Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque

[Peter Lemkin]

CIA revisits an old friend: "polarization."

Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque

By Mark Ames
September 10, 2010 | 2:36 p.m

http://www.observer.com/2010/politics/un...ero-mosque

So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged.

For instance, one of the earliest backers of the nonprofit group, the Cordoba Initiative, that is spearheading the Ground Zero mosque, is a 52-year-old Scarsdale, New York, native named R. Leslie Deak. In addition to serving on the group's board of advisors since its founding in 2004 by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Deak was its principal funder, donating $98,000 to the nonprofit between 2006 and 2008. This figure appears to represent organization's total operating budget—though, oddly, the group reported receipts of just a third of that total during the same time period.

Deak describes himself as a "Practicing Muslim with background in Christianity and Judaism, [with] in-depth personal and business experiences in the Middle East, living and working six months per year in Egypt." Born into a Christian home, Deak became an Orthodox Jew and married a Jewish woman before converting to Islam when he married his current wife, Moshira Soliman, with whom he now lives in Rye.

Leslie Deak's resume also notes his role as "business consultant" for Patriot Defense Group, LLC, a private defense contractor with offices in Winter Park, Florida, and in Tucson. The only names listed on the firm's website are those of its three "strategic advisers." These include retired four-star General Bryan "Doug" Brown, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command until 2007, where he headed "all special operations forces, both active duty and reserve, leading the Global War On Terrorism," and James Pavitt, former deputy director for operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he "managed the CIA's globally deployed personnel and nearly half of its multi-billion dollar budget" and "served as head of America's Clandestine Service, the CIA's operational response to the attacks of September 11, 2001."

Besides Pavitt, Brown and a third advisor, banker Alexander Cappello, the Patriot Defense Group is so secretive it doesn't even name its management team, instead describing its anonymous CEO as a former Special Forces and State Department veteran, the group's managing director as a former CIA officer experienced in counter-terrorism in hostile environments and the group's corporate intelligence head as a "23-year veteran of the U.S. Secret Service who worked on the personal security details of former Presidents Bush and Clinton."

Patriot Defense Group's primary business involves leveraging its government connections and know-how. The firm is divided into two divisions: one that "focuses exclusively on the needs of the U.S. military and law enforcement communities as well as the requirements of friendly foreign governments," and a corporate division, which "provides business intelligence and specialized security services to corporate clients and high net-worth family enterprises."

So, to recap: From 2006 to 2008, R. Leslie Deak worked as a "business consultant" to this super-secretive security contractor with ties to the CIA and counterterrorism forces, and in those same three years he also donated nearly $100,000 in seed money to the foundation now advocating the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.

Interestingly, during the same three-year period during which the Deak Family Foundation was financing the Cordoba Initiative, Deak also donated a total of $101,247 to something called the National Defense University Foundation. The National Defense University is a network of war and strategy colleges and research centers (including the National War College) funded by the Pentagon, designed to train specialists in military strategy. The organization recently announced a November 5 dinner gala in honor of Defense Secretary and former CIA chief Robert Gates. Sponsors include Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and...the Patriot Defense Group.

Deak also sits on the NDUF's board of directors, the chairman of which is Mark Treanor, the former general counsel for Wachovia bank from 1998 through its collapse in 2008 and a major bundler of campaign donations for the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008. Wachovia, now owned by Wells Fargo, was recently fined $160 million for laundering "at least $110 million" in Mexican drug money between 2003 and 2008, while Treanor was Wachovia's general counsel, though the figure is likely higher since Wachovia admitted it didn't put any controls on at least $420 billion—that's billion—in cash moved through its network of Mexico currency exchanges.

Which leads to another odd coincidence: Laundering money for drug lords is what brought down Deak & Co., the company run by Leslie Deak's father, Nicholas Deak, years ago. The elder Deak, a former top intelligence commander during World War II for the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), was the founder of Deak-Perera, which became for a time one of the world's biggest foreign currency and gold dealers. But in 1984, a Presidential Commission on Organized Crime accused the firm of acting as a money laundering operation for Columbia drug cartels, who reportedly brought sacks of cash containing tens of millions of dollars into Deak's Manhattan offices. By the end of 1984, Deak & Co. had declared bankruptcy, and a year later, Nicholas Deak was murdered in the company's headquarters at 29 Broadway by a deranged homeless woman.

After the firm went bankrupt and Leslie Deak was left on his own, the corporation was broken up and sold off in pieces. One company that traces its beginnings to the defunct Deak empire is Goldline International, a business concern well known to fans of Glenn Beck as well as California investigators. Goldline is to Glenn Beck what General Electric was to Ronald Reagan: The company sponsors Beck's TV and radio shows as well as his touring act, and Beck is its public face. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, along with the Santa Monica City Attorney's office, are currently investigating Goldline for defrauding customers by railroading gullible customers into buying their most debased products.

