There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet André Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.
-- Gary Sick, October Surprise (p 226)
******
I mean, look at all these damn data points we have to digest. And we're supposed to somehow forget, hold as innocent / benign, fail to comprehend, etc.
The terrible thing is, I'm beginning to understand it.
Byzantine accounts of shell corporations (aka brass plates)
get quite addictive. I think it's worse than the cocaine
& cash they funneled in the good old days.
This gets back to the intersection of the Savings & Loan scandals & Iran-Contra, as well as many other choice items... Stew Webb is his own case altogether, he made the mistake of marrying into a high level Bush-affiliated fraudster family, the Millmans, out in Denver.
Webb launched a website with perhaps the ugliest color scheme I have ever seen (including the once-thought-extinct HTML blink tag), but there are plenty of awesome primary source documents linked off this page... Be sure to hit up the Sarah McClendon 1991 Washington Report October Surprise items, which explain quite clearly the coverup of chemical weapons to Iraq that later contributed to Gulf War Syndrome, Webb's fate and the general 1991 coverup in Congress.
Before I run the book back to Minneapolis' fab new Central Library, I have to post a review of "October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan" by
Gary Sick, the 1991 first edition version.
In a lucky break, I finished this book the evening before a fresh new fake hostage crisis in Colombia. It felt like a lightning bolt to have another cheesy hostage rescue thingy, the very next day! The secret to the FARC Colombia scenario was much like the 1979-1980 classic episode: pay off the bad guys and put on a good show for the American press! CNN and the rest of them will believe every fucking word for two news cycles, and then forget it!
*****
The vast reservoir of cognitive dissonance embedded within the brains of America's Establishment political journalists and analysts makes up the foundation of accepted "consensus political reality." The weird stuff is never talked about, yet becomes heavier by the day. The room's elephants are becoming... super elephants? (Ask the accountant @ Fannie Mae.)
Prior to the emergence of the Internet, all and sundry could easily agree that if a given political fact or event did not get placed in the Washington Post, the New York Times, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, the Associated Press wire or a couple other key press outlets, everyone could safely agree the proposition in question did not exist, and they were safe from being 'burned' by further revelations. "We didn't know, it wasn't in our favorite paper!"
Of course, these outlets occasionally cut to the quick of matters like the Pentagon's military analyst PSYOP news manipulation program, the domestic wiretap program, or other affairs. However, the unique class of Establishment douchebags like David Broder will always fail to synthesize a new analysis of political/government affairs by taking into account their own paper's muckraking, and thus the ruling class can avoid swallowing the bitter pills of their own complicity in general malfeasance and alarming trends of criminality.
(Or shorter: the analysts will never place the results of muckraking in context).
*****
Such is the case with many of my favorite topics, in particular areas with huge layers of documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts and other "weird things" that get left by the wayside all too often. In the last two years I have been fascinated by the historical period of about 1977-1992, the period between when Pres. Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Stansfield "Choir Boy" Turner, fired hundreds of incensed CIA agents, and the election of Bill Clinton.
"October Surprise" was written by Gary Sick (a Carter-era National Security Council staffer with a role in the Middle East) after allegations surfaced in the 1988 presidential election that George H. W. Bush had attended secret meetings in Paris including himself, former CIA honcho and Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey, and various Iranians, with the intent of preventing the hostages from getting released before the November 1980 election. This was the famous, mythical "October Surprise".
Sick provides a sober and cautious synthesis of everything he can, without going out on a limb or offering extraneous, false nuggets that were surely offered by the shady characters that were his sources. He keeps the case minimal, and where he can't verify the names, he doesn't name them.
The American intelligence community in general got pissed at Carter after he took such measures against them, in the wake of partial exposures like the 1975-76 Church Commission, ominous mind control programs and other awesome items. Hundreds of pissed off CIA operators were suddenly cast off the government payroll, and some who you might call "The Cowboys" of the original school were pretty tight with George Bush - after all, he was a player with them since his earliest days. Many of the Cowboys entered fuzzy cargo aviation businesses and other cool cat fronts designed to be geopolitically useful.
