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-Caveat Lector-
"Sean McBride" wrote:
> Here's one way to connect a few dots, looking at events from the
> standpoint of the political objectives of neoconservatives:
>
> 1. JFK assassination: Kennedy replaced by Lyndon Johnson and the
influence of the neocon Rostow camp. [ SNIP ]
Good post - this is the way I see it too. I'll append a timeline
with notes that provides some details on how this all got started
with the Kennedy assassination.
Tim Howells
**************************************************
A TIMELINE FROM THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION TO THE PRESENT
1958 - Diem and Nhu start trafficking heroin in Saigon in conjunction
with the Corsican mob in order to support Nhu's intelligence
apparatus (1).
1961 - 1963 President Kennedy grows increasingly concerned with
corruption in the South Vietnamese government and urges
Diem to institute reforms. Diem refuses - the trafficking
of heroin continues. (2,3)
November 1, 1963 - Military coup in South Vietnam, with
encouragement from the Kennedy administration. Nhu and
Diem are killed. One result is a cessation of heroin
trafficking by the Government of South Vietnam. (4)
November 22, 1963 - Assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas.
The accused assassin is himself murdered in the Dallas
police station two days later by Jack Ruby, a business
associate of Santo Trafficante. (5) Ruby, like Oswald
himself, is mixed up with anti-castro operatations with
cuban exile groups funded and managed by the CIA out of
their JMWAVE station in Miami. The station chief there,
Ted Shackley has overall responsiblity. Eg see:
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/issues/2001-04-
12/feature.html/page1.html
December 1963 - President Johnson tells the Joint Chiefs: "Just let
me get elected, and then you can have your war (in Vietnam)."
(6)
November 1964 - Johnson is elected.
1965 - Ted Shackley is sent to be CIA station chief in Long Tieng,
Laos.
1965 - The Corsicans are forced out of the opium transportation
business in Laos and Vietnam - the CIA airline Air America
takes over. (7)
1965 - Santo Trafficante sends Frank Furci, the son of his number
three man in Miami to Saigon where he gets involved in
narcotics and racketeering. (8)
April 1966 - The South Vietnamese Government resumes the practice
of using opium trafficking to fund intelligence and covert
operations under the management of CIA protege General Loan.
(9)
1968 - Ted Shackley becomes CIA station chief in Saigon.
1968 - Santo Trafficante comes to Saigon and sets up deals for
importing heroin from Saigon into the US. (10)
1969 - One of Shackley's former agents at Long Tieng, Michael Hand
goes to Australia and sets up a partnership with Frank Nugan
that is to be the parent company of the Nugan-Hand bank, an
instrument for laundering CIA drug trafficking and arms
smuggling profits. (11)
1970 - Long Tieng, the location of CIA headquarters in Laos,
becomes a major center for refining heroin (12)
1970's Southeast Asia becomes the major source for the world's
heroin supply, supplaning the Turkey/Marseille connection
["The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", McCoy].
Shackley working together with Trafficante (the Mafia boss
who arranged the Kennedy assassination) and Richard
Armitage (currently our Deputy Secretary of State) plays a
major role in establishing this multi-billion dollar
enterprise. (13)
1973 - Shackley is made head of covert operations for the Far East.
1976 - Nugan-Hand bank set up in Australia by CIA and Military
Intelligence to handle money laundering fort heir covert
arms and drug trafficing operations.
1980's - The requirements of the US intelligence community for
money laundering leads to the plundering of US Savings
and Loan industry under Reagan and Bush - by far the
greatest financial scam in history.
Right up to the present - Despite the disasterous results of the
adventure in Vietnam, and the corruption exposed in the
Nugan-Hand bank scandal, and the Savings and Loan fiasco,
the crew put together by Shackley in Laos in 1965 continues
to exert tremendous influence on US foreign policy, in Iran,
Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and so on. (eg see note 14)
Tim Howells
===================================================
(1) The beginnings of armed insurgency in the countryside and
political dissent in the cities had shown Ngo Dinh Nhu,
President Diem's brother and head of the secret police, that
he needed more money to expand the scope of his intelligence
work and political repression. Although the CIA and the
foreign aid division of the State Department had provided
generous funding for those activities over the previous three
years, personnel problems and internal difficulties forced
the U.S. Embassy to deny his request for increased aid.
