statism watch

Nick Juliano, The Raw Story
Published: Thursday January 31, 2008

A book to be published next month contains an explosive allegation sure to call into question the independence of the 9/11 Commission: Its executive director secretly spoke with President Bush’s close adviser Karl Rove and others within the White House while the ostensibly autonomous commission was completing its report.

Philip Zelikow, a former colleague of then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, was appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission despite his close ties to the Bush White House, and he remained in regular contact with Rove while overseeing the commission, according to New York Times reporter Philip Shenon’s new book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. Shenon’s book will not be released until Feb. 5, but author Max Holland purchased an audio copy of it at a New York bookstore and published a summary on his blog, Washington DeCoded.

“Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow’s role and leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners for appointing Zelikow in the first place–and then allowing him to stay on after his myriad conflicts-of-interest were revealed under oath,” Holland writes.

Full Story

CBC News
Last Updated: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 | 6:05 AM ET

Taser stun guns may not be as safe as their manufacturer claims, according to a study carried out by Chicago researchers, CBC News has learned.

The team of doctors and scientists at the trauma centre in Chicago’s Cook County hospital stunned 11 pigs with Taser guns in 2006, hitting their chests with 40-second jolts of electricity, pausing for 10 to 15 seconds, then hitting them for 40 more seconds.

When the jolts ended, every animal was left with heart rhythm problems, the researchers said. Two of the animals died from cardiac arrest, one three minutes after receiving a shock.

CBC News Report

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Bill Conroy, Narco News
January 29, 2008

On a fall evening in a cotton field in Nicaragua, a group of armed men placed a series of torches in a line of planters along a makeshift runway.

About half an hour later, around 9 p.m. that evening, Friday, Nov. 26, 2004, a twin-prop Beechcraft King Air 200 touched down on that rural runway and came to a stop. The assembled men began to unload the plane, which was packed with cocaine, while holding the sole witness to the event, a local field hand, captive.

The Beechcraft King Air 200 on a runway in Nicaragua. Photo: Humboldt Rescue Organization

Before departing, the men attempted to set fire to the plane, but miraculously it did not burn. They departed the area in trucks with the plane’s valuable payload, leaving behind the lone witness, alive, and more than a half dozen AK-47 automatic rifles.

Several days later, Nicaraguan law enforcers apprehended a truck headed for Honduras carrying 1,100 kilos of cocaine. The driver was arrested and the cocaine payload seized. The Nicaraguan law enforcers said the source of the seized dope appeared to be the Beech 200 found abandoned in the cotton field. Police had found traces of cocaine onboard the aircraft as well.

The Beech 200, undamaged by the attempt to set it ablaze, was eventually turned over to the Nicaraguan military for use in future drug war efforts in that nation.

That’s the storyline provided to the Nicaraguan newspapers (links here and here) that reported on the Beech 200 incident more than three years ago. Those same newspaper reports included photos of the abandoned aircraft and list the tail number variously as MN-167-NT or MN-168-NT. However, the photos are taken from angles that fail to show the Beech 200’s tail number.

Narco News ran the press stories about this Beech 200 by a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agent, who has experience working in Latin America. The source’s first reaction was to laugh out loud.

ICE, by the way, is apparently connected to ongoing operation in Latin America called the Mayan Express, which Narco News has previously reported played a role in another cocaine plane shipment – the Gulfstream II jet that crashed in Mexico last September with some 4 tons of coke onboard.

The press reports about the Beech 200 incident just didn’t smell right, given that members of a nonprofit Venezuelan search and rescue group also obtained their own own photo of the abandoned aircraft. That photo (link here) does show the Beech 200’s tail number: N168D, which Federal Aviation Administration records indicate is registered to a North Carolina company called Devon Holding and Leasing Inc.

According to press reports and an investigation conducted by the European Parliament into the CIA’s terrorist rendition program, Devon Holding is a CIA shell company and N168D is a tail number to a CIA aircraft.

The former ICE agent went on to explain the cause of his humor over the Nicaraguan press reports. He said if the armed men involved in the cocaine shipment were indeed real narco-traffickers, they would not have left a witness alive to talk, nor would they have bungled the attempt to burn the plane – which is not a hard thing to accomplish considering the flammable nature of the fuel that feeds it. Most telling, he says, they would never leave behind their guns.

“Those guns are their only protection,” the ICE agent says. “And an AK-47 is a prized possession in their world.”

The former agent says the press was fed a big fat lie, and they bit on it hook, line and sinker, because it made for good ink. The ICE agent adds that, to him, the Beech 200 incident has all the markings of a government-run operation. He says the reason the plane was not burned up is that the plan all along was to reuse the aircraft for use in a future government operation – and it was, according to the press reports, turned back over to the Nicaraguan government after all.

