Western Goals & American Phoenix

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Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 13, 2013 9:52 am

The "Phoenix Program" was a massive targeted assassination sweep initiated during the Vietnam War for the ostensible purpose of counterinsurgency. Instead, it was a tactical failure even when it got ramped up to such an industrial scale it began to verge upon genocide. I have stated many times now that Inside the League by the Anderson brothers was the best book I read in 2012 because it connected so many disparate dots for my mental model of global fascism. The death squad nightmares in Latin America during the 60's, 70's and especially 80's were a matter of training and expertise from Taiwan and the United States.

The basic model was so simple it's hard to caricature: you have advance teams identify all your "Communist" targets and collect spreadsheet lists so that they can get rounded up by autonomous kill squads who get fed information by controllers. This model was also implemented in several NATO countries under the "Gladio" framework. I have always been fascinated by how close we came to having it happen right here in America. (I also question the extent to which private alliances have attempted to make it happen on whatever scale they could afford, too.)

This collection will focus on late 70's / early 80's police state projects that strongly resemble preparation for an American version of Project Phoenix. Western Goals, Inc is not purported to be the center of this, just a useful focus for understanding all players and money at work on this clandestine project.

Via: http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/Rees/Rees.html

Starting in the late 1960's, John Rees and his long-time partner S. Louise Rees conducted political monitoring and surveillance operations on leftists for over thirty years, first circulating their reports in their Information Digest newsletter to a wide range of public and private groups. The Reeses supplied information to such private sector conservative groups as the Old Right John Birch Society, the Christian Right Church League of America, the New Right Heritage Foundation, and the Neo-conservative Anti- Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. The Reeses also provided information to government law enforcement and investigative agencies such as the FBI, congressional committees, and local police intelligence units. In addition, the Reeses supplied data to private sector industrial and corporate security departments.

John Rees, who once edited a newsletter for the Church League of America, first published Information Digest and then took on the task of editing a newsletter for the ultraconservative Western Goals Foundation, then helped create Mid-Atlantic Research Associates, and then the Maldon Foundation.

Rees spent the early years of the Reagan administration as the spymaster for the right-wing Western Goals Foundation. Western Goals was the brainchild of Democratic congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia, a urologist and a John Birch Society honcho who specializes in placing anti-progressive diatribes and reports on the left-wing activities in the Congressional Record. Broken Seals, the outfit's first book, charged that groups including the Campaign for Political Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Center for National Security Studies were part of a Soviet-backed attempt "to destroy the foreign and domestic intelligence capabilities of the United States." The book featured an introduction by right-wing congressman John Ashbrook and an afterword by Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Western Goals published several small books warning of the growing domestic red menace,

Western Goals solicited funds to create a computer database on American subversives, but was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) when it was caught attempting to computerize references to "subversive" files pilfered from the disbanded Los Angeles Police Department "Red Squad."

Western Goals essentially collapsed after the death of Larry McDonald in September of 1983. John Rees left shortly after McDonald's death. Western Goals discontinued its domestic dossier and intelligence operation shortly after the departure of Rees. A contentious battle over control of Western Goals and the alienation of key funders left the foundation essentially a shell which was taken over by a conservative fundraiser Carl Russell "Spitz" Channell who turned it into a conduit for contra fundraising efforts linked to North and Iran-Contragate. Rees returned to his freelance spy-master status while former Western Goals director Linda Guell went to Singlaub's Freedom Foundation. Rees later turned up at the Maldon Institute.


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1977. Via: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract. ... 5F438785F9

CONGRESSMAN REPORTEDLY HELPED TO STOCKPILE GUNS

ATLANTA, March 29 Representative Larry McDonald, a national officer of the John Birch Society who has frequently warned that enactment of gun control laws would leave Americans defenseless against Communist invasion, helped stockpile about 200 guns in his official district residence near Atlanta over the past several years, according to a report in tomorrow's editions of The Atlanta Constitution.

The newspaper reported that Mr. McDonald, a neurologist now in his second term in congress, had concealed the purchase of some of the weapons by persuading a number of his patients, some of them terminally ill, to put their names on federal forms required for gun sales.


1988. Via: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/01/world ... truce.html

Not long afterward, a dozen youths in camouflage uniforms, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and American-made M-16 rifles and M-79 grenade launchers, appeared out of the parched hills. They seemed at ease as they spoke, and villagers, especially children, gathered to listen.

The guerrillas said they were part of the Larry McDonald Task Force, an important contra unit said to include about 550 men. The task force is named for the strongly conservative Democratic Congressman from Georgia - a supporter of the contras - who was killed when Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet missile in 1983.

The chief of the contra squad here, who uses the name Ernesto, said he commands 30 men, nearly all of whom are teen-agers from peasant families...
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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 13, 2013 9:55 am

Via: http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/15/nyreg ... group.html

After satisfying himself that Western Goals Inc., a militantly anti-Communist educational group, has no ties to the right-wing John Birch Society, Roy M. Cohn said yesterday, he joined the advisory board of the organization.

Western Goals, founded three years ago by Representative Larry McDonald, a conservative Democrat from Georgia, has its headquarters in Alexandria, Va.

Its avowed purpose is to ''track and report incidents of subversion and terrorism and the spread of Communism.'' While Mr. Cohn supports these aims, he has always opposed the Birch Society, an ultraconservative group.

Mr. Cohn, a key aide in the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's Communist-hunting campaign of the 1950's, said he had thought over Mr. McDonald's invitation to join the advisory board for two months before accepting.

Mr. McDonald is a member of the governing board of the Birch Society, and several Western Goals members also hold membership in the Birch Society.

But, Mr. Cohn said, he was satisfied that Western Goals was not tied to the Birch Society, because the advisory board includes Dr. Edward Teller, the physicist who helped create the hydrogen bomb, and Roger Milliken, the North Carolina textile executive.
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Claire Sterling | The Terror Network

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 13, 2013 6:03 pm

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A curiously specific Guardian obit for Claire Sterling:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/peopl ... 88401.html

The American journalist Claire Sterling played a leading role in creating the ''Bulgarian Connection'' theory, one of the most successful cases - certainly the most publicised - of disinformation carried out by a Western intelligence agency since the Second World War. The theory maintained that the Soviet Union was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981, helped by the Bulgarian Secret Service who had hired the Turkish gunman, Mehet Ali Agca. The motive was to kill the Pope on account of his support of Solidarity - the new independent trade union in Poland.