But Nhu was determined to go ahead, and decided to revive
the opium traffic to provide the necessary funding. Although
most of Saigon's opium dens had been shut for three years,
the city's thousands of Chinese and Vietnamese addicts were
only too willing to resume or expand their habits. Nhu used
his contacts with powerful Cholon Chinese syndicate leaders
to reopen the dens and set up a distribution network for
smuggled opium. Within a matter of months hundreds of opium
dens had been reopened, and five years later one Time-Life
correspondent estimated that there were twenty-five hundred
dens operating openly in Saigon's sister city Cholon. To keep
these outlets supplied, Nhu established two pipelines from
the Laotian poppy fields to South Vietnam. The major pipeline
was a small charter airline, Air Laos Commerciale, managed by
Indochina's most flamboyant Corsican gangster, Bonaventure
"Rock" Francisci. Although there were at least four small
Corsican airlines smuggling between Laos and South Vietnam,
only Francisci's dealt directly with Nhu. According to Lt.
Col. Lucien Conein, a former high-ranking CIA officer in
Saigon, their relationship began in 1958 when Francisci made
a deal with Ngo Dinh Nhu to smuggle Laotian opium into South
Vietnam. After Nhu guaranteed his opium shipment safe
conduct, Francisci's fleet of twin-engine Beechcrafts began
making clandestine airdrops inside South Vietnam on a daily
basis.
(Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II,
1972,
"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", Harper & Row, New
York,
Chapter: Diem's Dynasty and the Nhu Bandits)
(2) Even though the opium traffic and other forms of corruption
generated enormous amounts of money for Nhu's police state,
nothing could keep the regime in power once the Americans had
turned against it. For several years they had been frustrated
with Diem's failure to fight corruption, In March 1961 a national
intelligence estimate done for President Kennedy complained of
President Diem: "Many feel that he is unable to rally the people
in the fight against the Communists because of his reliance on
one-man rule, his toleration of corruption even to his immediate
entourage, and his refusal to relax a rigid system of controls.
... In essence, Nhu had reverted to the Binh Xuyen's formula for
combating urban guerrilla warfare by using systematic corruption
to finance intelligence and counterinsurgency operations.
However,
the Americans could not understand what Nhu was trying to do and
kept urging him to initiate "reforms." When Nhu flatly refused,
the Americans tried to persuade President Diem to send his
brother out of the country. And when Diem agreed, but then backed
away from his promise, the U.S. Embassy decided to overthrow
Diem.
(Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II,
1972,
"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", Harper & Row, New
York,
Chapter: Diem's Dynasty and the Nhu Bandits)
(3) In an interview with Walter Cronkite in September 1963, Kennedy
said:
"I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the
Government (of South Vietnam) to win popular support that
the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it
is their war. They are the ones who have to win or lose
it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can
send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it,
the people of Viet-Nam, against the Communists ... I don't
think that the war can be won unless the people support the
effort, and, in my opinion, in the last two months the
Government has gotten out of touch with the people."
("Kennedy's Wars", Lawrence Freedman, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2000, pg. 375)
(4) On November 1, 1963, with the full support of the U.S. Embassy,
a group of Vietnamese generals launched a coup, and within a
matter of hours captured the capital and executed Diem and Nhu.
But the coup not only toppled the Diem regime, it destroyed
Nhu's police state apparatus and its supporting system of
corruption, which, if it had failed to stop the National
Liberation Front (NLF) in the countryside, at least guaranteed
a high degree of "security" in Saigon and the surrounding area.
(Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II,
1972,
"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", Harper & Row, New
York,
Chapter: Diem's Dynasty and the Nhu Bandits)
(5) In 1976, in response to a freedom of information suit, the CIA
declassified a State Department cablegram received from London
on November 28, 1963. It read:
On 26 November 1963, a British Journalist named John
Wilson, and also known as Wilson-Hudson, gave
information to the American Embassy in London which
indicated that an "American gangster-type named Ruby"
visited Cuba around 1959. Wilson himself was working
in Cuba at that time and was jailed by Castro before
he was deported.