The CIA-linked tail number on the Beech 200, then, raises some serious questions as to the ultimate destination of the cocaine onboard as well. Similar questions have been raised about the planned destination of the nearly 4 tons of cocaine onboard the Gulfstream II jet that crashed in the Mexican Yucatan last fall. A CIA asset named Baruch Vega claims the Gulfstream II was part of a U.S. government operation (the Mayan Express) that utilized a well-known Colombian narco-trafficker turned informant named Jose Nelson Urrego.

Urrego was arrested on money laundering charges by Panamanian police about a week prior to the Gulfstream II’s crash landing. Urrego claims he worked for the CIA, according to Panamanian press reports – a fact Vega also confirms. Greg Smith, one of the owners of the Gulfstream II, according to its bill of sale, also has been linked to past ICE, DEA and CIA operations in Latin America, Narco News reported previously. And the Gulstream II itself has been linked to past use in the CIA’s terrorist rendition program, according to European investigators.

Given these realities, attorney Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with U.S. Customs, ICE’s predecessor agency, speculates that the Mayan Express operation is not controlled by ICE at all, but is, in fact, a CIA-run operation using ICE as a cover. He adds that the CIA has agents operating inside many federal law enforcement agencies utilizing what is known as an “official cover.”

The former ICE agent who spoke with Narco News about the Beech 200 also suspects CIA is running the show in these drug plane operations. He says ICE is a perfect vehicle for the CIA because it can provide the Agency with a free pass through U.S. ports of entry.

“All an ICE agent has to do is make a call and the cargo will be cleared through the checkpoint,” he says.

Journalist and author Doug Valentine recently revealed the inner workings of these CIA cover methods within DEA in a story he penned for Counterpunch.

From Valentine’s story:

By 1977, some 125 “former” CIA officers had been infiltrated into the DEA at every level of the organization, especially in intelligence units, making everything possible– from black market arms exchanges, to negotiations with terrorists, to political assassination. It also put the CIA in total control of targeting.

Leutrell Osborne, a former CIA case officer, told Narco News essentially the same thing when he conveyed his concern about the merging of spook and law enforcement agendas.

“Law enforcement and intelligence operations have become one and the same,” Osborne says. “We as citizens are all affected by this because it has a major impact on civil and human rights.”

The Beech 200 and Gulfstream II cocaine planes, both now linked to CIA planes and/or assets, raise the specter of this merged law enforcement/intelligence approach to the war on drugs – an approach that tolerates or even enables drug running for the sake of some perceived higher value in the dirty world of covert action. This curious connection is magnified further by the fact that a third cocaine aircraft also appears to be in the mix: A DC-9 jet apprehended in Mexico in April 2006 with some 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard.

Given the evidence bubbling to the surface due to public faces of these cocaine jets, the pattern seems to be self-evident, even if officially our government continues to deny the evidence.

Rotating Tail Numbers

The European Parliament, which undertook an exhaustive study of the CIA’s terrorist rendition program, provided the following overview of that program in a report it issued in 2006:

Ultimately, in this inextricable net, there is also the possibility that single aircrafts change their registration numbers (as for the Gulfstrean V, from Richmor Aviation, registered as N379P, then, N8068V and then N44982). There are indeed 51 airplanes alleged to be used in the extraordinary renditions, but, according the Federal Aviation Administration records, there would be 57 registration numbers. It comes out that some of them are registered more than once.

Among the 51 airplanes alleged to be used by CIA:

• 26 planes are registered to shell companies and sometimes supported by operating companies.
• 10 are designed as “CIA frequent flyers”, they belong to Blackwater USA, an important CIA and US Army “classified contractor”. It provides staff, training and aviation logistic. In this case there is no intermediation of shell companies.
• The other 15 planes are from occasional rental from private companies working with CIA as well as with other customers.

2. COMPANIES INVOLVED
Shell Companies 6,
- CROWELL AVIATION TECHNOLOGIES, INC
- PATH CORPORATION
- RAPID AIR TRANS, INC.
- STEVENS EXPRESS LEASING, INC
- AVIATION SPECIALTIES, INC
- DEVON HOLDING AND LEASING, INC
- BAYARD FOREIGN MARKETING, LLC.
- KEELER & TATE MANAGEMENT, LLC

The rotating tail number scenario seems to have played a role in the Beech 200 incident. The number on the plane, N168D, as shown in the photo from the Venezuelan nonprofit group, actually is registered to a different aircraft, according to FAA records. That tail number, N168D, FAA records show, belongs to a large cargo plane known as a CN-235-300, and its registered owner is the same CIA shell company, Devon Holding, referenced in the European Parliament’s report.

A photo and further background on this CIA plane can be found at this site.

The Beech 200’s real tail number, the Venezuelan search and rescue group reports, is N391SA – which is registered to a company in St. Petersburg, Fla., called Skyway Aircraft Inc., FAA records show.

Coincidentally, the DC-9 jetliner apprehended in Mexico in April 2006 also is linked to a Skyway Aircraft Inc. in the Tampa/St. Pete metro area. That Skyway Aircraft, based in Clearwater, is an affiliate of Skyway Communications Holding Corp., which has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings since June 2005. (Journalist Daniel Hopsicker has reported extensively on Skyway Communications’ role in the mystery of the cocaine jets.)