Claire Sterling, a self-proclaimed terrorism expert, was one of three journalists responsible for fabricating and divulging the details of the theory. The others were Paul Henze, a propaganda expert and former CIA station chief in Turkey, and Michael Leeden, associated with the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, a right-wing think tank; and Leeden had strong connections with a faction of the Italian secret service (SISMI) linked to the P2 secret masonic lodge, which first revealed the phoney proposed attack on the Pope by the Soviet Minister of Defence Marshal Ustinov.


The three journalists wrote articles and appeared on television and Sterling and Henze's books, respectively Pontiff in Danger: the time of the assassins and The Plot to Kill the Pope (both published in 1983), were enthusiastically reviewed.

Individually, or as a team, the two were repeatedly invited as guests on to the three principal American networks and programmes on British television. They insisted that no expert who supported a contrasting view be interviewed with them on the same programme and, in most cases, the producers obliged.

In effect, the Sterling-Henze duo was almost able to monopolise coverage of the story. In the American media, for a certain time, it became almost impossible to express a different view. and anyone who did was considered "unpatriotic" at best.


And yet, the "Bulgarian Connection" theory was flawed, particularly as far as the motive was concerned. At the time the plot was allegedly conceived in July 1980 Solidarity did not even exist. Even one month later, on 31 August, the day the Gdansk agreements were signed, no one, Lech Walesa, the Pope, or anyone else, could have predicted the course events were to take over the coming months.

The trial of the five Turks and the three Bulgarians who were accused of having plotted to kill Pope John Paul II with Ali Agca opened in Rome on 27 May 1985. After 10 months, during which 14,000 pages of testimony were gathered, the prosecution was unable to prove the existence of a "Bulgarian Connection" in the attack against the Pope and all the defendants were acquitted.

The Italian court's verdict and the acquittal of all the defendants was something of an anticlimax, and was treated by the Western media almost with indifference.

Little did it matter. The organisers of the massive propaganda campaign had been extremely successful. In 1982 the new ''Red Scare'' proved extremely useful, as, under Ronald Reagan's administration, the US was involved in a massive re-armament programme and the Bulgarian Connection served effectively to counter the pacifist movement and the Allies were persuaded to accept the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles.
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ISGP on the American Security Council

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jan 22, 2013 11:29 am

abundantly documented page on an important detail: https://wikispooks.com/ISGP/organisatio ... ouncil.htm

Origins of the American Security Council

The American Security Council was founded in 1954 under the name Mid-American Research Library. Although the ASC does not advertise with it, the Mid-American Research Library was the continuation of the library of the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation. Harry A. Jung, head of the federation, fell ill in mid-1954 and died that November. Robert E. Wood, outgoing chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co., had begun to anticipate that Jung's secretive headquarters in the Chicago Tribune Tower would soon come up for sale and initiated a fundraiser to take it over.

He delegated the task of approaching other company heads to John M. Fisher, vice president of personnel and employee relations at Sears. Fisher was able to bring on board twenty-five other companies, including Motorola, Marshall Field and Illinois Central Railroad. Together these corporations put up the money to buy Jung's library, rebranding it the Mid-American Research Library. Fisher became CEO, with the most important financiers organizing themselves in a senior advisory board.

Fisher changed the name to American Security Council in 1955. This name was much more fitting, as the new foundation was considerably more than just a neutral research library. To begin with, Jung's American Vigilant Intelligence Federation, which had originally been founded in 1919, campaigned against everything from the New Deal to labor unions and U.S. involvement in World War II. He denied it, but there's every indication that Jung was also editor for The American Gentile, an anti-Semite newspaper owned by Russian émigrés from Czarist Russia. These White Russian contacts provided him early on with copies of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and together they worked on an English translation. Certainly Jung was widely accused of being an anti-semite and a Nazi sympathizer. At the very least he was a prominent isolationist and was said to have been in close contact with the leadership of the America First Committee (headed by General Robert Wood), together with his friend Colonel Richard R. McCormack, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. That's the same McCormack who became notorious for leaking U.S. war plans against the fascist nations three days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Jung also worked "in close cooperation" with the FBI and on occasion acted as an advisor to junior FBI agents. The primary reason for the FBI's interest in him seems to have stemmed from the fact that he had collected "one of the largest and most complete files on subversive activities" in the United States, stashed at his low-profile headquarters in the Chicago Tribune Tower. One can wonder if General Robert Wood, who used to be chairman of isolationist America First Committee during World War II, came up with the idea to acquire Jung's library all by himself. Jung appears to have been a friend of J. Edgar Hoover, a notorious red-baiter and blackmailer whose FBI didn't even acknowledge the existence of organized crime until forced to do so in the 1960s. In turn, John M. Fisher, who took control of the library, had retired as a special FBI special agent in 1953, the year before he took over the library. He also picked an army of former FBI agents to run his council. Three early and successive operating directors were all FBI agents with "internal security or counterintelligence experience". The research director had been a FBI agent and so were various members of the senior advisory board: Stephen L. Donchess, who had become a low-level manager at U.S. Steel; Kenneth M. Piper, a former assistant director of the FBI who had become vice president of Motorola; and Russell E. White, taken on by General Electric as a security consultant. Fisher also set up the for-profit firm Fidelifax with offices across the hall from the ASC. The firm's purpose, according to its own official history, was "to bring FBI type background investigations to the corporate sector". Within three months Fidelifax had 32 offices throughout the country, each of them headed by a former special agent of the FBI. Unfortunately, the research agencies did not produce much income for the central library, prompting Fisher to give away his majority stake to his five most important franchise holders.

Private sector intelligence gathering

Evidence really seems to point to the fact that the American Security Council was a joint venture between Hoover's FBI and corporate America. According to Fisher, the companies financing the American Security Council did this to meet their "Cold War citizenship responsibilities" and stop the communist ideal "to put business out of business". Hoover was completely on the side of American corporations and was as extreme to the right as Harry Jung. He ran a massive counter-intelligence program, known as COINTELPRO. With it he infiltrated and disrupted labor unions, civil rights groups, anti-segregation outfits and kept tabs on various left-wing politicians.