In the old days, they knew how to fly copters in hot zones, dammit!
Gen. Claire Chennault put this all together, back then... The survivors of a geopolitically awkward venture, they deserved better than a pink slip from a uptight dude like CIA director Stanfield Turner. Back in China, Nam, elsewhere.... Many died to bring the guns over the line that the pukes in Washington didn't dare tell the public about.
This is true. And under-appreciated. If people in Washington had the guts to be more honest about things (and the press held them to it) then people like Air America and Southern Air Transport (way to go Wikipedia) would never have gotten the short end of the stick. The same is true today.
In the 1980 election, Bush elbowed aside the more regular GOP establishment for the role of Vice Presidential candidate. Bush had a lot of friends in the intelligence community, still, and the unemployed freelancers felt ready to participate in organizing serious operations monitoring Carter. After the Iranians captured the hostages (where was Ted Shackley during the pre-coup period... not sure), Bill Casey, of all people, the grizzled ex-CIA honcho and "half crazy" by all accounts, was suddenly Reagan's campaign manager.
I mean really. The ex-CIA honcho is the campaign manager, and George Bush, ex-CIA director, is the VP candidate, and somehow this does not become a huge mess of covert operations and total PSYOPS subversion?!
How is that no one reminds us how hardcore cool kats in intelligence community put together the whole Reagan campaign?
Damn...
And thus began the Perception Management expertise we know and love today... [see below]
It all began with making sure that FUCKING CARTER couldn't get the FUCKING HOSTAGES out. And all it took was some arms dealers, some arms and some of that old backdoor, secret hotels in Madrid/Paris, don't tell the nerds in the "elected" Democratic White House, old wheeler dealer Texas-sized gambles.
And where did it lead? Getting Felix Rodriguez into the White House? Hurray!
When you wins, you gets ta write the history, eh?
*****
I gotta throw in one of my favorite smoking guns: a rare 1985 document that survived the shredder, wherein Ollie describes the "Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S."
They do NOT show this one on FOX News War Stories!
*****
Some morons on Amazon are claiming that Sick claims that George Bush flew to Paris in an SR71 Blackbird, which is never floated at all. In fact, Sick provides a good analysis of how the Bush-in-Paris claims acted as a "poison pill" or intentional red herring diversion to embarrass journalists and drive them away from further inquiry.
*****
Apart from the facts of the hostage crisis, the way the whole press coverage got manipulated by disinformation (propaganda) specialists becomes quite important.
Grizzled Iran-Contra-exposing reporter Robert Parry recently put out the formerly "lost chapter" of the Democrats' whitewash committee report, which has TONS of details about how the disinfo experts manipulated the scene in the 1980s. GET THE PDF fools!
In a rare new addition to Iran Contra documentation, an awesome "Lost Chapter" of the Democratically-controlled investigation committee has been unearthed. The Lost Chapter got deleted from the Final Report, because it spelled out how "perception management" type dudes got brought into the inner circle, running interference all around. The tone and substance of how these guys operated gets explained in a choice narrative style.
Of course, this surfaced from Robert Parry, who got the tar kicked out of him by pursuing Iran-Contra deeply and professionally. This turned out to be a terrible mistake, since the Establishment coverup took hold and Parry went down some of the many cul-de-sacs put there by the disinfo Beltway experts. So instead of a fancy TV spot, he is here & there, and this lost chapter turned up not in Newsweek but on ConsortiumNews.com.
*****
I will add the October Surprise book jacket notes because they encompass the most important dimensions of the case, and are well-substantiated:
This book was never supposed to have been written. It is an account of a political mystery never intended to be solved, a tale of bold deception by a few powerful men who apparently calculated that political manipulation, if conducted on a sufficiently grand scale, would be essentially invisible and ultimately beyond the law.
October Surprise reconstructs the story of how the 1980 Reagan-Bush presidential campaign, intent on delaying the release of the fifty-two Americans held hostage in Tehran until after the election, made clandestine overtures to Iran and arranged illegal arms shipments through Israel. Thiss effort, spearheaded by Republican campaign manager William Casey, not only prevented President Carter from reaping the political benefits of an early hostage release, but also hobbled his ability to exercise the full powers of his elective office.