Skyway Communications, the parent company of Skyway Aircraft in Clearwater, arranged to purchase the DC-9 (tail number N900SA) via a stock swap with a Costa Rica-based firm called Dupont Investment Fund #57289, in November 2004, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, the jet was ultimately registered with the FAA in August 2005 by a company called Royal Sons Inc. prior to being sold to an unknown Venezuelan buyer only days before it was apprehended in Mexico on April 10, 2006, with 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard.

Royal Sons President Frederick J. Geffon is a shareholder in Skyway Communications and his company is a major creditor in the Skyway Communications bankruptcy (links here and here). In addition, Royal Sons and Skyway Communications previously teamed up to purchase a separate DC-9 via a joint loan agreement, a January 2004 SEC filings shows. That DC-9, tail number N120NE, is now registered to a company in Houston called AIRCRAFT GUARANTY TRUST LLC TRUSTEE, FAA records show.

The paper trail is complex, but it all boils down to several individuals who conducted business with each other via several South Florida companies that all intersect with Skyway Communications, the parent company of Skyway Aircraft in Clearwater, Fla. Those individuals are the following:

• Brent Kovar, president of Skyway Communications;
• Joy Kovar, (Brent’s mother) also an officer of Skyway Communications;
• James Kent, CEO of Skyway Communications;
• Glenn Kovar, (Joy’s husband and Brent’s father) listed as the original sole board member of Skyway Aircraft in its Nevada articles of incorporation, SEC records show. Skyway Aircraft in Clearwater, Florida, is set up as a foreign corporation (based in Nevada) that does business in the Sunshine State.

The Kovars all intersect through a company called Skyway Global LLC, which licensed the wireless technology to Skyway Aircraft that was the basis of a proprietary air-to-ground communications system that Skyway Communications marketed as its exclusive product. The Kovars, according to a 2002 SEC filing, are all officers of Skyway Global.

Skyway Commustries contractor who presently manages more than 2,500 contracts with a backlog of more than $4 billion dollars in the areas of Homeland Security and Anti-Terrorism, Command, Control and Communications Systems, Aircraft Defense Systems, Network Communications, as well as other information and communications systems and solutions associated with national defense.

Finally, Brent Kovar appears to have a special relationship with the movers and shakers of the U.S. political system, according to this August 2003 press release:

Congressman Tom Delay, Majority Leader, has appointed Brent C, Kovar, to serve as the Honorary Chairman, Business Advisory Council. Officials from the National Republican Congressional Committee announced that Mr. Brent C. Kovar has been appointed to service on the Business Advisory Council in recognition of his valuable contributions and dedication to the Republican Party.

Skyway Communications lost some $40 million between 2002 and its eventual bankruptcy filing in 2005. But it did manage to directly or indirectly acquire two DC-9 aircraft, one of which eventually found its way to Mexico, via Royal Sons and then an unknown Venezuelan owner, with 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard.

Royal Sons’ Geffon claims he is a victim of Skyway Communications debacle and stresses that he knows very little about the DC-9 coke jet and has no responsibility for the cocaine found onboard since his company did not own the jet when it was apprehended in Mexico.

“I just chalked it all up to a bad experience,” he says.

Brent Kovar, in a promotional video for Skyway Aircraft. Photo: St. Petersburg Times

And Glenn Kovar has another interesting business associate, according to a check of Florida’s corporation records. Glenn Kovar is listed as an officer in an inactive Florida company called Homeland Security Tracking Enforcement Inc., along with his wife Joy and another businessman named Donald A. Mitchell.

It turns out that Mitchell in 1996 served as the president of a Panamanian investment company called The Firm of Marc Harris, according to SEC filings. Mitchell left Harris’ firm about a year later due to a business dispute, court records show.

That was probably a stroke of luck for him given the eventual fate of the founder of The Firm of Marc Harris. Marc Harris, was arrested in Nicaragua in June 2003 on money laundering charges and is currently serving a 17-year stint in U.S. federal prison.

The Kovars could not be reached for comment. The phone number for Skyway Communications is now disconnected. Geffon says he knows only that Brent Kovar resides in the tiny St. Petersburg community of Tierra Verde.

Skyway St. Pete

Brent Kovar’s address in Tierra Verde is 121 6th St., according to corporation records filed with the state of Florida.

Brent Kovar, who served as president of Skyway Aircraft in Clearwater, lives a short distance away from the home of Larry Peters, who owns a company with an identical name (Skyway Aircraft Inc.) in St. Petersburg.

Peters’ address in Tierra Verde is 615 Monte Cristo Blvd., Florida, corporation records show.

Like the DC-9 linked to Skyway Communications that was eventually sold to a buyer in Venezuela, Peters’ company sold the Beech 200 to a Venezuelan purchaser as well, in October 2004, about a month before it was apprehended in a Nicaraguan cotton field linked to a payload of some 1,100 kilos of cocaine. In addition, since 2004, Peters’ Skyway Aircraft has sold four additional planes to Latin American buyers, according to FAA records – the most recent a Gulfstream jet exported to Panama in June 2007.

