18-10-2009, 12:05 PM
Quote:More on the CIA, Moss, and the Politics of Corruption: Adnan Khashoggi
The indirect relationship of the CIA to Moss through a cut-out (Varona) appears to have survived into the 1970s. By this time the cut-out was Adnan Khashoggi, who for a while (like T.V. Soong and Phao Sriyanon before him) was known as "the richest man in the world." Khashoggi was also listed in the Kerry-Brown BCCI Report as one of the "principal foreign agents of the U.S," and at some point in the 1970s he engaged Edward K. Moss as his public relations agent.
Khashoggi replicated the politics of corrupt influence through money and sex which we have already encountered. His contributions to Nixon’s election campaigns – some legal, some illicit – were investigated by the Senate Watergate Committee. Khashoggi is said by some to have given $1 million to Nixon covertly in 1972, allegedly in a briefcase which he "mistakenly" left behind in Nixon’s San Clemente residence.
In addition, Khashoggi is known to have deposited several million dollars (some say $200 million) in the bank of Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo. He then "withdrew all but $200,000 of it in the form of checks written to ‘cash’ and signed over to the Sands Hotel" in Las Vegas. It was as if Khashoggi was using the Sands as his personal laundromat. Known as "the biggest high roller ever to hit Las Vegas," Khashoggi would lose as much as $250,000 in one fling.
The Sands was one of the Las Vegas casinos originally part-owned by Meyer Lansky, and from which proceeds were skimmed to be deposited (as we saw) in the Miami National Bank. In the 1970s the Sands was now owned by Howard Hughes; but two veterans of the Lansky era, Carl Cohen and Jack Entratter, continued to work in the casino. Khashoggi meanwhile involved in his business deals the manager of Hughes’ Vegas properties, F. William Gay; and eventually, when Hughes was spirited secretly out of Vegas to Wallace Groves’ resort in Freeport, Bahamas, it was in Khashoggi’s plane.
Even in the Hughes era, Las Vegas casinos continued to be preferred sites for the laundering of money (disguised as gambling losses). This practice was so well established that eventually, in Operation Casablanca, U.S. Customs actually created a fake casino near Las Vegas at which top-level Mexican bank officials congregated and "avidly discussed how to handle the latest half-billion dollars in drug proceeds already on hand." In one important case, thousands of dollars in money wrappers from the Stardust casino (mentioned above) were found on a suspected drug-smuggling plane in Florida.
There are also reports that in addition to money, Khashoggi "used sex to win over U.S. executives." The bill for the madam who supplied girls en masse to his yacht in the Mediterranean ran to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The CIA’s interest in Khashoggi and Moss was not limited to the funds the two men had accessible. By the 1970s, Moss was Chairman of the elite Safari Club in Kenya, where he invited Khashoggi in as majority owner. And as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once revealed publicly, the intelligence chiefs of a group of countries (France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran under the Shah) met regularly at the Safari Club to conduct covert operations which the CIA was unable to carry out in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
CIA officers such as Miles Copeland and James Critchfield became part of Khashoggi’s milieu. They advised Khashoggi on diplomatic initiatives, such as a proposed Mideast Peace Fund that would reward both Israel and Palestine for recognizing each other. Khashoggi had the ability to negotiate with the Israelis; he is said to have been introduced to the Israelis by former gunrunner Hank Greenspun, the politically influential editor of the Las Vegas Sun.
In general, Khashoggi represented the post-war emigration offshore of immense wealth and the power it conveyed. He served as a "cut-out," or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to those he represented. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo.
All this suggests that the CIA’s interest in Moss – as later in Khashoggi, in Wallace Groves, in Operation ███, and in Eddie Cellini’s employers at Resorts International – had to do with irregular funding for off-the-books covert operations. And if any such funds were passed, the context suggests that the man fingered to handle them would have been Paul Helliwell, the man the Wall Street Journal reported was "‘deeply involved’ in financing a series of covert forays between 1964 and 1975 against Cuba."