This book brings to light startling new information, including:
• The Reagan-Bush campaign's systematic penetration of the national security complex of the U.S. government, through which a network of former and current intelligence agents kept Casey--not then in any government position--informed of highly classified military movements, diplomatic initiatives, and policy decisions.
• The secret meetings that took placed in Europe during the summer and fall of 1980, at which Casey hammered out the deal with the Iranians.
• Israel's shipment of arms to Iran during the last weeks of the presidential campaign (in deliberate violation of the U.S. embargo) and the massive covert arms transfers between the two nations that begin immediately after Reagan's inauguration.
• The connection between the Republicans' 1980 arms-for-hostages deal and the Iran-Contra Affair five years later.
The result of three years of research and hundreds of interviews, October Surprise lays bare an elaborate network of political intrigue and treachery, subversive in its actions and chilling in its implications. It is a cautionary tale about the seductions of power and the fragility of our democratic system.
He spells out the series of events, including the weird and messy power mesh that made up the nebulous Iranian ruling circles, which, in their splintering, oddly mirrored the splintered American side. (Numerous arms dealers and shadeballs, (in particular the Hashemi brothers as channels), "fairly" offered similar terms, separately, to Carter and Casey's people.)
His conclusion chapter was really interesting, as it encompassed the case of the United States of America v. Richard J. Brenneke, as they were ticked off that Brenneke
"had been accused of falsely stating that William Casey, Donald Gregg and possibly George Bush were in Paris on that particular weekend, and that he was employed by the CIA at that time.... Although this case received virtually no attention in the national media, it marked the only time that the U.S. gvoernment had systematically and athoritatively attempted to refute the allegations of an October surprise. All of those accused had an unparalleled opportunity to rebut the charges, and they had all the resources of the U.S. government at their command to research and document their case. To my surprise, and to the surprise of nearly everyone who followed the trial closely, they failed." (p 212)
All they had to do to win the case was prove that George Bush or Casey or Gregg were anywhere but Paris, in the middle of the damn campaign. And they failed. And it was forgotten.
*****
In my own fishing in the murky waters, I would be wise to remember this conclusion about the general morass.
This is hardly earth shattering, but it's a clear explanation of a fundamental principle of all stories about espionage and Deep Politics: (p 214-216):
Over the course of the next two years, during the research and writing of this book, I would meet many men like Richard Brenneke. To my frustration, Brenneke's idiosyncrasies and character flaws were too often representative of the general nature of the sources. These mens were denizens of a shadowy yet flamboyant subculture who expected absolute discretion in dealing with outsiders but tolerated boasting and exaggerated tales of past exploits among the members of the fraternity. They took pains to conceal key facts from an obvious outsider, and when they chose to talk they routinely embellished the facts and inflated their own importance.
Such characters are a researcher's nemesis; they are meant to be. When the CIA or other intelligence agencies need to hire a "contractor," who may be required to carry out tasks that are potentially dangerous and of questionable legality, they look for three things: a specific and useful skill (a knowledge of money-laundering, for example); a romantic streak that glorifies both the secrecy and the risk; and a propensity for exaggeration and trouble. One former CIA officer, David MacMichael, has said that the agency looks for these free-lancers at small community airports and gun ranges--places where men go to escape the boredom of everyday life. Looking for adventure, these men are fascinated by the imagined glamour and excitement of the world of espionage. MacMichael said that often, after one or two assignments, the agency will put the contractor on a case in which he runs afoul of the law. The contractor finds himself in a compromising position--nothing so major as to put him permanently out of commission, but significant enough that if he ever starts telling tales out of school about covert operations, his record will discredit his testimony.