Speaking of Glenn Beck, it has been reported that Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the second-largest shareholder in News Corp., the parent company Fox News, which airs Beck's program, is also a major funder of Imam Rauf's projects, as Jon Stewart viewers heard all about last week.

Coincidences happen, of course. (For instance, Pamela Geller, the blogger who's become the leading voice denouncing the mosque project was once, bizarrely enough, associate publisher of The New York Observer.)

But add to this array of unexpected connections the work of Imam Rauf on behalf of the U.S. government—which includes serving as an FBI "consultant" and being recruited as a spokesperson by longtime George W. Bush confidante Karen Hughes, who headed up the administration's propaganda efforts in the Muslim world—and a compelling picture begins to emerge. Bush's favorite Imam, with backing from a funder with connections to the CIA, the Pentagon and the currency trading company that now sponsors rightwing firebrand Glenn Beck, proposes to build a mosque around the corner from the site of the most devastating terrorist attack ever visited on America. In the name of "[cultivating] understanding among all religions and cultures," he puts forth a project that offends a majority of Americans and deals a significant setback to the broader acceptance of Muslim-Americans. It's a little like Billy "White Shoes" Johnson claiming the only reason he moonwalks after scoring a touchdown is to lower tensions on the football field and raise the other team's spirits.

Whether the Cordoba Initiative ever gets its way with the Ground Zero Mosque, it may well have a lasting legacy at odds with its stated intention: By damaging the very moderates and progressives who actually view New York, and the nation as a whole, as a tolerant melting pot, and strengthening the position demagogues on both sides, it will almost certainly deal a setback to interfaith relations. It will also help to hobble the Democratic party. Which just might have been the point all along.

Either that, or it's merely a coincidence that this controversy has erupted now, during crucial mid-term elections. In which case we can all go back to what we were doing before—either denouncing the Park51 Mosque as an affront to Americans, or championing it as a symbol of our fundamental rights-playing our accustomed roles in a drama that seems too perfect, somehow, to believe.

I was curious about the Deak murder and the tale told above is not quite the case.....another mind-control assassin? :bandit: Needs more study.......

DEAK MURDER SUSPECT HAD BEEN FOUND PARANOID
By SELWYN RAAB
Published: November 21, 1985
NYT
The woman accused of murdering the head of the Deak-Perera foreign-exchange company and a receptionist in Manhattan was diagnosed by psychiatrists three months ago as paranoid and schizophrenic, according to court records.

The psychiatric report last August also found that the woman, Lois E. Lang, was incompetent to stand trial on criminal charges in Washington State and unlikely to be competent to stand trial in the future.

More details about her background came to light yesterday. Court and school records disclosed that she grew up in the lumber-mill town of Longview, Wash., graduated from Washington State University and got a master of science degree in physical education from the University of Illinois.

Miss Lang, who is 44 years old, has been charged with the fatal shootings Monday of Nicholas L. Deak, the chairman of Deak & Company, and a receptionist, Frances Lauder. Deak-Perera is a subsidiary of Deak & Company.

Mr. Deak, 80, who helped found the company, and Mrs. Lauder, 58, were slain in the main offices of Deak-Perera at 29 Broadway. The police said Miss Lang had no connection to the company or the victims but was under the delusion that she was a part-owner of Deak-Perara and was owed money by the company.

From November 1982 to last August, Miss Lang was arrested at least five times in Seattle on charges of trespassing, petty theft and resisting arrest.

Released After 14 Days

Court records in King County, which includes Seattle, showed she was examined at a mental hospital, Western Washington State Hospital in Steilacoom, where she was found to be paranoid and schizophrenic. The report did not say whether she was considered to be dangerous to herself or others.

After 14 days in the hospital, she was released and a charge of possesion of stolen credit cards was dropped.

The psychiatric report said that she was born in Seattle and that her parents were divorced when she was 8 years old. It said she later lived with her father, Harold Lang, who has since died, and a stepmother in Longview, a town in southwest Washington.

Miss Lang graduated from high school in Longview in 1959 and attended Lower Columbia Junior College and then Washington State University in Pullman. She obtained a bachelor's degree in physical education from Washington State University in 1963 and a master's from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in 1968.

The psychiatric report said she had been married for five years, had no children and was divorced in 1969. The report added that Miss Lang had said she had taught physical education at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the 1960's.

University officials said no faculty records before 1974 were available and they could not confirm her statement.

At the University of Illinois, a retired professor of physical education, Thomas Cureton, who was Miss Lang's thesis adviser, said she visited the campus three weeks ago. Mr. Cureton described Miss Lang as under ''great stress.'' He said she had a leg injury, was shabbily dressed and ''looked as if she had been hiking on the road.''