The early American Security Council had roughly the same aim as COINTELPRO. Membership companies, which grew to about 1,500 corporations in the early 1970s, were able to use the library of the ASC to screen new or existing employees. Although the ASC wouldn't allow any outsiders to view the files, by the early 1970s it was reported that the ASC had information on about 6,000,000 individuals. The information had come from various libraries that had been taken over and was supplanted with information coming from public sources, mainly newspapers. To what extent private researchers and company executives added information to the database seems to be unknown. It is also not known if the FBI cooperated with the ASC in the same way it had done with Harry Jung. It is also not known if applicants have been turned away based on information gathered on them in the library or if employees have ever been fired because of this information. What is known is that in one case a private investigator used the American Security Council "for security checks about political backgrounds with special interest in any communist type activities". The name of this private investigator was Guy Banister, a former FBI agent known to have been the runner of Lee Harvey Oswald of the Kennedy assassination. In this way it seems that ASC, in combination with private investigators, have been providing a service to the FBI that it is ordinarily barred from doing.

The average person may not be worried too much with a group of companies gathering information on communist activity. After all, communism is bad, isn't it? The problem lies in defining what a communist is or what makes a person a suspected communist. Judging from the size of the ASC library, one would be inclined to believe that millions of communists were working to undermine democracy in America.

The ASC was far from the only group that was profiling American citizens based on their political beliefs. The Church League of America, active for many decades since 1937, had a database containing millions of individual names. They added everyone who was "attacking and ridiculing a major doctrine of the Christian faith or the American way of life." Much of the information came from newspapers and books, but the league explained that it also "sat in on communist and leftist meetings" and had agents who "ingratiated themselves with leftists".

The controversial detective and private security firm Wackenhut, ran by an extreme right Christian Scientist, occasionally made use of the files of the Church League. Wackenhut also had its own database of suspects in the 1960s and 1970s, largely based on several unspecified libraries the company bought. George Wackenhut himself estimated that the library "got up to about three million" individual names. To what extent these names overlapped with the databases of the Church League and the ASC hasn't been investigated, but it is likely to have been considerable as Wackenhut was represented on the national strategy committee of the ASC for several decades. A 1968 list - to pick one - reveals that two of the three co-chairmen of the committee at that point were Wackenhut directors: General Bernhard A. Schriever and Lloyd Wright.

In addition, Wackenhut director General Mark W. Clark was a member of the committee. One of Clark's last assignments in the army was as commander-in-chief of United Nations Command in Korea. Under Truman he had been offered the ambassadorship to the Vatican, but was forced to withdraw after protests from various groups. After his retirement he became the oldest and most experienced director of Wackenhut. At the same time he was the long-time head of the Citadel Military College of South Carolina.

...

1970 and beyond

In 1970 the ASC introduced its "security voting index". Senator Frank Church, who voted against the ABM and would later chair the Church Committee on CIA abuses, not surprisingly, was among those who received a "zero" rating. In 1973 the ASC moved its headquarters to the tiny town of Boston, Virginia, located about 70 miles south-east of Washington. The ASC took their database of alleged subversives with them, placing the records in the Sol Feinstone Library for the Survival of Freedom. It claimed to phase out the use of the library, focusing exclusively on external subversion instead of internal. That may be so, but other organizations, whose leadership overlaps with that of the ASC, continued to focus on the internal aspects. The American Legion's Virginia headquarters was located in the same town, for example. Within a decade the ASC would also have major overlap with the Western Goals Foundation, which was caught in the early 1980s collecting police files on everything from civil liberties groups and anti-nuclear protestors to left-wing judges and politicians. Anthony Kubek, Thomas Moorer, General John Singlaub, General Lewis Walt, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, all of the ASC, also sat on the board of Western Goals. So in essence the ASC never gave up its domestic spying activities.

RELEVANT FOOTNOTES

No. 19

January 26, 1977, AP:

"John S. Ammarell, executive vice president of the Wackenhut Corp., told the Privacy Protection Study Commission that the firm occasionally obtains information from the Church League of America. In response to a question by Rep. Edward I. Koch, D-N.Y., Ammarell declined to say whether the agency would discontinue using material from the Church League files. "


No. 31

August 13, 1983, Associated Press, 'Grand Jury Subpoenas Right-Wing Editor in Police Spying Probe':

"A grand jury probing police spying has subpoenaed an editor for a right-wing organization aided by a detective in building a data bank on alleged subversives, a newspaper said Saturday. John Rees, who edits publications for the Western Goals Foundation, was served Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported. The subpoena was issued through a court in Baltimore, Md., where Rees lives, it said, quoting unidentified sources. The grand jury is investigating alleged spying and misuse of confidential information by the Police Department's recently disbanded Public Disorder Intelligence Division. Rees, who also is the Washington correspondent for the John Birch Society's weekly Review of the News, said by telephone Friday he will claim protection from the subpoena under the California Reporters' Shield Law and the First Amendment. Deputy Los Angeles County District Attorney Denis Petty refused to confirm or deny the grand jury action. The Times' sources said more subpoenas were expected from the grand jury, which entered the case at the request of the district attorney's office and the Police Department's Internal Affairs Division. Both agencies had complained they were encountering uncooperative witnesses.

Investigators have been trying to obtain computer tapes that Detective Jay Paul -- chief target of the probe -- prepared for Western Goals on a computer terminal he operated for the foundation out of his wife's law office in Long Beach. The foundation is a tax-exempt group headed by the chairman of the John Birch Society, Rep. Larry McDonald, D-Ga. The tapes being sought by the grand jury may show whether Paul fed confidential police information to the foundation. Paul also is under investigation for storing intelligence files containing information about various politicians, judges and civil liberties advocates at his home and in a garage. On Friday, the Police Department made public a 17-count disciplinary complaint against Michael J. Rothmiller, a suspended detective who claims officers from the Organized Crime Intelligence Division spied on politicians."
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George Wackenhut - NEEDS EDITING

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jan 22, 2013 6:06 pm

Via: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wackenhut

By 1965, Wackenhut was boasting to potential investors that the company maintained files on 2.5 million suspected dissidents - one in 46 American adults then living. In 1966, after acquiring the private files of Karl Barslaag, a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Wackenhut could claim that with more than 4 million names, it had the largest privately held file on suspected dissidents in America. In 1975, after the US Congress investigated companies that had private files, Wackenhut gave its files to the now-defunct anti-Communist Church League of America of Wheaton, Illinois.