Essentially, such a free-lancer is a skilled Walter Mitty, who delights in possessing arcane knowledge and who imagines himself the instrument that secretly drives events behind the scrim of history. It is a profile, alas, of a less-than-credible witness. Intelligence agencies understand this very well, and bank on it. A free-lancer is inherently difficult to control; if he wanders off the reservation and begins blabbing, it is helpful if no one believes him. A retired CIA covert-operations officer, when asked about the extravagant behavior of a former contract employee, said: "The agency likes things that way... The wilder and crazier and sillier the story, the more they like it. The agency indulges people to come up with that. It's the best defense." MacMichael confirmed that the agency permits contractors to become entangled in a legally compromising position, so that if an operation goes awry they can be cut loose. "When a contractor gets caught," he said, "all their 'friends' disappear. It happens over and over again."
In a story in which the principal actors have no desire for the facts to come out, one does not have the luxury of choosing one's sources. The "respectable" people who plotted and carried out a covert operation refuse to comment or, at worst, fabricate stories to protect themselves and their reputations; because of their "respectability," most people are inclined to believe them. The contractors who were hired to do the dirty work are not "respectable" at all, and if they decided to tell their story, most people assume they are lying.
And sometimes they are. These free-lancers, on occasion, are deliberately recruited as front men for disinformation campaigns. In 1988, when stories about possible Republican tampering with the hostage issue began to emerge in the national media, Oswald LeWinter said he was contacted by some people he had known through his intelligence background. They were concerned, he said, that the United States was once again facing the possibility of a Watergate-type scandal that risked tearing the country apart, discrediting the candidacy of George Bush, and electing a Democratic candidate who was unsympathetic to the intelligence community. He claimed to have been offered $40,000 to undertake a disinformation campaign designed to discredit the stories about the 1980 elections and the Paris meetings. He agreed, and for several months he spoke to journalists and others who were investigating the allegations of an "October surprise." He said that he used the pseudonym "Razin," and refused to be interviewed in person. INstead he spoke to reporters only by telephone, offering a few bits and pieces of accurate information laced with fanciful inventions and false leads. His purpose, as he now freely admits, was to throw dust in the air, to invent tantalizing leads that would eventually prove to be false, and thereby generate so much fruitless commotion that the story would be discredited and abandoned.
To get at the truth, one must listen to those who know something about what happened and who are willing to talk, even if they exaggerate and embroider the truth. Then every significant statement must be carefully weighed against the known facts -- dates, places, times, identities -- and other witnesses. A bald assertion, however intriguing, must be regarded as false unless it can be corroborated independently, and not just from one of the sources' cronies who may have compared stories. When the allegations of Casey's participation in the secret talks with the Iranians surfaced in 1988, the CIA director's defenders swore up and down that Casey had not traveled abroad on the dates that the Madrid meetings were said to have taken place. However, one of my researchers found an obscure item tucked away in the second section of The New York Times of July 30, 1980, in which the following sentence appeared: "A spokesman at Reagan headquarters said that the national campaign chairman, WIlliam Casey, would begin negotiations with the Right to Life group when he returns today from a trip abroad." Suddenly the denials were less convincing.
Casey died of a brain tumor on May 6, 1987, making it impossible to get his side of the story. Nevertheless, he had made several public statements which I now viewed in a new light. For example, when he was questioned in the 1984 Senate investigation into the mysterious theft of President Carter's briefing book four years earlier, he described his knowledge of the hostage crisis at the time as follows: "Information about negotiations for the release of the hostages in Iran came to me from many sources, including bankers involved in loans to Iran and frozen Iranian funds." That Casey admitted, under oath, that he was privy to inside information about the negotiations between the government of the United States and the government of Iran is itself revealing.
All right, I have to put in a couple more passages... This is taking a while, but key to the case: (p 222-223)
I would not be human if I did not confess that I have at one time or another awakened in the middle of the night with the thought: what if all of these people are lying to me? Is it possible that all of these accounts are themselves a conspiracy of lies?
