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-Caveat Lector- Wayne Madsen Report, February 2, 2006
Abramoff espionage links with apartheid South Africa
sanctioned by Reagan-Bush White House
Documents obtained by WMR reveal that the Reagan-Bush White House sanctioned, financed, and provided high-level intelligence support to an international propaganda effort that, among other tasks, established "Casino Jack" Abramoff's South African intelligence-funded International Freedom Foundation (IFF), code-named Pacman by the South Africans, which was part of an international propaganda program code-named Project Babushka, designed to undermine the African National Congress (ANC) and provide support for Angola's UNITA. According to South African documents, the South African strategy sessions for the covert programs were code-named Sanhedrin. WMR previously reported on how South African intelligence ran "approved" South African opposition party leaders.
However, the South African program was all part of the Reagan-Bush attempt to circumvent international sanctions against the apartheid regime. The South African-U.S. intelligence program involved a number of covert programs, including South Africa's Projects Longreach and Babushka and the United States' Doomsday Project. Doomsday involved more than 20 classified "black programs" in the CIA, DIA, and private companies run by retired military and intelligence officers.
The programs involving South Africa ultimately came under the purview of CIA officer Walter Raymond, who became the National Security Council's international communications director and special assistant to the President in 1983 (this position was similar to the one that Karen Hughes now occupies at the State Department -- running international U.S. propaganda. In fact, Raymond's portfolio was authorized by Reagan's National Security Decision Directive, NSDD-77 signed in January 1983. Written by Raymond, the directive called for strengthening "the organization, planning, and coordination of the various aspects of the public diplomacy of the United States). Raymond wrote in a number of NSC memoranda in May 1985 that he hoped a "Freedom Fighters International" movement would be formed. The group was to include the Nicaraguan contras, Afghan mujaheddin, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in Angola, and other groups.
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The Ties That Bind the GOP to apartheid, Israeli weapons smugglers, Iran-Contra, and right-wing U.S. propaganda: Clockwise from top left: Abramoff, Crystal, Williamson, Rich, North, Murdoch, Ledeen, Lehrman, and Wick.
Raymond's office at the NSC and South African intelligence used a mix of government and private funds to sponsor Abramoff's and Grover Norquist's "freedom fighters summit" in Jamba, Angola. Among the private American contributors was Lewis Lehrman, the multimillionaire head of Rite Aid drugs, unsuccessful GOP New York gubernatorial candidate, one-time partner in George W. Bush's failed Arbusto Energy, and convert from Judaism to the conservative Catholic Opus Dei sect.
Another South African pro-apartheid agent of influence was Walter Kansteiner III, an official in the first Bush's Pentagon and later, George W. Bush's Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Kansteiner also visited apartheid South Africa under the aegis of a pro-apartheid Christian fundamentalist front called the Institute of Religion and Democracy in Washington. Angola's UNITA helped fund its operations by poaching elephants and rhinos, selling ivory and rhino horns on the international black market. As many as 100,000 elephants were slaughtered by UNITA and South African forces to support UNITA. Perhaps not coincidentally, Kansteiner's Chicago-based family business, Walter Kansteiner and Associates, specialized in the trading of "tropical commodities" from Africa.
NSDD-77 set up a cabinet-level Special Planing Group that was composed of representatives of the Defense and State Departments and the U.S. Information Agency (the latter headed by Charles Wick, Reagan's pal from California who had been a band leader and the producer of the movie Snow White and the Three Stooges, a movie which is as forgettable as Abramoff's South African intelligence-funded Red Scorpion, starring Dolph Lungren).
Raymond's public diplomacy work would bring into the administration individuals who would later become some of the most egregious neo-cons in the George W. Bush administration. Over the objections of then-Secretary of State George Shultz, Raymond saw to it that an Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean (S/LPD) was created within the State Department. It was headed by Otto Reich, who, in turn, contracted much of the new group's work to International Business Communications (IBC), which placed pro-Contra propaganda in major newspapers and magazines. IBC was also used to illegally transfer support money for the Contras raised by Oliver North from other countries to accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. In 1983, Raymond also brought into the NSC Michael Ledeen who had left the State Department along with Alexander Haig in 1982.
When Raymond was asked by the congressional Iran-Contra committee in 1987 why he hired Ledeen back in the government, Raymond responded, "He is a good writer." A July 12, 1983 National Security Memorandum of Notification from Raymond's successor as head of the NSC Intelligence Directorate Kenneth DeGraffenreid to Vice President Bush's aide Admiral Dan Murphy asked for a meeting to outline the procedures necessary to get Bush's concurrence and comments on ALL covert actions undertaken by the National Security Planning Group. These included the support for apartheid South Africa and Abramoff's IFF, aid to the Contras, UNITA, and Afghan mujaheddin, and other covert programs (including drug smuggling operations in Latin America). It also involved coordination with South Africans like Russel Crystal (now Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon's top adviser) and assassin-spy Craig Williamson. Crystal was a driving force behind the IFF, according to South Africa's Mail and Guardian.