That phrasing is "sourced" from an old Spy Magazine classic:
http://prop1.org/legal/prisons/92wack.htm

SPY MAGAZINE
SEPTEMBER 1992

By 1966, Wackenhut could confidently state that it had secret files on 4 million Americans
SID -- a unit, known as founder and chairman George Wackenhut's "private FBI," that provided executive protection and conducted undercover investigations and sting operations. Once they arrived, they rented two gray Ford Taurus's and drove four hours to a desolate town on the Mexican border called Eagle Pass. There, just after dark, they met two truck drivers who had been flown in from Houston. Inside a nearby warehouse was an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, which the two truck drivers and the four Wackenhut agents in their rented cars were supposed to transport to Chicago. "My instructions were very clear," Ramirez recalls. "Do not look into the trailer, secure it, and make sure it safely gets to Chicago." It went without saying that no one else was supposed to look in the trailer, either, which is why the Wackenhut men were armed with fully loaded Remington 870 pump-action shotguns.

The convoy drove for 30 hours straight, stopping only for gas and food. Even then, one of the Wackenhut agents had to stay with the truck, standing by one of the cars, its trunk open, shotgun within easy reach. "Whenever we stopped, I bought a shot glass with the name of the town on it," Ramirez recalls. "I have glasses from Oklahoma City, Kansas City, St. Louis."
A little before 5:00 on the morning of the third day, they delivered the trailer to a practically empty warehouse outside Chicago. A burly man who had been waiting for them on the loading dock told them to take off the locks and go home, and that was that. They were on a plane back to Miami that afternoon. Later Ramirez's superiors told him—as they told other SID agents about similar midnight runs—that the trucks contained $$40 million worth of food stamps. After considering the secrecy, the way the team was assembled and the orders not to stop or open the truck, Ramirez decided he didn't believe that explanation.
Neither do we. One reason is simple: A Department of Agriculture official simply denies that food stamps are shipped that way. "Someone is blowing smoke," he says. Another reason is that after a six-month investigation, in the course of which we spoke to more than 300 people, we believe we know what the truck did contain—equipment necessary for the manufacture of chemical weapons—and where it was headed: to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the Wackenhut Corporation—a publicly traded company with strong ties to the CIA and federal contracts worth $$200 million a year—was making sure Saddam would be getting his equipment intact. The question is why.
IN 1954, GEORGE WACKENHUT, THEN A 34-YEAR-old former FBI agent, joined up with three other former FBI agents to open a company in Miami called Special Agent Investigators Inc. The partnership was neither successful nor harmonious—George once knocked partner Ed Dubois unconscious to end a disagreement over the direction the company would take—and in 1958, George bought out his partners.
However capable Wackenhut's detectives may have been at their work, George Wackenhut had two personal attributes that were instrumental in the company's growth. First, he got along exceptionally well with important politicians. He was a close ally of Florida governor Claude Kirk, who hired him to combat organized crime in the state, and was also friends with Senator George Smathers, an intimate of John F. Kennedy's. It was Smathers who provided Wackenhut with his big break when the senator's law firm helped the company find a loophole in the Pinkerton law, the 1893 federal statute that had made it a crime for an employee of a private detective agency to do work for the government. Smathers's firm set up a wholly owned subsidiary of Wackenhut that provided only guards, not detectives. Shortly thereafter, Wackenhut received multimillion-dollar contracts from the government to guard Cape Canaveral and the Nevada nuclear-bomb test site, the first of many extremely lucrative federal contracts that have sustained the company to this day.
The second thing that helped make George Wackenhut successful was that he was, and is, a hard-line right-winger. He was able to profit from his beliefs by building up dossiers on Americans suspected of being Communists or merely left-leaning—"subversives and sympathizers," as he put it—and selling the information to interested parties. According to Frank Donner, the author of Age of Surveillance, the Wackenhut Corporation maintained and updated its files even after the McCarthyite hysteria had ebbed, adding the names of antiwar protesters and civil-rights demonstrators to its list of "derogatory types." By 1965, Wackenhut was boasting to potential investors that the company maintained files on 2.5 million suspected dissidents—one in 46 American adults then living. In 1966, after acquiring the private files of Karl Barslaag, a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Wackenhut could confidently maintain that with more than 4 million names, it had the largest privately held file on suspected dissidents in America. In 1975, after Congress investigated companies that had private files, Wackenhut gave its files to the now-defunct anti-Communist Church League of America of Wheaton, Illinois. That organization had worked closely with the red squads of big-city police departments, particularly in New York and L.A., spying on suspected sympathizers; George Wackenhut was personal friends with the League's leaders, and was a major contributor to the group. To be sure, after giving the League its files, Wackenhut reserved the right to use them for its clients and friends.
Wackenhut had gone public in 1965; George Wackenhut retained 54 percent of the company. Between his salary and dividends, his annual compensation approaches $2 million a year, sufficient for him to live in a $$20 million castle in Coral Gables, Florida, complete with a moat and 18 full-time servants. Today the company is the third-largest investigative security firm in the country, with offices throughout the United States and in 39 foreign countries.
It is not possible to overstate the special relationship Wackenhut enjoys with the federal government. It is close. When it comes to security matters, Wackenhut many respects is the government. 1991, a third of the company's $600 million in revenues came from the federal government, and another large chunk from companies that themselves work for the government, such as Westinghouse. Wackenhut is the largest single company supplying security to U.S. embassies overseas; several of the 13 embassies it guards have been in important hotbeds of espionage, such as Chile, Greece and El Salvador. It also guards nearly all the most strategic government facilities in the U.S., including the Alaskan oil pipeline, the Hanford nuclear-waste facility, the Savannah River plutonium plant and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wackenhut maintains an especially close relationship with the federal government in other ways as well. While early boards of directors included such prominent personalities of the political right as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, General Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, current and recent members of the board have included much of the country's recent national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci; former Defense Intelligence Agency director General Joseph Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J. Rowley; former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of President Bush's foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut's outside legal counsel. The company has 30,000 armed employees on its payroll.