Helliwell, Castle Bank, Bruce Rappaport, and BCCI
Through this rapid survey of Helliwell’s banks we have seen that he was central to a connection between the worlds of intelligence, organized crime, global drug trafficking, political influence, and speculative investment, often in hotel-casinos, with overworld figures. But the connection was not one engineered by Helliwell himself; there were other powerful people in the background, some of whom would maintain the connection after Helliwell died in 1976 (just as Castle Bank was beginning to attract the attention of journals like Newsweek).
One of the most important may have been former OSS Chief William Donovan (about whom we shall have more to say). According to Pete Brewton,
One of the attorneys in the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest case made the statement that Kanter was introduced to Helliwell by General William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the famous leader of the OSS during World War II, and Helliwell’s OSS boss. Kanter denied that. "I personally never met Bill Donovan. I believe I may have spoken to him once by phone at Paul Helliwell’s request…"
Another OSS figure, more directly involved, was Helliwell’s partner in the Florida bank holding company (called HMT and later Florida Shares) that owned the Bank of Perrine and the Bank of Cutler Ridge. This was
E.P. Barry, who had been a U.S. military intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. By the end of the war, he was the head of U.S. Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna…. Barry … was a longtime associate of [CIA Director] William Casey, according to a Castle Bank officer.
Barry was simultaneously a key shareholder in Florida Shares and in the Inter Maritime Bank of Bruce Rappaport, a close friend and business associate of William Casey. Rappaport, an oilman and oil tanker broker "thought to have ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence," had numerous connections to the world’s largest-ever intelligence-drug laundromat – the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The Gokal shipping family of Pakistan, leading BCCI investors who later contributed to BCCI’s bankruptcy, was also shareholders with Rappaport and Barry in the Inter Maritime Bank. Alfred Hartmann, a board member of BCCI, was both vice-chairman of Rappaport’s Swiss bank, Bank of New York-Intermaritime, and also head of BCCI’s Swiss subsidiary, the Banque de Commerce et de Placements (BCP).
And according to Block and Weaver, "Rappaport worked the National Bank of Oman (a BCCI/Bank of America joint venture), helping funnel millions of CIA and Saudi dollars to Pakistan for the Afghan rebels during its 1980s war with the Soviets." Rappaport’s key man in Oman was Jerry Townsend, an alleged former CIA operative who now ran Colonial Shipping Co. in Atlanta, where he knew BCCI associate Bert Lance.
BCCI and an Israeli intelligence agent were also involved in Medellin arms sales, via a "melon farm" in Antigua partly financed by William Casey’s friend, Bruce Rappaport.
Bruce Rappaport … owned the land on which Maurice Sarfati, a former Israeli military officer, set up his melon farm. And one of Rappaport’s banks in Antigua made a large loan to Sarfati—which was never repaid. Sarfati (who also walked away from a loan guaranteed by OPIC, the U.S. government insurance agency) took it from there, first cultivating government officials and then providing entree to their offices to his compatriot Yair Klein.
Klein’s work [was] in Colombia, where his Israeli-licensed "security" company, Spearhead Ltd… trained the hit squads of the Medellin cocaine cartel in assassination and bombing techniques, was beginning to attract unwelcome attention. …. In 1988, Klein was in Antigua, looking for a new way to provide arms to his Medellin client, Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.
Rappaport’s apparent links to Mossad raise the question whether Helliwell’s connections to Lansky’s Bank of World Commerce and Tibor Rosenbaum did not also constitute a connection to Mossad. The same question is raised by Helliwell’s legal representation (according to the Martindale-Hubbell Legal Register) of the Eastern Development Company: a firm of this name cooperated with Lansky, Hank Greenspun, and others in the supply of arms to the nascent state of Israel.
It is clear that Jews were, like many other minorities, a constituent in the global drug connection. More importantly, they were an important part of the financial infrastructure of that connection – but even at this level they did not operate alone. The global drug connection combined Jewish banks in Florida and Switzerland with those of Teochew, Fujian, and Hokkien Chinese in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, the Muslims of Bank Intra and later BCCI in the Middle East, and furthermore Italian banks like those of Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, both members of the intelligence-linked Masonic Lodge P-2, and both murdered after their banks failed from mafia involvement. It is my impression that none of these ethnic minority elements ever surpassed in power the dominant role of figures from the mainstream, like Donovan and Helliwell.