(However, this is not the same Gulfstream II that crashed in Mexico last September.)

Like Geffon, Peters says he has no control over what happens to an aircraft his company sells after it leaves the country.

DC-9 with tail number N900SA, shown here two years before its aprehension in Mexico with 5.5 tones of cocaine. Note the Skyway logo toward the front door. Photo: D.R. 2004 Michael Cater, Airliners.net

“When we sell a plane, it is deregistered and it leaves my place,” Peters told Narco News. “I sell about five planes a month all over. I also have a business in Brazil that does refurbishing work on planes.”

Interestingly, the Gulfstream II jet that was ditched in Mexico’s Yucatan last September was sold to a company controlled by two Brazilian businessmen prior to being flipped to Greg Smith (a U.S. government-connected pilot) and his partner, Clyde O’Connor. However, that is likely just another coincidence in a series of coincidences involving the three cocaine aircraft.

Peters adds that he has no personal relationship with Brent Kovar, though he does know they are neighbors in the waterfront neighborhood of Tierra Verde. In fact, Peters claims he was troubled by the fact that Kovar operated a company with the same name as his company, which is something Peters says the state of Florida should not have allowed.

“I followed him [Brent Kovar] home one day,” Peters says. “He drives a Hummer with the Skyway name on it, and I followed him home, and then contacted my lawyer.”

Peters adds, however, that he chose not to take the matter to court because he could not afford an extended, costly litigation battle.

He also declined to disclose any information about the Venezuelan buyer of the Beech 200.

“I have no idea who we exported that plane to in Venezuela and I wouldn’t release that information anyway,” he says. “…There’s nothing I can do to control what happens after I sell an airplane to someone.”

Following the Vanishing Guns

So, it seems, this entire paper trail of coincidence leads back to some half dozen supposedly abandoned AK-47s in a cotton field in Nicaragua. And the odds are, if a former ICE agent is to be believed, those weapons, if they existed at all, were likely a red herring used to bait a gullible media.

Journalist Valentine, in his recent Counterpunch story, offers some insight into the possible nature of this complex trail of coincidence:

With Bush’s war on terror, the situation has only gotten worse. In Afghanistan and South West Asia, the DEA is entirely infiltrated and controlled by the CIA and military. DEA headquarters is basically an adjunct of the Oval Office. And the Establishment continues to keep the lid on the story. After sending my manuscript to two reviewers–one with CIA connections, the other with DEA connections–my publisher has stopped communicating with me. I think my editor just wants me to go away. One can only wonder how deeply America will descend into this vortex of fear and subservience to state security before it vanishes altogether.

So, what does this intersection of government agencies and assets, money launderers, narco-traffickers, cocaine jets, and public and private companies really reveal, and how does it relate to Valentine’s own revelations? What was the CIA’s true interest in these drug flights, and how many drug shipments has the agency protected toward that end?

For now, we will have to keep digging, since nobody in our government, including the Congress, seems inclined to investigate the matter. As a result, the drug war will continue as one immense cover story that makes for good ink – and fiction.

Stay tuned…

Source

Douglas Valentine, Counterpunch.org
January 25, 2008

The DEA and its predecessor federal drug law enforcement organizations have always been infiltrated and, to varying degrees, managed by America’s intelligence agencies. The reason is simple enough: the US Government has been protecting its drug smuggling allies, especially in organized crime, since trafficking was first criminalized in 1914. Since then drug law enforcement has been a function of national security in its broadest sense; not just protecting our aristocracy from foreign enemies, but preserving the Establishment’s racial, religious and class prerogatives.

The glitch in the system is that while investigating traffickers, federal drug agents are always unearthing the Establishment’s ties to organized crime and its proxy drug syndicates. US intelligence and security agencies recognized this problem early in the early 1920s and to protect their Establishment patrons (and foreign and domestic drug smuggling allies fighting communists), they dealt with the problem by suborning well-placed drug law enforcement managers and agents.

They have other means at their disposal as well. In 1998, for example, in a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News, reporter Gary Webb claimed that the CIA had facilitated the flow of crack cocaine to street gangs in Los Angeles. After the Agency vehemently denied the allegations, Webb was denounced by the CIA’s co-conspirators: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. Frightened into submission by the growls of its biggers and betters, the Mercury News retracted Webb’s story and sent the reporter into internal exile. The CIA’s Inspector General later admitted that Webb was partially right. But being unjustly discredited is the price one pays for tearing the mask off the world’s biggest drug trafficker.

It’s always been that way. Case in point: in 1960 MacMillan published Russ Koen’s book The China Lobby. In it Koen said the Nationalist Chinese were smuggling narcotics into the US, “with the full knowledge and connivance” of their government in Taiwan. He said that “prominent Americans have participated and profited from these transactions.” The idea of prominent Americans profiting from drug trafficking was unthinkable and quick as a flash, Harry J. Anslinger, the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), denounced Koen as a fraud. Within weeks Koen’s book was remaindered into obscurity by MacMillan.