He said she told him that she needed money and requested a fellowship scholarship. ''She seemed lost,'' he said. ''She didn't know where she was going or what she was going to do.''

According to the city's Correction Department, Miss Lang is being held under a suicide watch at the Women's House of Detention on Rikers Island.
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A bit more on who Deak was.....and connected to....

ADNAN KHASHOGGI LINKED TO 911 TERRORISTS

PART 5: TAPED CONVERSATIONS & A SHOWER OF GOLD FOR AMERICA

by Alex Constantine

After the nightmare of Black Tuesday, a tape recording of a private conference at the Hotel Royale Monceau in Paris, France found its way to Observer reporter Greg Palast. The topic of this meeting of minds was protection money, as in how much of it to give bin Laden to assure that no messy al Qaeda bombs exploded in Saudi Arabia. This cabal was in general agreement that their friend Osama had done quite well promoting Wahhabism in the Middle East. They were very complimentary.

Some of the usual suspects attended this session:
Prince Turki al-Faisal.
Khalid bin Mahfouz.
Saudi Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh (bailed W. and his oil company from bankruptcy).
Adnan Khashoggi.1

(The 9/11 families have mentioned a French intelligence report of the meeting in a lawsuit filed against Saudi royals, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on August 16, 2002.)

Reverse the tape, now. More wretched voices drift upward from the charred recesses of 911 history...

On April 4, 1993, the Las Vegas Sun revealed that it had obtained a tape recording of its own, this one from an unnamed intelligence source. On the tape, Middle Eastern gold traders toyed with the notion of killing President Bill Clinton.3

As if this little attention-getter wasn't enough, the Arab businessmen went on to discuss options for dealing with widow Imelda Marcos and her son, then exiled in Hawaii. From the balmy islands, Imelda Marcos was heaving billions of dollars in gold on the black market, frantically, before the remains of their tin dictatorship was seized by the courts.

The sudden infusion of Philippine gold on the world market threatened to depress the already-sagging price of the metal. This cabal settled on a drastic solution - a strategic terrorist act staged to drive up the price of gold.

The threats "may be nothing more than ill-conceived boasting," the Sun allowed. "There may well be no connection between the [1993] New York blast - which DID impact installation of new computer programs at a major commodity exchange [also, one of the largest repositories of gold in the world, worth $1 billion, situated beneath the skyscraper4] - and the Marcos efforts to sell.... Yet far-fetched as it sounds, terrorist acts aimed at eroding public confidence in the world's most stable nation and commodity markets could make gold more attractive and drive its price higher."5

The Ford Econoline that exploded at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 left behind one of the biggest crime scenes in New York history, with six dead, 1,000 injured. The damage was estimated at an excess of $500 million.

Police dubbed it "the case of the century."6

Assistant FBI director James Fox explained to reporters that Mohammed Salameh, a follower of Omar Abdel Rahman, had been ID'd as the bomber. The New York Times reported that Rahman was a "Suspect Tied to an Islamic Fundamentalist Sect." Ramzi Yousef, suspected to be the "mastermind" of the plot, lit for Pakistan...

Khashoggi was given a taste of the Marcos gold back in 1963 - when he was running with Edwin Pauley and George DeMorenschieldt - converted into a certificate issued by the Bank of Switzerland to one "Adnan Kasogi."

Adnan was a familar face around the Marcos palace. So was Kodama Yoshio, a Khashoggi business partner - also a Japanese Naval rear admiral during WW II, a CIA asset, a thug in the Yakuza crime organization, a future mover in the Unification Church. Yoshio had shipped the so-called "Golden Lilly" Japanese gold war reserve to the Philippines after the war.

Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, in Gold Warriors (2002), detail a "great fortune discovered by U.S. intelligence services in 1946 ... $13-billion in war loot amassed by underworld godfather Kodama Yoshio who, as a rear admiral' in the Imperial Navy working with Golden Lily in China and Southeast Asia, was in charge of plundering the Asian underworld and racketeers. He was also in charge of Japan's wartime drug trade throughout Asia. After the war, to get out of Sugamo Prison and avoid prosecution for war crimes, Kodama gave $100-million to the CIA." Kodama, the all-purpose Yakuza, "personally financed the creation of the two political parties that merged into Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), strongly backed to this day by Washington."

As the Seagraves detail it, Kodama "spent two years in Sugamo Prison as an indicted war criminal, but was magically released in mid-1948 when he made a deal with General Willoughby [a viable suspect in the plot to murder John Kennedy] to give the CIA $100-million (equal to $1-billion in today's values.) This payment [was] placed in one of the secret slush funds controlled by the CIA station at the U.S. Embassy. Subsequently, Kodama was put directly on the CIA payroll."