(As a person deeply committed to nonviolence, I also have to acknowledge that the violence of the ethnic groups in the global drug connection, although later powerful and indeed intelligence-related, had its origins in redressive violence, against a system dominated above all by European and American interests.)
One of these mainstream figures was the mysterious E.P. Barry, an investor with both Helliwell and Rappaport. One of the very few things known about Barry is that he was in OSS during World War II, and that towards the end of the war Donovan appointed him head of OSS Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna.
OSS X-2, or Counterintelligence, was the most secretive and highly classified of the OSS branches, and the one whose precise mission was to penetrate the German Sicherheitsdienst [SD]. According to a 1946 OSS Report, "an equally interesting X-2 activity was the investigation of RSHA [SD] financial transactions" (Operation Safehaven). In the course of these investigations, the U.S. Third Army took an SD major "on several trips to Italy and Austria, and, as a result of these preliminary trips, over $500,000 in gold, as well as jewels, were recovered." Some of the Nazi gold recovered under Barry’s supervision was subsequently used to finance U.S. intelligence operations in Germany in the immediate post-war years.
Barry, with this intriguing background, represents the continuity between the Helliwell intelligence-drug connection which flourished until 1972 (the year the IRS’s Operation Tradewinds began to investigate the Bank of Perrine) and the BCCI intelligence-drug connection which flourished after 1972 (the year BCCI was founded).
Like Khashoggi before it, BCCI had the ability to broker Arab-Israeli-China arms deals, as well as its contacts to western intelligence and politicians. Indeed, the bank seems to have largely inherited Khashoggi’s function as an agent of influence in the Middle East and elsewhere after the United States, by the Corrupt Federal Practices Act of 1978, outlawed direct payments by U.S. corporations to foreign individuals.
BCCI also inherited and vastly expanded Khashoggi’s use of money to influence and corrupt American politicians. BCCI’s Pakistani president, Agha Hasan Abedi, rescued Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Secretary Bert Lance from bankruptcy, and thereby developed a relationship with Carter himself.
A Senate report on BCCI concluded that
BCCI's systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated. …The result was that BCCI had relationships that ranged from the questionable, to the improper, to the fully corrupt with officials from countries all over the world, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Colombia, the Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, the Ivory Coast, India, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
And from two well-researched books by journalists from Time and the Wall Street Journal, we learn that among later highly-placed recipients of largesse from BCCI, its owners, and its affiliates, were
Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker, who declined to investigate BCCI; and
Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which declined to investigate BCCI.
The CIA, BCCI, and a "Long Tradition of Shady Banks"
But Barry is not the only link between the drug banks of Helliwell and BCCI. A more central figure is General George Olmsted, the head of the Washington bank holding company known as the International Bank. In March 1973 Olmsted had the International Bank (which "had a reputation as a CIA bank") buy 66 percent of the capital stock of the failing Mercantile Bank in the Bahamas (Castle’s predecessor), even though "International’s officers knew the actual state of Mercantile’s financial health." Starting in 1977, International started to sell its stock in Financial General Bankshares (later known as First American), a major American bank holding company, to BCCI front men, who later took over First American for BCCI.
The most common explanation is that the CIA not only used the bank, but had helped develop it. Journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, the authors of the definitive book on BCCI, speculated that the CIA’s relationship with its founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, might have gone back to before BCCI’s founding in 1972. They observed also that BCCI was only the latest in an overlapping series of money-laundering banks that did services for the CIA – Deak & Company, Castle Bank & Trust, and Nugan Hand.
Above is an extract from Peter Dale Scott's original article. Almost any part can be examined and the latent, resonant, details pored over.
The Safari Club was clearly a cover for all sorts of deep black communication. But what else?
In the spirit of Namebase-style connnections, here's some more Khashoggi murkiness, involving occultist and Polanski producer Robert Evans, from another thread:
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:OK - some Kalifornia weirdness.