Professor Al McCoy’s seminal book The Politics of Heroin, published in 1972, is another example. The CIA knew about McCoy’s research and approached his publisher, demanding that it suppress the book on grounds of national security. Harper Row refused, but agreed to allow the CIA to review the book prior to publication. When McCoy objected, Harper Row said it would not publish the book unless McCoy submitted.

Examples of federal drug law enforcement’s complicity with the CIA also abound and many are recounted in my first book on the subject, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics 1930-1968. In my new book, The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Espionage Intrigues, and Personalities that Defined the DEA, I explain how the CIA infiltrated the DEA and how, under CIA direction, the war on drugs became a template for the war on terror. One example shall be presented in this essay.

The Merry Pranksters

My new book, Strength of the Pack, begins in April 1968, when, in the wake of a huge corruption scandal, the Johnson Administration folded the FBN into a new organization called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced the appointment of thirty-eight year old John E. Ingersoll as the BNDD’s director. In a letter to me Clark said that Ingersoll “offered a clean break with a past that had ended in corruption and, I hoped, a new progressive, scientific based approach to drug control in a time of deep social unrest.”

Clark appointed Ingersoll while Johnson was president and after the elections, in an attempt to preempt the in-coming Nixon Administration, Clark held a news conference to proclaim the Johnson Administration’s success in cleansing the BNDD of any lingering corruption. “32 Narcotics Agents Resign in Corruption Investigation Here,” read the headline in the 14 December 1968 New York Times. Clark noted that five of the bad agents had been indicted, and that additional prosecutions and resignations would soon be forthcoming.

The Democrats had lost the election, largely because the “law and order” candidate Richard Nixon had promised to win the war on drugs. Ironically, once he was elected president, this vow would pit Nixon against the CIA, which was aiding and abetting the major politicians and generals commanding America’s allies in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, many of whom were part of a huge Kuomintang drug smuggling network. In order to defeat the Communists, their drug smuggling activities had to be protected. But in order for Nixon to make good on his promise to win the war on drugs, they had to be stopped. Thus began the CIA’s infiltration of the BNDD, and its struggle with Nixon’s anti-Establishment, felonious minions for control over targeting of major traffickers as a mean of managing the war on drugs.

BNDD Director John Ingersoll was totally unprepared for the political tug-of-war he found himself in the midst of. He had joined the Oakland police department in 1956, serving as a motorcycle cop and later as an administrative assistant to the chief. In the mid-1960s he became the police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina where he earned a reputation as a straight arrow and fighter against corruption. But within a year of taking control of the BNDD, Ingersoll realized he was no match for the wily federal drug agents he inherited. They were a cunning and dangerous wolf pack, and the organization’s top officials were among the worst offenders.

As one agent explains, “Most were corrupted by the lure of the underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door–go out and lie, cheat, and steal–then come back and retrieve it. But you can’t. In fact, if you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy. You’re talking about guys whose lives depended on their ability to be devious and who become very good at it. So these people became the bosses. Meanwhile the agents were losing their simplicity in subtle ways.”

Ingersoll knew this, but he was also aware of the high priority Nixon placed on winning the war on drugs. Rather than generate a scandal, Ingersoll decided to go outside of the organization, to the CIA, for help in quietly rooting out corruption. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission Report On CIA Activities Within The United States stated that the joint CIA-BNDD anti-corruption program began when Ingersoll became “vitally” concerned that some of his employees might have been corrupted by drug traffickers. Lacking the necessary security apparatus to expunge these corrupt agents, Ingersoll in early 1970 asked the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, for help building a “counter-intelligence” capacity. The request was “apparently” supported by President Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell.

The man Ingersoll appointed chief inspector of BNDD, Patrick Fuller, had served with IRS investigations for nearly 20 years in California. Fuller was Ingersoll’s close friend, but apart from that, he was incapable of mounting internal security investigations against federal drug agents. When Ingersoll proposed that they turn to the CIA, Fuller readily agreed. The plan, known as Operation Twofold, involved the hiring of CIA officers to spy on ranking BNDD officials suspected of corrupt practices, past and present. As Pat Fuller recalls, “We recruited the CIA officers for BNDD through a proprietary company. A corporation engaged in law enforcement hired research consultants, and three CIA officers posing as private businessmen were hired to do the contact and interview work.”

The principle recruiter was Jerry Soul, assisted by CIA officers John F Murnane, Joseph Cruciani, and Chick Barquin. Then a personnel officer at CIA headquarters, Soul had managed Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and later directed the CIA’s exile Cuban mercenary army and air force in the Congo.

