in
the more general criminal enterprise of which that is just one
overt act. And so, we turned our attention to the criminal
enterprise itself which, of course, was the federal criminal
conspiracy to violate the U.S. Neutrality Act, to mount a
criminal war against the government of Nicaragua.
When we began to investigate who was participating in that
enterprise, we had another fortuitous visit. This one was from a
former military intelligence agent who came to us and said,
"Don't you realize who the people are that you're dealing with?"
We didn't know whether to pretend to be very knowledgeable and,
therefore, stupid or to say like we always do: "No, we don't know
much more than the American people know about what the facts
are." And he said, "I will tell you who they are and when you
undertake your investigation, you will discover what they are."
"The people you want," he said, "are Theodore Shackley,
Thomas Clines, Richard Secord, Albert Hakim, Rafael Chi Chi
Quintero, and a man by the name of Eric Von Marbod."
"Okay," we said. And we went off to find out who these
people were.
An extraordinary series of events began to unfold which
resulted in the ruling that you heard about this past Friday. In
this ruling the federal court in Miami said that what you have
here is an ongoing criminal enterprise dating from 1960. Because
what we had discovered is that the man who was directing the
operations, supplying the guns and the military hardware to the
contras in Central America was, indeed, a man by the name of
Theodore Shackley.
Theodore Shackley had been the worldwide director of covert
operations for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 1976 under
George Bush, when he was the director of the CIA. Theodore
Shackley had been the man in 1961 who had run the major contra
operation against the Cuban socialist revolutionary government
starting in 1961. But the U.S. CIA had run a secret covert war
against Cuba about which the American public knew virtually
nothing, both before and after the Bay of Pigs. And I will now
tell you what it is we all need to know.
We discovered that back in late 1959, when Fidel Castro
drove the dictator Batista from Cuba, he also drove out the
organized crime syndicate from Cuba, the major criminal operation
that was operating under the name of Resorts International. It
was Meyer Lanskey's major criminal syndicate that ran the casinos
and hotels and prostitution rings in Havana. They indeed were
business partners with Batista, and they were all driven from
Havana in 1959. They came to Southern Florida, and there they
were contacted by Richard Nixon, then vice president in the
Eisenhower administration.
<cont'd in part 2>