In the early stages of the research, when the descritpiton of these events relied on only a handful of admittedly unreliable source, I had to take that possibility seriously. But as time went on and the number and diversity of sources increased, the likelihood of a concerted, organized disinformation campaign dwindled. At some point, I had to ask myself why all of these individuals might have decided to propagate false statements, and how they had managed to coordinate their stories. Most of these men did not know one another, and those who had met or talked at some pont in the past frequently distrusted one another. Most of them did not come forward of their own accord to publicize this story. On the contrary, most of them were discovered only as the result of persisten digging by journalists and researchers. To believe that there was an orchestrated effort to plant these individuals in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, and that each was supplied with the same false story, required a considerable leap of imagination -- a grand conspiracy theory to counter a conspiracy theory. Is it easier to believe that all of these sources surreptitiously coordinated their stories to create trouble for the Reagan and Bush administrations, or alternatively, that each of these sources may be telling the truth (or pieces of the truth) as perceived on the basis of his own personal background and personal experience? The answer seems obvious: The chance that these sources are telling their version of the truth is much higher than the chance they are all lying in concert. These sources seemed to be describing the same event, albeit from different perspectives, rather than merely improvising a description based on sketchy published accounts.
In the absence of convincing corroboration, however, I have reserved judgment. For example, several reports have surfaced claiming that vice-presidential candidate George Bush was present at least briefly in Paris during the course of negotiations in October. I have always been incomfortable about this allegation. There was little reason for a vice-presidential candidate to take such an extreme risk at the very peak of a political campaign. Besides, it would have been difficult for any candidate to slip away from his campaign responsibilities, not to mention his Secret Service protection, for a transatlantic flight. Even if the Iranians insistend on very high-level personal assurances as part of the final agreement, which would be entirely characteristic of Iranian bargaining style, surely someone would have been found to stand in for the candidate.
I was also aware that the allegation about Bush might have been deliberately floated in order to discredit the story. An effective way to divert attention from what really happened is to invent a sensational story and send the media scurrying off on a wild-goose chase. That is essentially what happened in the Iran-Contra Affair, where all journalistic resources and public attention were fixated on the question of whether the President knew about the diversion of Iranian arms-sales profits to the Nicaraguan contras. When that could not be proved, because the original memos with identifying signatures had been destroyed and because Admiral Poindexter testifeid that "the buck stopped here, with me," the entire congressional case came to an end. Other important constitutional and legal issues simply faded into the background or were shunted off to the special prosecutor's office.
When the "October surprise" story first received wide publicity in 1988, much of the media attention was devoted to the question of whether or not George Bush had been in Paris. When the evidence proved to be ambiguous, and especially after Bush won the 1988 presidential election, the entire story was shelved.
We gotta get to the nut grafs, the finale..... (p 226-228)
In the end, it is irrelevant whether Bush went to Paris or whether Reagan approved or knew of the deal. The critical question is whether representatives of a political party out of power secretly, and illegally, negotiated with representatives of a hostile foreign power, thereby distorting or undermining the efforts of the legitimate government. Even today, more than a decade later, it is still difficult to imagine that an opposition political faction in the United States would employ such tactics, willfully prolonging the imprisonment of fifty-two American citizens for partisan political gain. Nevertheless, that is what occurred: the Reagan-Bush campaign mounted a professionally organized intelligence operation to subvert the American democratic process.
We are accustomed to the petty scandals of Washington politics: A candidate for high office is a lush or a compulsive womanizer; a member of Congress diverts campaign funds to a private account; an official lies to cover up an embarrassing policy failure. These are misdeeds on a human scale, and these miscreants who are unfortunate enough or careless enough to get caught are pilloried and punished by the press and their peers in periodic cleansings. We regard such rituals with a certain satisfaction, evidence of our democracy at work.
There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet André Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.
We understand the motives of a thief, even if we despise them. But few of us have ever been exposed to the seductions of power on a grand scale and we are unlikely to have given serious thought to the rewards of political supremacy, much less to how it might be achieved. We know that groups and individuals covet immense power for personal or ideological reasons, but we suppose that these ambitions usually will be pursued within the confines of the laws and values of our society and democratic political system. If not, we assume we will recognize the transgressions early enough to protect ourselves.