Apart from one exile Cuban, the CIA officers hired for Operation Twofold were, typically, Anglo paramilitary officers whose careers had stalled due to the gradual reduction of CIA forces in Vietnam and Laos. Those hired were put through the BNDD training course and assigned by Fuller to spy on a particular regional director and his trusted subordinates. According to Fuller, no records were kept and some participants will never be identified because they were “cut-outs” who never went to a BNDD office, but spied from afar and reported clandestinely. Some were not even known to Fuller. All were supposed to be sent overseas but most remained in the US.

Much of Twofold remains a mystery because, as the Rockefeller Commission reported, it “violated the 1947 Act which prohibits the CIA’s participation in law enforcement activities.”

No one was ever prosecuted.

Twofold Case Studies

Twofold was aimed at the BNDD’s top managers. One target was Joseph J. Baca, the assistant Regional Director in Los Angeles. The cousin of a top Mexican cop, Baca in July 1969 was charged by the New Mexico State Police with trafficking in drugs and stolen property. He was accused of arranging burglaries and holdups, and allegedly sold heroin to a drug smuggler. But the local investigations were closed without any adverse action against Baca, so Twofold torpedo Charles “Chuck” Gutensohn was asked to investigate.

Gutensohn had served with the Special Forces in South Vietnam. He left the army in 1964, earned a college degree, and in 1968 joined the CIA. For the next two years, Gutensohn served in Pakse, Laos, one of the major drug transit points between the Golden Triangle and Saigon. He had drug experience and upon returning to the US, Gutensohn was given the choice of being the CIA’s liaison to the BNDD in Laos, or joining Twofold. Gutensohn’s brother Joel, also a Vietnam veteran, had joined the Twofold program six months earlier in Chicago. That being the case, Chuck joined too.

“After meeting with Jerry Soul,” Gutensohn recalls, “I met Fuller at a hotel near Tyson’s Corner. He said that when we communicated, I was to be known as Leo Adams, for Los Angeles. He was to be Walter De Carlo, for Washington, DC.”

Fuller recruited Gutensohn and the other CIA officers because they did not have to be trained in the “tradecraft skills” required for the job of spying on their bosses. But Gutensohn’s cover was blown before he got to LA. As he recalls, “Someone at headquarters was talking and everyone knew. About a month after I arrived, one of the agents said to me, “I hear that Pat Fuller signed your credentials.”

A similar situation occurred in Miami, where Fuller’s targets were Regional Director Ben Theisen and Group Supervisor Pete Scrocca. Terry Burke, who would cap his career as the DEA’s acting administrator in 1990, was one of the Twofold agents assigned to investigate Theisen and Scrocca. Tall and handsome, Burke’s background is fascinating. After serving as a Marine guard at the US Embassy in Rome, he joined the CIA and served as a paramilitary officer in Laos from 1963-1965, working for legendary CIA officer Tony Poshepny at the 118A base near Ban Houei Sai–the epicenter of the Golden Triangle’s opium and heroin trade. Burke received the CIA’s highest award, the Intelligence Star, for gallantry in combat in Laos. He served his next tour in the Philippines but in 1969 was assigned to a dead-end job at CIA headquarters. Knowing his career had stalled, Burke contacted a friend from Italy, Customs Agent Fred Cornetta. Then the agent in charge at Dulles airport, Cornetta persuaded Burke to join the BNDD.

Burke applied and was hired in December 1970. Fuller recruited him into the Twofold operation and assigned him to Pete Scrocca’s group. But instead of spying on his new colleagues, Burke set about proving that he was tough and smart enough to work “undercover cases on bad guys with shotguns in motel rooms.” Burke never sent any negative reports to Fuller, and Theisen and Scrocca eventually accepted him.

Gutensohn and Burke’s experience was not unusual, and Twofold never resulted in a single dismissal of any corrupt BNDD agent. The astonishing reason for this is quite simple. Little did Ingersoll or Fuller know that the CIA never initiates a program unless it is deniable and has “intelligence potential.” Twofold conformed to these criteria: it was deniable because it was, ostensibly, a BNDD program; and it had intelligence potential in so far as it was perfectly suited for Angletonian style “operations within operations.”

As the BNDD’s chief inspector Pat Fuller told me, “There was another operation even I didn’t know about. Why don’t you find out who set that one up, and why?”

Boxes Within Boxes

Well, I did find out about this operation. Quite by accident, while interviewing a DEA agent in Miami, I was introduced to Joseph C DiGennaro, a member of the CIA’s secret facet of Operation Twofold, its unilateral drug operations unit. Hidden behind Fuller’s “inspections” program, the purpose of the CIA’s unilateral drug unit was to identify drug-dealers worldwide, and selectively kidnap and/or assassinate them. As DiGennaro explains, his entry into the program began when an eminent surgeon, a family friend, suggested that he apply for a job with the BNDD. Then working as a stockbroker in New York City, DiGennaro in August 1971 met Fuller at a Howard Johnson’s near the Watergate complex. Fuller told him that if he took the Twofold job, he would be given the code name Novo Yardley. The code name was based on DiGennaro’s posting in New York, and a play on the name of the famous American spy, Herbert Yardley.