We wanted to know more about this special relationship, but the government was not forthcoming. Repeated requests to the Department of Energy for an explanation of how one company got he security contracts for nearly all of America's most strategic installations have gone unanswered. Similarly, efforts to get the State Department to explain whether embassy contracts were awarded arbitrarily or through competitive bidding were fruitless; essentially, the State Department said, "Some of both." Wackenhut's competitors—who, understandably, asked not to be quoted by name—have their own version. "All those contracts," said one security-firm executive, "are just another way to pay Wackenhut for their clandestine help." And what is the nature of that help? "It is known throughout the industry," says retired FBI special agent William Hinshaw, "that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut."
Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA,
ex-analyst says, on a quid pro quo
WE MET GEORGE WACKENHUT IN HIS swanky, muy macho offices in Coral Gables. The rooms are paneled in a dark, rich rosewood, accented with gray-blue stone. The main office is dominated by Wackenhut's 12-foot-long desk and a pair of chairs shaped like elephants— "Republican chairs," he calls them -- complete with real tusks, which, the old man says with some amusement, tend to stick his visitors. The highlight of the usual collection of pictures and awards is the Republican presidential exhibit: an autographed photo of Wackenhut shaking hands with George Bush (whom Wackenhut, according to a former associate, used to call "that pinko" as well as framed photos of Presidents Reagan, Nixon and Bush, each accompanied by a handwritten note.
The chairman looks every inch the comfortable Florida septuagenarian. The day we spoke, his clothing ranged across the color spectrum from baby blue to light baby blue, and he wore a lot of jewelry -a huge gold watch on a thick gold band, two massive gold rings. But Wackenhut was, at 72, quick and tough in his responses. Near the end of our two-and-a-half-hour interview, when asked if his company was an arm of the CIA, he snapped, "No!"
Of course, this may just be a matter of semantics. We have spoken to numerous experts, including current and former CIA agents and analysts, current and former agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and current and former Wackenhut executives and employees, all of whom have said that in the mid-1970s, after the Senate Intelligence Committee's revelations of the CIA's covert and sometimes illegal overseas operations, the agency and Wackenhut grew very, very close. Those revelations had forced the CIA to do a housecleaning, and it became CIA policy that certain kinds of activities would no longer officially be performed. But that didn't always mean that the need or the desire to undertake such operations disappeared. And that's where Wackenhut came in.
Our sources confirm that Wackenhut has had a longstanding relationship with the CIA, and that it has deepened over the last decade or so. Bruce Berckmans, who was assigned to the CIA station in Mexico City, left the agency in January 1975 (putatively) to become a Wackenhut international-operations vice president. Berckmans, who left Wackenhut in 1981, told SPY that he has seen a formal proposal George Wackenhut submitted to the CIA to allow the agency to use Wackenhut offices throughout the world as fronts for CIA activities. Richard Babayan, who says he was a CIA contract employee and is currently in jail awaiting trial on fraud and racketeering charges, has been cooperating with federal and congressional investigators looking into illegal shipments of nuclear-and-chemical-weapons-making supplies to Iraq. "Wackenhut has been used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for years," he told SPY "When they {the CIA} need cover, Wackenhut is there to provide it for them." Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau was said to have rebuffed Wackenhut's efforts in the 1980s to purchase a weapons-propellant manufacturer in Quebec with the remark "We just got rid of the CIA—we don't want them back." Philip Agee, the left-wing former CIA agent who wrote an expose of the agency in 1975, told us, "I don't have the slightest doubt that the CIA and Wackenhut overlap."
There is also testimony from people who are not convicts, renegades or Canadians. William Corbett, a terrorism expert who spent 18 years as a CIA analyst and is now an ABC News consultant based in Europe, confirmed the relationship between Wackenhut and the agency. "For years Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA and other intelligence organizations, including the DEA," he told SPY "Wackenhut would allow the CIA to occupy positions within the company {in order to carry out} clandestine operations." He also said that Wackenhut would supply intelligence agencies with information, and that it was compensated for this—"in a quid pro quo arrangement," Corbett says—with government contracts worth billions of dollars over the years.
We have uncovered considerable evidence that Wackenhut carried the CIA's water in fighting Communist encroachment in Central America in the 1980s (that is to say, during the Reagan administration, when the CIA director was former Wackenhut lawyer William Casey, the late superpatriot who had a proclivity for extralegal and illegal anti-Communist covert operations such as Iran-contra). In 1981, Berckmans, the CIA agent turned Wackenhut vice president, joined with other senior Wackenhut executives to form the company's Special Projects Division. It was this division that linked up with ex-CIA man John Philip Nichols, who had taken over the Cabazon Indian reservation in California, as we described in a previous article {"Badlands;" April 1992}, in pursuit of a scheme to manufacture explosives, poison gas and biological weapons—and then, by virtue of the tribe's status as a sovereign nation, to export the weapons to the contrast This maneuver was designed to evade congressional prohibitions against the U.S. government's helping the contrast Indeed, in an interview with SPY, Eden Pastora, the contras' famous Commander Zero, who had been spotted at a test of some night-vision goggles at a firing range near the Cabazon reservation in the company of Nichols and a Wackenhut executive, offhandedly identified that executive, A. Robert Frye, as "the man from the CIA." (In a subsequent conversation he denied knowing Frye at all; of course, in that same talk he quite unbelievably denied having ever been a contra.)
In addition to attempted weapons supply, Wackenhut seems to have been involved in Central America in other ways. Ernesto Bermudez, who was Wackenhut's director of international operations from 1987 to '89, admitted to SPY that during 1985 and '86 he ran Wackenhut's operations in El Salvador, where he was in charge of 1,500 men. When asked what 1,500 men were doing for Wackenhut in El Salvador, Bermudez replied coyly, "Things." Pressed, he elaborated: "Things you wouldn't want your mother to know about." It's worth noting that Wackenhut's annual revenues from government contracts—the alleged reward for cooperation in the government's clandestine activities—increased by $150 million, a 45 percent jump, while Ronald Reagan was in office. "You've done an awful lot of research," George Wackenhut said to me as I was leaving. "How would you like to run all our New York operations? "
IF THAT WAS THE EXTENT of Wackenhut's possible involvement in a government agency's attempt to circumvent the law, then we might dismiss it as an interesting footnote to the overheated, cowboy anti-Communist l980s. However, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida has been conducting an investigation into the illegal export of dual-use technology—that is, seemingly innocuous technology that can also be used to make nuclear weapons—to Iraq and Libya. And SPY has learned that Wackenhut's name has come up in the federal investigation, but not at present as a target.
Between 1987 end '89, three companies in the United States received investments from an Iraqi architect named Ihsan Barbouti. The colorful Barbouti owned an engineering company in Frankfurt that had a $$552 million contract to build airfields in Iraq. He also admitted having designed Mu'ammar Qaddafi's infamous German-built chemical-weapons plant in Rabta, Libya. According to an attorney for one of the companies in which Barbouti invested, the architect owned $100 million worth of real estate and oil-drilling equipment in Texas and Oklahoma. He may also be dead, there being reports that he died of heart failure in Queen Mary's University Hospital in London on July 1, 1990, his 63rd birthday. Barbouti, however, had faked his death once before, in 1969, after the Ba'ath takeover in Iraq, which brought Saddam Hussein to power as the second-in-command. That time, Barbouti escaped Iraq, resurfacing several years later in Lebanon and Libya. There are now reports that he is living in Jordan—or, according to other reports, in a CIA safe house in Florida. Those reports can be considered no better than rumor; what follows, though, is fact.