Khashoggi's gold certificate was his own pay-off for services rendered. Gary Weadon, in The Nazi Hydra in America, recalls that Khashoggi was an agent of Lockheed with a Yakuza business partner who'd brought a furtune in gold to the Philippines: "This gold certificate was issued just before Lockheed paid the first known bribe to Prince Bernhard. Lockheed was being used by the CIA to funnel money worldwide. Moreover, Lockheed's European Sales Director, Dutchman Fred Meuser, had been a member of Prince Bernhard's wartime air force squadron. An additional member of the Lockheed bribe team was CIA officer Nicholas Deak."

Deak had set up a brokering front to launder CIA funds and slip them discreetly to Kodama. Deak merged with Lionel C. Perera, founder of Perera, Manfra & Brookes. "Perera was attached to the Chief of Military Government Finance Office at the Third Army's headquarters in Germany at war's end, where he interviewed Colonel Rauch. Rauch was the SS colonel responsible for hiding the Reich Bank gold reserves."

Another Nazi entrusted with the postwar wealth of the SS was Francois Genoud. In 1992, the Observer identified Genoud as "one of the world's leading Nazis." Authorites suggest that he "transferred the defeated Nazis' gold into Swiss bank accounts." Genoud underwrote the postwar Odessa organization.8 On March 12, 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle let on that Swiss police "believe Genoud founded al Taqwa Bank and allocated its resources to support international terrorists such as Vladimir Ilich Ramirez, alias Carlos the Jackal, and bin Laden."9 A few days later, Salon reported that Osama bin Laden had received funding from Al Taqwa, with "shareholders that include prominent Arab figures from numerous countries in the Middle East. Among the shareholders are the grand mufti of the United Arab Emirates and prominent families in the UAE and Kuwait. Two sisters of Osama bin Laden are also on the list, undermining the bin Laden family's claim that it separated itself from his terrorist pursuits after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1994.10

With all this subterfuge in the background, the Khashoggi-Lockheed bribery scandal begs reappraisal. Marcos, Yoshia and Iran-contra's John Singlaub were all charter members of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a para-fascist organization of old guard Nazis, death squad leaders, spooks and propagandists. WACL provides further right-wing context; the CIA and WACL were arguably symbiotic.

David Guyatt reports that a letter from Henry Kissinger dated February 21, 1986 was sent to Marcos, ordering the sale of 63,321 tons of gold to 2000 US and European banks. Marcos stubbornly refused and was dethroned.11

_______________

NOTES:

1) Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, London: Pluto Press, 2002.

2) Gary Thompson and Steve Kanigher, "Coverup Spans 50 Years," Las Vegas Sun, April 4, 1993.

3) Ibid.

4) "World Trade Center of New York City, Web-Dictionary.org: "One of the world's largest gold depositories was stored underneath the World Trade Center, owned by a group of commercial banks. The 1993 bomb detonated close to the vault, but it withstood the explosion. One source estimates the 1993 value of the gold at one billion dollars, believed to be owned by Kuwaiti interests." The gold was recovered in late 2001.

5) Anon., "The World Trade Center Bombing," Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network, http://www.adl.org/learn/jttf/wtcb_jttf.asp

6) See Santa Fe New Mexican, March 20, 2003.

7) Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors, Bowstring, 2002. Another, immense domestic gold reserve began as cachés of Nazi and Japanese loot, seized by the allies, intended not as compensation to victims and survivors of the war, but as an "action fund" - for bribing foreign officials, influencing elections, and such - known as the Black Eagle Trust. Seagraves: "The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a braintrust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when peace came.... To eliminate any trace of original ownership, the Nazis had melted it down, and recast it as ingots hallmarked with the swastika and black eagle of the Reichsbank." The "egg" of the Black Eagle Trust was laid at the secret Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when representatives of forty-four nations met to plan the postwar global economy.

This has been verified by documents and official sources. One of them is former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline [yet another Iran-contra conspirator], who was aware of Nazi and Japanese gold recoveries in 1945. "As recently as the 1990's," the Seagraves write, "Cline continued to be involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.... Captain Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson."

General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to manila, where they set out for a tour of the vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down row after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall'. From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of years Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. What was seen by Anderson and MacArthur was only the gold that had not reached Japan. Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly enriched." And so had the U.S. after the war when the pelf was seized and cabbaged away as a covert foreign policy slush fund.

8) David Lee Preston, "Hitler's Swiss Connection," Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 5, 1997.

9) Jay Bushinsky, "Suspected financial ties to al Qaeda," San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 2002.

10) Lucy Komisar, "Shareholders in the Bank of Terror? Salon, March 15, 2002. See, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/15/al_taqwa/

11) For Guyatt's reconstruction, See Gary Weadon excerpt, "Nazi Gold," chapter 10. http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/goldp10.html