DiGennaro took the job and was sent to a CIA security officer to obtain the required clearances. That’s when he was told that he and several other recruits were being “spun-off” from Fuller’s inspection program into the CIA’s unilateral “operational” program. He was told that he had been selected because he had a black belt in Karate and the uncanny ability to remember lists and faces. The background check took 14 months, during which time DiGennaro received intensive combat and tradecraft training. In October 1972 he was sent to BNDD regional headquarters in New York and, as a cover, was assigned to a compliance group that mostly inspected pharmacies. His paychecks came from official BNDD funds, though the program was funded by the CIA through the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Mines. The program had been authorized by the “appropriate” Congressional committee.

DiGennaro’s special group was managed by the CIA’s Special Operations Division (then under Evan Parker, first director of the CIA’s Phoenix Program) in conjunction with the military, which provided assets within foreign military services to keep ex-filtration routes open. Ex-filtration routes were air corridors and roads. The military also cleared air space when captured suspects were brought into the US. DiGennaro spent most of his time on operations in South Americaargeting.

However, as the CIA’s influence became pervasive, more and more DEA agents felt its adverse impact on their cases. First the CIA demanded a list of all overseas DEA informants, as well as copies of all its intelligence reports. They got both. Next they began recruiting traffickers the DEA was working on. These recruits were subtracted from the DEA target list. In Chile in 1973, for example, the CIA allowed five drug traffickers to leave the soccer stadium in Santiago where dissidents were being tortured en masse. These traffickers fled to Colombia where they helped form the cartel that would eventually supplied crack cocaine to street gangs in Los Angles, through other CIA assets in Latin America.

As one DEA agent puts it, “The relationship between the CIA and DEA was not as it was originally intended. The CIA does not belong in any type of law enforcement activity, unless it can result in a conviction. Which it rarely does. They should only be supportive, totally.”

In February 1977, as he was about to resign in dismay, this agent and a group of other senior DEA officials felt compelled to document a litany of CIA misdeeds.

The CIA was causing so many problems that in early 1977, outgoing Assistant Administrator for Enforcement Dan Casey sent a three page, single-spaced memorandum to DEA Administrator Peter Bensinger expressing his concern “over the role presently being played by the CIA relative to the gathering of operational intelligence abroad.” Signing off on the memo were six enforcement division chiefs. “All were unanimous in their belief that present CIA programs were likely to cause serious future problems for DEA, both foreign and domestic.” Unilateral CIA programs in foreign countries were a “potential source of conflict and embarrassment and which may have a negative impact on the overall U.S. narcotic reduction effort.” He referenced specific incidents, citing CIA electronic surveillance and the fact that the CIA “will not respond positively to any discovery motion.” Casey foresaw more busted cases and complained that “Many of the subjects who appear in these CIA promoted or controlled surveillances regularly travel to the United States in furtherance of their trafficking activities.” The “de facto immunity” from prosecution enables the CIA assets to “operate much more openly and effectively.”

Casey was especially upset that the CIA demanded that DEA provide telephone numbers for its operations. “This practice is most disturbing because, in effect, it puts DEA in the position of determining which violators will be granted a de facto immunity.” Considering the seriousness of the problem, he recommended that “all DEA support for CIA electronic surveillance be suspended at once.” He asked DDEA Administrator Peter Bensinger to insist that the CIA adhere to guidelines set by the Carte White House Domestic Council, which limited the CIA to gathering strategic intelligence. He advised that DEA personnel not request CIA support “which might end to prejudice the domestic prosecution of any drug trafficker.”

Alas, Bensinger suffered the CIA at the expense of the DEA’s integrity. He ignored Casey and his division chiefs. The Strength of the Pack features examples of how this accommodation with the CIA emasculated the DEA. One major example is the CIA’s Contra Connection, as revealed by Gary Webb. There is also the fact that Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset and that his DEA file was destroyed by CIA infiltrators, paving the way for the invasion of Panama. There was also the Pan Am 103 case in December 1988, in which a bomb was planted by enemy agents who had penetrated a protected CIA drug ring, which was making a “controlled delivery.”

This huge crack in the CIA’s protective shield led to the formation of the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center, and business continued as usual. In December 1989, as reported in the 4 May 1990 issue of Newsday, “a small US special operations team both planned and carried” out a raid that resulted in the death of drug lord Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, his 17 year old son, and several bodyguards. Pablo Escobar in 1994 was similarly assassinated by a CIA led execution squad.

The Gacha and Escobar hits, and many more like them which the public knows little or nothing about, are extrapolations of those performed by Joey DiGennaro. And the beat goes on. Shortly after he resigned in 1993, DEA chief Robert Bonner revealed that the CIA in 1990 had shipped a ton of pure cocaine to Miami from its Counter Narcotic Center warehouse in Venezuela. The Orwellian “controlled delivery” was accidentally lost.