As reported on ABC's Nightline last year, the three companies in which Barbouti invested were TK-7 of Oklahoma City, which makes a fuel additive; Pipeline Recovery Systems of Dallas, which makes an anti-corrosive chemical that preserves pipes; and Product Ingredient Technology of Boa Raton, which makes food flavorings. None of these companies was looking to do business with Iraq; Barbouti sought them out. Why was he interested? Because TK-7 had formulas that could extend the range of jet aircraft and liquid-fueled missiles such as the SCUD; because Pipeline Recovery knows how to coat pipes to make them usable in nuclear reactors and chemical-weapons plants; and because one of the byproducts in making cherry flavoring is ferric ferrocyanide, a chemical that's used to manufacture hydrogen cyanide, which can penetrate gas masks and protective clothing. Hydrogen cyanide was used by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds in the Iran-Iraq war.
Barbouti was more than a passive investor, and soon he began pressuring the companies to ship not only their products but also their manufacturing technology to corporations he owned in Europe, from which, he told the businessmen, it would be sent to Libya and Iraq. In doing so, Barbouti was attempting to violate the law. First, the U.S. forbade sending anything to Libya, which was embargoed as a terrorist nation. Second, the U.S. specified that material of this sort must be sent to its final destination, not to an intermediate locale, where the U.S. would risk losing control of its distribution. According to former CIA contract employee Richard Babayan, in late 1989 Barbouti met in London with Ibrahim Sabawai, Saddam Hussein's half brother and European head of Iraqi intelligence, who grew excited about the work Pipeline Recovery was doing and called for the company's technology to be rushed to Iraq, so that it could be in place by early 1990. And the owner of TK-7 swears that Barbouti told him he was developing an atom device for Qaddafi that would be used against the U.S. in retaliation for the 1986 U.S. air strike against Libya. Barbouti also wanted the ferrocyanide from Product Ingredient.
Assisting Barbouti with these investments was New Orleans exporter Don Seaton, a business associate of Richard Secord, the right-wing U.S. Army general turned war profiteer who was so deeply enmeshed in the Iran-contra affair. It was Secord who connected Barbouti with Wackenhut. Barbouti met with Secord in Florida on several occasions, and phone records show that several calls were placed from Barbouti's office to Secord's private number in McLean, Virginia; Secord has acknowledged knowing Barbouti. He is currently a partner of Washington businessman James Tully (who is the man who leaked Bill Clinton's draft-dodge letter to ABC) and Jack Brennan, a former Marine Corps colonel and longtime aide to Richard Nixon both in the White House and in exile. Brennan has gone back to the White House, where he works as a director of administrative operations in President Bush's office. He refused to return repeated calls from SPY Interestingly, Brennan and Tully had previously been involved in a $$181 million business deal to supply uniforms to the Iraqi army. Oddly, they arranged to have the uniforms manufactured in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania. The partners in that deal were former U.S. attorney general and Watergate felon John Mitchell and Sarkis Soghanalian, a Turkish-born Lebanese citizen. Soghanalian, who has been credited with being Saddam Hussein's leading arms procurer and with introducing the demonic weapons inventor Gerald Bull to the Iraqis, is currently serving a six-year sentence in federal prison in Miami for the illegal sale of 103 military helicopters to Iraq. According to former Wackenhut agent David Ramirez, the company considered Soghanalian "a very valuable client."
Unfortunately for Barbouti, none of the companies in which he made investments was willing to ship its products or technology to his European divisions. That, however, doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't get some of what he wanted. In 1990, 2,000 gallons of ferrocyanide were found to be missing from the cherry-flavor factory in Boa Raton. Where it went is a mystery; Peter Kawaja, who was the head of security for all of Barbouti's U.S. investments, told SPY "We were never burglarized, but that stuff didn't walk out by itself."
What does all this have to do with Wackenhut? Lots: According to Louis Champon, the owner of Product Ingredient Technology, it was Wackenhut that guarded his Boa Raton plant, a fact confirmed by Murray Levine, a Wackenhut vice president. Champon also says, and Wackenhut also confirms, that the security for the plant consisted of one unarmed guard. While a Wackenhut spokesperson maintains that this was the only job they were doing for Barbouti, he also says that they were never paid, that Barbouti sniffed them.
This does not seem true. SPY has obtained four checks from Barbouti to Wackenhut. All were written within ten days in 1990: one on March 27 for $168.89; one on March 28 for $24,828.07; another on April 5 for $756; the last on April 6 for $40,116.25. We asked Richard Kneip, Wackenhut's senior vice president for corporate planning, to explain why a single guard was worth $66,000 a year; Kneip was at a loss to do so. He was similarly at a loss to explain a fifth check, from another Barbouti company to Wackenhut's travel-service division in 1987, almost two years before Wackenhut has acknowledged providing security for the Boa Raton plant.
Two former CIA operatives, separately interviewed, have the explanation. Charles Hayes, who describes himself as "a CIA asset," says Wackenhut was helping Barbouti ship chemicals to Iraq. "Supplying Iraq was originally a good idea," he maintains, "but then it got out of hand. Wackenhut was just in it for the money." Richard Babayan, the former CIA contract employee, confirmed Hayes's account. He says that Wackenhut's relationship with Barbouti existed before the Boa Raton plant opened: "Barbouti was placed in the hands of Secord by the CIA, and Secord called in Wackenhut to handle security and travel and protection for Barbouti and his export plans." Wackenhut, Babayan says, was working for the CIA in helping Barbouti ship the chemical-and-nuclear-weapons-making equipment first to Texas, then to Chicago, and then to Baltimore to be shipped overseas. All of which makes the story of the midnight convoy ride of David Ramirez, recounted at the beginning of this article, rather less mysterious. SPY has learned that this shipment is now the subject of a joint USDA-Customs investigation.
When we asked George Wackenhut what was being shipped from Eagle Pass to Chicago, the sharp, straightforward chairman at first claimed they were protecting an unnamed executive. He then directed an aide to get back to me. Two days later, Richard Kneip did, repeating the tale that had been passed on to David Ramirez—that the trucks contained food stamps. We told him that we had spoken to a Department of Agriculture official, who informed us that food stamps are shipped from Chicago to outlying areas, never the other way around, and that food stamps, unlike money, are used once and then destroyed. All Kneip would say then was, "We do not reveal the names of our clients.