Mama Cass Elliot was reportedly present at the Frankenheimer Last Supper. Her wide social entourage allegedly included Charles Manson. Manson, the Scientological "Clear", undoubtedly moved in hip musical circles, knowing - for instance - various Beach Boys. It's claimed that Manson knew and had received money from Cielo Drive heiress and slaughter victim Abigail Folger. It's also claimed that Cass Elliot's entourage contained one Bill or William Mentzer, who was briefly a bodyguard for Larry Flynt.
Maury Terry's Ultimate Evil extensively details the drugs, sex & violent occultism around Hollywood producer Robert Evans and the so called "Young Turks" (Nicholson, Hopper, Fonda etc).
Robert Evans was the producer of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. Some accounts - this may be bullshit - have it that the face of Satan who impregnates Farrow/Rosemary belongs to Anton LaVey.
Here's the denouement of Rosemary's Baby, with Mia Farrow wandering into Satan's lair with a knife. It ends with her accepting the demonic Roman's invitation to be a mother to Satan's offspring.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNG6ZSiIfCE
Imagine Charles "Tex" Watson and Susan "Sadie Mae Glutz" Atkins, trippy trapped in EA1729 MK-ULTRA "acid" Manson Family paranoia land, creeepycrawling into Cielo Drive's sex and violence lair, and coming face to face with Roman "Rosemary's Baby" Polanski's angelically beautiful wife, heavily pregnant with Satan knows what inside her belly.
Precisely what did Atkins believe she was carving out of Sharon Tate's womb?
Before scrawling "pigs" in Tate's blood on the Cielo Drive walls, and providing spurious evidence for Bugliosi's Helter Skelter race war narrative....
Robert Evans later produced The Cotton Club, which seems to have been some kind of money-laundering-meets-major-international-cocaine-dealing farce. Amongst the financial backers of The Cotton Club were Las Vegas casino owners Edward and Fred Doumani, who put $30 million into the film, notoriously spooky arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and vaudeville promoter Roy Radin.
Radin was later the victim of a professional hit. Radin's assassin is one of the central figures of Maury Terry's The Ultimate Evil, known throughout the book as Manson II.
Terry alleges, based in part on confessions from Son of Sam David Berkowitz, that the Process Church of the Final Judgement, itself a British breakaway from L Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, contained cells which were known variously as Four Pi, the Circe Order and The Children, and paid homage to a Grand Master known as the Grand Chingon or Chignon.
Four Pi/The Children/Grand Chignon had a fetish about German shepherds. They revered them, they probably fucked them, and they liked to sacrifice them. Son of Sam the dog made me do it nutcases that they were. Oh and the legend has it that they also liked to kidnap, fuck and sacrifice hitchhikers. In a Zodiacal kind of way....
http://alienbodies.wikidot.com/four-pi-movement
One of the first true investigators of the Manson Family, Ed Sanders, pursued the Process link all the way through to Charlie, the Spiral Staircase and the Grand Chignon. Sanders was then sued by the Process, and the relevant chapter of his book was removed and ritually burnt.
All Kalifornia weirdness.
Random and meaningless.
Maury Terry's sources claimed that some of the Son of Sam murders were filmed as commissioned snuff movies. Terry pursued this lead. According to Terry, during prison interviews, Berkowitz described a future murder - that of Cotton Club backer Roy Radin's friend Ronald Sisman, who allegedly had a copy of one of the Son of Sam snuff movies. Sisman was murdered in 1981.
In 1983, Roy Radin was professionally hit.
According to Terry, by Four Pi/The Children's or whatever they now called themselves' Manson II .
Well, to clarify, Radin was shot in the head at close range 27 times....
For a long time, Maury Terry refused to divulge the identity of Manson II, but stated that he had moved in the circles of both Charlie Manson and Mama Cass Elliot.
All Kalifornia weirdness.
Random and meaningless.
Manson II, Roy Radin's assassin, was Bill Mentzer.
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...306&page=4
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war