With Bush’s war on terror, the situation has only gotten worse. In Afghanistan and South West Asia, the DEA is entirely infiltrated and controlled by the CIA and military. DEA headquarters is basically an adjunct of the Oval Office. And the Establishment continues to keep the lid on the story. After sending my manuscript to two reviewers–one with CIA connections, the other with DEA connections–my publisher has stopped communicating with me. I think my editor just wants me to go away.

One can only wonder how deeply America will descend into this vortex of fear and subservience to state security before it vanishes altogether.

Source

CBC News
Last Updated: Monday, January 21, 2008 | 6:10 PM ET

The S&P/TSX composite index plummeted almost 605 points on Monday as it joined a worldwide market sell-off prompted by growing fears of a U.S. recession.

The benchmark index finished at 12,132.14 – a loss of 4.8 per cent. That’s its biggest one-day percentage loss since February 2001…

Every sector was deeply in negative territory, led by resource and financial stocks. The TSX metals and mining index dropped 7.6 per cent; the energy group slumped 5.7 per cent; financials fell 3.9 per cent.

“One hopes this is the cathartic sell-off that gives us a foundation to work back from,” CIBC Wood Gundy managing director Dunnery Best told CBC News.

Monday’s sell-off slashed another $95 billion in market value from the TSX. Since the start of the year, the fall in its total market capitalization is more than $260 billion. So far in 2008, the market has lost just over 1,700 points, or more than 12 per cent.Investors were evidently not impressed by Friday’s proposal from U.S. President George W. Bush for a $145 billion US economic stimulus package.

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Bill Curry, The Globe and Mail
Posted on 19/01/08 

OTTAWA — Canada is working with the FBI on a system called Server in the Sky that would see fingerprint and iris scan data shared around the world to nab individuals running from the law.

The personal information on the database would be used by Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand and could ultimately be used by European Union countries as well. The number of people in the system with connections to terrorism and other serious crimes would be well over one million.

Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says she first learned of the plan this week from a media report from London. No Canadian officials had informed her of the project. Ms. Stoddart is now contacting her counterparts in the four other countries to ensure privacy concerns are taken into account.

“I am concerned at the speed at which it seems to be going ahead and I’m concerned with our relatively little experience with the use of biometric technology,” she said.

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The Daily Mail
Last updated at 09:07am on 16th January 2008 

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, competence and physical wellbeing, it was revealed today.

A patent application has been filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism.

The system would allow managers to monitor their employees’ performance by measuring their body temperature, heart rate, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.

But unions are concerned that employees could be sacked on the basis of the computer’s assessment of their physiological state.

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Marni Soupcoff, The National Post
Posted: January 15, 2008, 12:03 PM

Drug policy in Canada, particularly as it pertains to marijuana, is stuck in a sort of legal no-man’s-land. Politicians want to appear tough on crime, but at the same time are loath to make criminals out of the hundreds of thousands of Canadians — perhaps as many one or two million — who are casual tokers. They tiptoe up to the precipice of decriminalization, always to scurry back at the last minute for fear of offending the United States, or the many domestic voters who oppose more liberal marijuana laws. At best, our leaders can only ever summon the courage for a de facto decriminalization: Keep personal pot possession nominally illegal, but instruct Crown prosecutors not to prosecute most offenders.

The irony is: This gutless approach undermines the rule of law more assuredly than decriminalization or full legalization ever could.

Nowhere has this truth been more evident than in the two-year-long efforts by American drug police to extradite Marc Emery, entrepreneur, leader of the B.C. Marijuana Party and the West Coast’s self-styled “Prince of Pot.” For years, the government has looked the other way as Mr. Emery has become a millionaire many times over. But even as he has remained a free man in Canada, Ottawa has felt pressured by Washington to crack down on Mr. Emery for alleged breach of U.S. drug laws (Americans complain that his mail-order business has sold seeds to U.S. buyers.) The result of this application of War on Drugs heavy-handedness by remote control has been a diminution of our national sovereignty and a blow to Canada’s own rule of law.

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Owen Bowcott, The Guardian
Tuesday January 15 2008

Senior British police officials are talking to the FBI about an international database to hunt for major criminals and terrorists.

The US-initiated programme, “Server in the Sky”, would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the “war against terror” – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy.

Biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information are likely to be exchanged across the network. One section will feature the world’s most wanted suspects. The database could hold details of millions of criminals and suspects.

The FBI is keen for the police forces of American allies to sign up to improve international security. The Home Office yesterday confirmed it was aware of Server in the Sky, as did the Metropolitan police.

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by Alan Miller
Global Research, January 15, 2008

Dr. Ellsberg is one of many signers of a petition to reinvestigate 9/11. Best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, Dr. Ellsberg is a former U.S. State Department envoy to Viet Nam and Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Another State Department critic of the official account of 9/11 is Col. Ann Wright, who said in a 2007 interview with Richard Greene on the Air America Radio Network, “It’s incredible some of these things that still are unanswered.  The 9/11 Report — that was totally inadequate.  I mean the questions that anybody has after reading that.”

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