WACKENHUT'S connection to the CIA and to other government agencies raises several troubling questions. _ First, is the CIA using Wackenhut to conduct operations that it has been forbidden to undertake? Second, is the White House or some other party in the executive branch working through Wackenhut to conduct operations that it doesn't want Congress to know about? Third, has Wackenhut's cozy relationship with the government given it a feeling of security—or, worse, an outright knowledge of sensitive or embarrassing information—that allows the company to believe that it can conduct itself as though it were above the law? A congressional investigation into Wackenhut's activities in the Alyeska affair last November [see "Sure, but Wackenhut Must Have Its Good Points, Right?," page 54} began to shed some light on Wackenhut's way of doing business; clearly it's . time for Congress to investigate just how far Wackenhut's other tentacles extend.
Additional reporting by Eric Reguly, Margie Sloan and Wendell Smith
SURE, BUT WACKENHUT MUST HAVE ITS GOOD POINTS RIGHT?
Not Wackenhut's labors on behalf of Arab despots aren't the company's only unsavory episodes. Here are some ocher items from our Wackenhut file:
* Wackenhut's right-wing politics have not been confined to supporting U.S. administrations. In 1977, Wackenhut obtained special permission to operate in Belgium; according to Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan's The Terrorism Industry, Wackenhut 'quickly got involved with right-wing terrorists who were themselves linked to state security agents." Wackenhut's local director in Brussels, Jean-Francis Calmette, was a rightist who had hired and given combat instruction to members of Westland New Post, a Belgian fascist group. Wackenhut left Belgium in the early 1980s, following accusations that its guards were luring immigrant children into basements and beating them.
* Tom Carpenter of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization thee protects whistle-blowers, considers Wackenhut a major oppressor. At many of the nuclear installations guarded by Wackenhut, the company works to identify and discourage whistle-blowers. Earlier this year, an investigation by the Energy Department's Inspector General's Office into the illegal use of electronic eavesdropping equipment at plants run by Westinghouse and other private companies in the nuclear-energy business found 147 different pieces of surveillance equipment; one could listen in on 200 phones at once. Many of the bugs had been planted by Wackenhut. The private companies agreed to dismantle the equipment, and sent the bugs off to a Department of Energy training center in Albuquerque. As it happens, the training center is operated by Wackenhut These are not the only complaints against the company. Robert Jacques of the Energy Department's Inspector General's Office told SPY "We have had hundreds of complaints about Wackenhut."
* This August a House committee was due to release a report on its investigation into the way Wackenhut's Special Investigations Division handled a job for one of its clients, the oil consortium Alyeska. The committee has been looking into allegations, reported on 60 Minutes and elsewhere, that Wackenhut had conducted illegal surveillance of an outspoken Alyeska critic, Chuck Harnel, who has funneled information about the oil consortium's safety and environmental abuses to Congress and the media for more than a decade. Wackenhut is accused of setting up a phony environmental-law firm and offering money to Hamel to discover his Alyeska sources. Wackenhut says it operated legally.
* While Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA in clandestine adventures, sometimes it just goes off on its own. That's what happened last year, when Wackenhut's dirty work on behalf of a client helped bring down a presidential aide and fueled unrest that led to an attempted coup against the democratically elected, pro-American government of Venezuela.
On June 21, 1991, Wayne Black, the director of Wackenhut's Special Investigation Division, flew from Miami to Caracas. He traveled on an Abu Dhabi Passport, using the name Wayne Jenkins--the same name he'd used while heading the Alyeska business. The purpose of this trip was to destroy the reputation of Orlando Garcia, the chief of security for President Carlos Andres Perez.
According to Gus Castillo, a former FBI special agent who worked Wackenhut, Black began last summer to plant false information about Garcia with Government officials, members of opposition parties and other influential Venezuelans. Black stories concerned an investigation by the Venezuelan attorney general into accusations that a munitions company owned by Gracia has taken money from the army for weapons it failed to supply. Garcia denied any wrongdoing but resigned rarer in the year and was placed under house arrest. "You would not be wrong in saying that Wackenhut helped gee Orlando Garcia out of the government," says a source in the Venezuelan government.
Soon the stories Black had spread took on a life of their own. President Perez, who had been hailed by President Bush as "one of the great democratic leaders of our hemisphere," was suffering a bout of unpopularity. Austerity measures he had implemented had lowered the standard of living. New allegations of corruption by a member of the president's inner circle fueled this unrest, and in February 1992 a group of midlevel army officers attempted a military coup. In the end, Perez survived an attack that claimed three of his bodyguards; 17 soldiers and 42 civilians were also killed. Meanwhile, Orlando Garcia fled to Paris.
Wackenhut helped instigate this episode neither to forward a political philosophy not to protect any security interests, but simply for a fee. The client was Blanca Ibanez, a wealthy 38-year-old V Venezuelan expatriate now living in Boa Raton who is the mistress of Jaime Lusinchi, Perez's predecessor as president. In addition to her duties as Lusinchi's personal secretary and mistress, Ibanez had another responsibility—regulating the flow of hard currency in and out of Venezuela. After she left public of office, her activities were investigated, and she was suspected of stealing more than $300 million. The person in charge of that investigation was Orlando Garcia.
In May 1991, Ibanez flew to Miami; when she arrived, she and her luggage were searched by U.S. Customs officials. The search was conducted at the request of Venezuelan officials, who were hunting for financial records and evidence of offshore accounts. Nothing showed up, but Ibanez was clearly rattled. Soon afterward, she had her American attorney hire Wackenhut to stymie the Venezuelan government's investigation of her. Obviously, Wackenhut was successful, although apparently only in the shots run. This past June, the Venezuelan attorney general indicted her for influence-peddling.
* Michael Riconosciuto is the mysterious convicted drug dealer who became a government informer and then became a Wackenhut employee, and who is now back in jail [see "Badlands," April 19921 He told SPY that during the early 1980s he was "working for Wackenhut to adapt Inslaw's Promis." Promis is the computer program allegedly stolen by Reagan-administration officials from Inslaw, a software company, and resold for private gain. Although Wackenhut denies any involvement with improper appropriation of software, Riconosciuto said in an interview with SPY that he "met with George Wackenhut and John Ammarell [a Wackenhut board member and consultant to George Wackenhut] in Las Vegas." Riconosciuto went on to say thee accompanying him was Dr. John Philip Nichols, the former CIA agent and Wackenhut business partner who was running the shadowy activities on the Cabazon Indian reservation in the California desert. Riconoscinto says that during their Vegas evening together, George Wackenhut ask how his work on the software was coming along.
Such comments from a twice-convicted felon would normally be dismissed out of hand. But in an interview with SPY Wackenhut's John Ammarell confided that such a meeting did indeed take place in Las Vegas. "I don't remember any specific conversations," Ammarell said, "but I think we were there to discuss the sale of George's yacht, the Top Secret. I think Nichols said he had a potential buyer." So: The wealthy president of a large security company with CIA ties and one of his board members meet with a drug dealer. electronics expert and a spook Burned arms supplier—and all they discuss is the sale of a boat?
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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Apr 02, 2014 8:25 pm