Those who operate politically beyond the law, if they are deft and determined, benefit from our often false sense of confidence. There is a natural presumption, even among the politically sophisticated, that "no one would do such a thing." Most observers are predisposed toward disbelief, and therefore may be willing to disregard evidence and to construct alternative explanations for events that seem too distasteful to believe. This all-too-human propensity provides a margin of safety for what would otheriwse be regarded as immensely risky undertakings.
Illegitimate political covert actions are attempts to alter the disposition of power. Since all of politics involves organized contention over the disposition of power, winners can be expected to maintain that they were only playing the game, while those who complain about their opponents' methods are likely to be dismissed as sore losers. Even if suspicions arose, the charges are potentially so grave that most individuals will be reluctant to give public credence to allegations in the absence of irrefutable evidence. The need to produce a "smoking gun" has become a precondition for responsible reporting of political grand larceny. The participants in political covert actions understand this and take pains to cover their tracks, so the chance of turning up incontrovertible documentation of wrongdoing--such as the White House tapes in the Watergate scandal--is thin.
This leads to a journalistic dilemma. In the absence of indisputable evidence, the mainstream media --themselves large commercial institutions with close ties to the political and economic establishment -- are hesitant to declare themselves on matter of great political gravity. The so-called alternative media are less reluctant, but they are too easily dismissed as irresponsible. By the time the mainstream media are willing to lend their names and reputations to a story of political covert action, the principal elements of the story have almost always been reported long before in the alternative media, where they were studiously ignored.
When the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986, both the Congress and the media pulled up short. Neither had the stomach for the kind of national trauma that would have resulted from articles of impeachment being delivered against a popular President who was in his last two years of office. So, when it could not be proven conclusively that the President saw the "smoking gun" in the case--a copy of the memo to Reagan reporting in matter-of-fact terms that proceeds of Iranian arms sales were being diverted to the Nicaraguan contras-- the nation seemed to utter a collective sigh of relief. (The original memo, bearing the signatures of those who had seen it, had been deliberately destroyed.) The laws trembled at the prospect of a political trial that could shatter the compact of trust between rulers and ruled, a compact that was the foundation upon which the laws themselves rested. The lesson seemed to be that accountability declines as the magnitude of the offense and the power of those charged increase.
The ultimate dilemma, which Chenier captured so perfectly in his comment on the revolutionary politics of eighteenth-century France, is the effect of very high stakes. A run-of-the-mill political scandal can safely be exposed without affecting anyone other than the culprits and their immediate circle. A covert political coup, however, like the one engineered by Casey in 1980, challenges the legitimacy of the political order; it deliberately exploits weaknesses in the political immune system and risks infecting the entire organism of state and society. Such a virus of secrecy and subterfuge would permeate the Reagan administration and would culminate in the Iran-Contra Affair, the contours of which bore an uncanny resemblance to Casey's 1980 deal to swap arms for hostages. One of the more puzzling aspects of the Iran-Contra Affair was the Reagan administration's dogged pursuit of a deal in the face of repeated Iranian demands. Yet Reagan's men refused to take no for an answer. The reason now seems plain: The same parties had cut a deal once before.
The weight of the evidence speaks for itself - and the establishment arms/drugs/coverup pattern is damn thick. You can't wrap your head around the JFK assassination, 9/11, other weird political events, without taking into account the real substrate of covert operations, 'perception management' AKA PSYOPS, and the dumb rules that control Washington journalists.
After trekking through the murky wasteland of mirrors, I cannot help but reach the conclusion that the extended cloud of covert activities behind Iran-Contra makes up a totally pivotal - and misunderstood - episode of American political history. The history isn't even past. In order to process the ugly stack that makes up today's political perceptions, the old affairs have to finally get digested.
As long as the rules of the game stay this way, Iran-Contra will never be seen as a complete mesh, the opening episode of total mindwar domination, total PSYOPS, the surrender of Beltway journalism, the death of that heady Woodward-Bernstein take-em-on era.
Oliver North has his TV show, we have the Internets.
One of them will finally win.
In the words of Al Martin, a self-described "fourth-level player" in Iran-Contra,
"Iran-Contra is still alive."