In 1983, Abramoff, the head of the College Republicans National Committee, visited South Africa to establish liaison with Crystal's National Students' Federation. According to the M&G, after Abramoff established the IFF in Washington, it took its orders directly from IFF's Johannesburg office, headed by Crystal.
Raymond also conducted outreach to a number of private businessmen to support the public diplomacy program. According to a March 3, 1983 NSC memo, titled "Presidential Meeting with Funders," Raymond wrote that a number of businessmen and private officials were committed to raise private funds for U.S. propaganda activities in Europe.
These individuals, who had been contacted by Wick, included: Dan McMichael (described as "Dick Scaife's man" [right-wing funder Richard Mellon Scaife]), Mike Joyce of the Olin Foundation, Les Lenkowsky of the Smith Richardson Foundation, Leonard Sussman and Leo Cherne of Freedom House, David Rockefeller, Dwayne Andreas, Henry Salvatori, Rupert Murdoch, Carl Lindner, and Clint Murchison, Jr.
One private businessman who was part of the Longreach and Doomsday programs was Italian businessman Giovanni Mario Ricci. Ricci's firm, GMR, shared offices with Longreach in Johannesburg. Ricci, who set up a money laundering operation in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, was tied to the Italian Freemason lodge Propaganda Due (P-2). Ricci set up the Seychelles International Bank (which had unidentified shareholders in Hong Kong and Australia, as well as investors from the Luxembourg-based Transmarine) as a laundering operation and in 1983 invited the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) to set up a branch in Victoria on Mahe Island. Ricci was also accredited as the "ambassador" to Seychelles from a diplomatic contrivance known as the Sovereign Order of Malta, a "country" that is headquartered in Rome.
In 1984, international black marketer Marc Rich (for whom indicted Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby worked as an attorney), who was also a conduit to the emerging Soviet and Israeli Mafia, visited Seychelles to discuss ways to buy cheap Mexican oil and re-sell it to South Africa, thus evading the UN sanctions against the apartheid regime. Rich's operative in busting UN oil sanctions against South Africa was Shabtai Calmanovic (one of the Israeli "art students" active in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the residences of some of the 9-11 hijackers was Michael Calmanovic). Shabtai Calmanovic "defected" from Soviet Lithuania in 1971 and became active in Golda Meir's Labor Party. He soon defected to Likud and became close to Israeli-North African Mafia figure Samuel Flatto-Sharon. On behalf of Marc Rich, Calmanovic set up a string of front companies, including B International and LIAT. LIAT became a dominant company in the South African apartheid Bantustan of Bophuthatswana, where a major casino complex had been established at Sun City. Rich's special relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran permitted Calmanovic to use Sierra Leone, where he held diplomatic status, to illegally ship Iranian oil to South Africa in return for 155-mm howitzer guns and ground-to-air missiles manufactured by Gerald Bull's arms factories in South Africa. Other Doomsday-oriented firms included Tradewinds, a subsidiary of Tiny Rowland's Lonrho Co. (London Rhodesia Company). Tradewinds sold its entire fleet of cargo planes to St. Lucia Airways, a front company set up by Oliver North and retired Gen. Richard Secord to fly arms to the Contras and to UNITA via Zaire.
Africa Confidential, a London-based newsletter considered close to British intelligence, wrote that GMR, which included Williamson on its board of directors, gave the South African spy "an association with a remarkable international network in Europe, the Indian Ocean, Somalia, and Kenya, where GMR is said to have interests in casinos. An impressive array." Africa Confidential identified the network as consisting of Seychelles President Albert Rene (ostensibly a Marxist); Ricci; Rich; P-2 Grand Master Licio Gelli; Robert Armao, the spokesman for the Shah of Iran and friend of CIA chief William Casey), and former SISMI Italian military intelligence officer Francesco Pazienza, later charged in the collapse of Italy's Banco Ambrosiano. In 1980, the bank's president, Roberto Calvi, was found hanging from London's Blackfriars Bridge, the apparent victim of a ritualistic Masonic murder carried out by P-2 operatives. In his trial in Bologna in 1987, Pazienza confirmed that Michael Ledeen, then a White House "consultant" was linked to P-2. During the Iran-Contra scandal, Ledeen was the White House liaison to Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Mossad Iranian agent of influence. That link continued in the run up to and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.
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