In prison in Cuba, Wilson says he met an American
gangster/gambler named Santos who could not return
to the U.S.A. Instead he preferred to live in relative
luxury in a Cuban prison. While Santos was in prison,
Wilson says, Santos was visited frequently by an
American gangster type named Ruby. ...
The (House Select) Committee (on Assassinations) was able
. . . to develop corroborative information to the effect that
Wilson-Hudson was incarcerated at the same detention camp in
Cuba as Trafficante. ...
(Michael T. Griffith, "The HSCA on Jack Ruby's Mafia Links,
Excerpts from the HSCA Report",
http://ourworld-top.cs.com/mikegriffith1/id153.htm)
(6) In one of (Oliver Stone's film) JFK's most pivotal scenes, a
secret agent tells Garrison about a late 1963 White House
reception at which Johnson told the joint chiefs of staff,
"Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war."
Stone, by his own admission, borrowed the anecdote from my
book, and I am convinced of its accuracy, having heard it from
Gen. Harold K. Johnson, then the army chief of staff and a
guest at the party. I used the story to illustrate Lyndon
Johnson's practice of making different promises to different
factions. In this instance, he estimated that by placating the
brass he could rally their conservative allies on Capitol Hill
behind his liberal social agenda. At the same time, as I wrote,
he confided to members of Congress who had qualms about Vietnam
that he had no intention of getting immersed in that "damn
pissant little country." However, Stone, to depict Johnson as
a warmonger, lifted the story out of context.
(JFK: Oliver Stone and the Vietnam War, Stanley Karnow, From
"Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies", Henry Holt,
1995, Agincourt Press 1995)
Note however that Stone did NOT take JOHNSON's words out of
context. He merely omitted KARNOW's rather questionable
interpretation of Johnson's statement. (Tim Howells)
(7) CIA clandestine intervention produced changes and upheavals in
the narcotics traffic. When political infighting among the Lao
elite and the escalating war forced the small Corsican charter
airlines out of the opium business in 1965, the CIA's airline,
Air America, began flying Meo opium out of the hills to Long
Tieng and Vientiane.
(Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II,
1972,
"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", Harper & Row, New
York,
Chapter: The Golden Triangle: Heroin Is Our Most Important
Product)
(8) ... The American Mafia followed the U.S. army to Vietnam in
1965. Like any group of intelligent investors, the Mafia is
always looking for new financial "frontiers," and when the
Vietnam war began to heat up, many of its more entrepreneurial
young members were bankrolled by the organization and left for
Saigon. Attracted to Vietnam by lucrative construction and
service contracts, the mafiosi concentrated on ordinary graft
and kickbacks at first, but later branched out into narcotics
smuggling as they built up their contacts in Hong Kong and
Indochina. Probably the most important of these pioneers was
Frank Carmen Furci, a young mafioso from Tampa, Florida.
Although any ordinary businessman would try to hide this kind
of family background from his staid corporate associates,
Frank Furci found that it impressed the corrupt sergeants,
shady profiteers, and Corsican gangsters who were his friends
and associates in Saigon. He told them all proudly, "My father
is the Mafia boss of Tampa, Florida." (204) (Actually, Frank's
father, Dominick Furci, is only a middle-ranking lieutenant in
the powerful Florida-based family. Santo Trafficante, Jr., is,
of course, the Mafia boss of Tampa. Furci arrived in Vietnam
in 1965 with good financial backing and soon became a key
figure in the systematic graft and corruption that began to
plague U.S. military clubs in Vietnam as hundreds of thousands
of GIs poured into the war zone.
(Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II,
1972,
"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", Harper & Row, New
York,
Chapter: The Mafia Comes to Asia)
(9) (By April 1966) The liberal naivete that had marked the
Kennedy diplomats in the last few months of Diem's regime was
decidedly absent. Gone were the qualms about "police state"
tactics and daydreams that Saigon could be secure and politics
"stabilized" without using funds available from the control of
Saigon's lucrative rackets. ... According to (CIA's) Lieutenant
Colonel Conein, "the same professionals who organized
corruption for Diem and Nhu were still in charge of police and
intelligence. (General) Loan simply passed the word among these
guys and put the old system back together again." ...
Putting "the old system back together again," of course, meant
reviving largescale corruption to finance the cash rewards paid
to these part-time agents whenever they delivered information.
Loan and the police intelligence professionals systematized the
corruption, regulating how much each particular agency would
collect, how much each officer would skim off for his personal
use, and what percentage would be turned over to Ky's political
machine. Excessive individual corruption was rooted out, and
Saigon-Cholon's vice rackets, protection rackets, and payoffs
were strictly controlled. After several years of watching
Loan's system in action, Charles Sweet feels that there were
four major sources of graft in South Vietnam: (1) sale of
government jobs by generals or their wives, (2) administrative
corruption (graft, kickbacks, bribes, etc.), (3) military
corruption (theft of goods and payroll frauds), and (4) the
opium traffic. And out of the four, Sweet has concluded that
the opium traffic was undeniably the most important source of
illicit revenue.
(Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II,
1972,
"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", Harper & Row, New
York,
Chapter: The New Opium Monopoly)
(10) American Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Jr., visited Saigon
in 1968 and is believed to have contacted Corsican syndicate
leaders there. Vietnamese police officials report that the
current owner of the Continental Palace is Philippe Franchini,
the heir of Mathieu Franchini, the reputed organizer of
currency- and opium-smuggling rackets between Saigon and
Marseille during the First Indochina War. ...
Although the few Mafia watchers who are aware of Trafficante's
journey to Asia have always been mystified by it, there is good
reason to believe that it was a response to the crisis in the
Mediterranean drug traffic and an attempt to secure new sources
of heroin for Mafia distributors inside the United States. With
almost 70 Percent of the world's illicit opium supply in the
Golden Triangle, skilled heroin chemists in Hong Kong, and
entrenched Corsican syndicates in Indochina, Southeast Asia was
a logical choice. Soon after Trafficante's visit to Hong Kong,
a Filipino courier ring started delivering Hong Kong heroin to
Mafia distributors in the United States. In 1970 U.S. narcotics
agents arrested many of these couriers. Subsequent
interrogation revealed that the ring had successfully smuggled
one thousand kilos of pure heroin into the United States-the
equivalent of 10 to 20 percent of America's annual consumption.
Current U.S. Bureau of Narcotics intelligence reports indicate
that another courier ring is bringing Hong Kong heroin into the
United States through the Caribbean, Trafficante's territory.
(Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II,
1972,
"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", Harper & Row, New
York,
Chapter: The Mafia Comes to Asia)
(11) In 1969 Michael Hand, a former Green Beret and one of the CIA
agents stationed at Long Cheng when Air America was shipping
opium,moved to Australia, ostensibly as a private citizen. On
arriving inAustralia, Hand entered into a business partnership
with an Australian national, Frank Nugan. In 1976 they
established the Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney (Commonwealth of New
South Wales, 1982a,1982b). The Nugan Hand Bank began as a
storefront operation with minimal capital investment, but
almost immediately it boasted deposits of over 25 million. The
rapid growth of the bank resulted from large deposits of secret
funds made by narcotics and arms smugglers and large deposits
from the CIA (Nihill, 1982).
In addition to the records from the bank that suggest the CIA
was using the bank as a conduit for its funds, the bank's
connection to the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies is
evidenced by the people who formed the directors and principal
owners of the bank, including the following:
** Admiral Earl F. Yates, president of the Nugan Hand Bank
was,during the Vietnam War, chief of staff for strategic
planning of U.S. forces in Asia and the Pacific.
** General Edwin F. Black, president of Nugan Hand's Hawaii
branch, was commander of U.S. troops in Thailand during the
Vietnam War and, after the war, assistant army chief of
staff for the Pacific.
** General Erle Cocke, Jr., head of the Nugan Hand
Washington, D.C., office.
** George Farris, worked in the Nugan Hand Hong Kong,
Washington, D.C. offices. Farris was a military intelligence
specialist who worked in a special forces training base in
the Pacific.
** Bennie Houghton, Nugan Hand's representative in Saudi
Arabia.Houghton was also a U.S. naval intelligence
undercover
agent.
** Thomas Clines, director of training the CIA's clandestine
service, was a London operative for Nugan Hand who helped in
the takeover of a London-based bank and was stationed at
Long
Cheng with Michael Hand and Theodore S. Shackley during the
Vietnam War.
** Dale Holmgreen, former flight service manager in Vietnam
for Civil Air Transport, which became Air America. He was on
the board of directors of Nugan Hand and ran the bank's
Taiwan office.
** Walter McDonald, an economist and former deputy director
of CIA for economic research, was a specialist in petroleum.
He became a consultant to Nugan Hand and served as head of
its Annapolis, Maryland, branch.
** General Roy Manor, who ran the Nugan Hand Philippine
office, was a Vietnam veteran who helped coordinate the
aborted attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages, chief of
staff for the U.S. Pacific command, and the U.S.
government's
liaison officer to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos .
On the board of directors of the parent company formed by Michael
Hand that preceded the Nugan Hand Bank were Grant Walters, Robert
Peterson. David M. Houton, and Spencer Smith, all of whom listed
their address as c/o Air America, Army Post Office, San Francisco,
California.
(William Chambliss, in his Presidential address to the American
Society of Criminology in 1988)
(12) Despite the drop in Meo opium production after 1968, General
Vang Pao was able to continue his role in Laos's narcotics
trade by opening a heroin laboratory at Long Tieng. According
to reliable Laotian sources, his laboratory began operations
in 1970.When a foreign Chinese master chemist arrived at Long
Tieng to supervise production. It has been so profitable that
in mid 1971 Chinese merchants in Vientiane reported that Vang
Pao's agents were buying opium in Vientiane and flying it to
Long Tieng for processing. Although American officials in
Laos vigorously deny that either Vang Pao or Air America are
in any way involved, overwhelming evidence to the contrary
challenges these pious assertions.
(Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P.Adams II,
1972,
"The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia", Harper & Row, New
York,
Chapter: Secret War, Secret Strategy in Laos)
(13) From a letter from Thai drug warlord Khun-Sa to the US Justice
Department, June 28, 1987 [ http://www.dcia.com/khun-sa.html ]:
"During the period (1965 - 1975) CIA Chief in Laos, Theodore
Shackley was in the drug business, having contacts with the
Opium Warlord Lor Sing Han and his followers. Santo
Trafficante acted as his buying and transporting agent while
Richard Armitage handled the financial section with the Banks
in Australia. Even after the Vietnam War ended, when Richard
Armitage was being posted to the US Embassy in Thailand, his
dealings in the drug business continued as before. He was
then acting as the US government official concerning with the
drugs problems in South East Asia. After 1979, Richard
Armitage resigned from the US Embassy's posting and set up the
"Far East Trading Company" as a front for his continuation in
the drug trade and to bribe CIA agents in Laos and around the
world. Soon After, Daniel Arnold was made to handle the drug
business as well as the transportation of arms sales. Jerry
Daniels then took over the drug trade from Richard Armitage.
For over 10 years, Armitage supported his men in Laos and
Thailand with the profits from his drug trade and most of the
cash were deposited with the banks in Australia which was to
be used in buying his way for quicker promotions to higher
positions."
(14) ... The Laos parallel is very strong in the Iran-contra
operation. ... All the personnel that are involved in that
operation are Laos veterans. Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines,
Oliver North, Richard Secord - they all served in Laos during
thirteen-year war. They are all part of that policy of
integrating narcotics and being complicitous in the narcotics
trade in the furtherance of covert action.
(Alfred McCoy,Interview with Daniel Barsamian, Prevailing Winds
Research: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/heroin/McCoy2.htm)
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