Via: http://pdr.autono.net/privatespies.html

McDONALD’S PRIVATE SPIES
By Paul DeRienzo

Reprinted from "Overthrow" December 1983.

Was the Flight 007 Caper intended to be the masterstroke of Larry McDonald’s intelligence career, a Far Right scheme to develop, with the S. Koreans, an independent capability to spy upon the Soviets?

Everything we know about the Congressman’s, background strongly suggests it.

Larry P. McDonald (D-Ga.), a urologist who was once charged with federal conspiracy in connection with a scheme to raise money for the Birchers by smuggling the worthless cancer nostrum, laetrile, into the U.S. for distribution to thousands of gullible cancer victims, met his demise on his way to ceremonies marking the 30th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. McDonald had just become head of the John Birch Society, representing a victory for the ‘western goals’ faction associated with the KCIA and the ‘old guard’ around Robert Welch. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, he was known to keep over 200 guns in his home. But he also played a major role in legitimizing his brand of lunatic fringe politics in the U.S.

McDonald had recently been most visible testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Anti-Terrorism, where he entered thousands of pages into the Congressional Record on the activities of the left, progressive individuals and organizations like the Yippies. In the Record, protected by congressional immunity, McDonald could print the most vicious lies without risking suit for slander or libel. Thereafter, it might be reprinted with impunity, and the rantings of Larry McDonald were widely disseminated in right wing circles.

McDonald was also a major sponsor of private intelligence" operations, most recently operating the intelligence-gathering arm of the Birchers, the Western Goals Foundation, as a tax-exempt organization "to strengthen the political, economic and social structure of Western Civilization so as to make any merger with totalitarians impossible."

Western Goals (Linda Guell, Director) was founded by McDonald in 1979, "to fill the critical gap caused by the crippling of the FBI, the disabling of the House un-American Activities Committee and the destruction of crucial government files." McDonald told the Atlanta Journal in 1981 that, because of the limitations on the CIA and FBI, Western Goals "will outdistance them in a short period of time." What he did not tell the Journal was the extent to which Western Goals personnel were themselves responsible for that "crippling" and "disabling" through their own abuses and excesses.

Listed on the Western Goals letterhead, as "editor" is one John Rees. In the early and mid ’70s, Rees (a.k.a. John Seeley) and S. Louise Rees (a.k.a. Sheila O’Connor), edited another kind of McDonald publication, a semi-clandestine bulletin known as Information Digest.) , Which numbered amongst its subscribers more than 40 police "intelligence divisions" (red squads), and was associated with the LEIU. (Not to be confused with the now defunct federal LEAA, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit continues as a private network).

The Reeses had infiltrated the left in Washington, D.C. around the time of Mayday, in ’71, trading heavily on their NLG cover, at one point even housing YIP organizers for the July 4th, 1973 Smoke-In and Impeach Nixon rally. The Reeses also ripped off $500 in receipts from the sale of Yipster Times and buttons, and at one point, John Rees threatened to punch out a Yippie who protested the theft.



The Digest, which stopped publication in 1974, was a detailed summary of left 4ctivities, but the very nastiness of their dirty tricks and thoroughness with which they violated the privacy of various groups and individuals proved to be their undoing. The Reeses were exposed in 1976 in hearings of the New York State Assembly as "private spies" with ties to McDonald, the House Internal Security Committee, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, New York State Police and FBI. (See Counterspy [Spring, 19761, and the National Lawyers Guild paper, Guild Notes [May, 19761.) According to Chip Berlet, editor of the National Lawyers Guild publication Public Eye, Rees continued to maintain "an informal private/public network" of active duty and retired FBI agents, police officers and private security experts. Private intelligence is provided by companies such as Pinkerton, Wackenhut and Ma Bell, as well as by Western Goals.

Rees has been extraordinarily prolific as an editor of "private intelligence." He has placed more than 120 articles in Birch publications in recent years. Most recently, along with Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss,-authors of the witchhunt novel The Spike, he began publishing Early Warning, a $1,000-a-year newsletter on international trends.

Under Rees’s direction, the Western Goals Foundation has published a series of special reports with titles like "Red Locust" (on Soviet support-for "terrorists" in Southern Africa), "Outlaws of Amerika" (an attack on the National Lawyers Guild as a support group for the Weather Underground), and attacks on the nuclear freeze movement which Rees says is controlled from Moscow. Readers Digest author John Barron admits he used Rees’s material as a primary source for his 1981 broadside at the anti-nuclear movement. There they gain a semblance of "respectability," something the Birchers or Western Goals could never provide.

Western Goals & The LAPD

It is not surprising, then, that the Foundation was recently tied into political infighting between the Los Angeles Times and the LAPD chief, Daryl F. Gates. The LA Times, which is owned by the Trilateral Commission-connected Times-Mirror Co., has been gunning for Gates since they made and issue of spying by the infamous LAPD Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID).

The intrigue began in November 1982, when an associate superintendent of the LA unified school district, Jerry Halverson, was called into his boss’s office for a meeting. According to sworn testimony he has given in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU sponsored Citizens’ Commission on Police Repression, Halverson was shocked to find the editor of the LA Times Metro Section, Noel Greenwood, leading the meeting, and Police Commissioner Reva Tooley was also present. Greenwood revealed that his sources in the police department applied some heavy beans, saying that the PDID was keeping files on "very important people," and that some of those files were among those that the police commission had ordered destroyed in 1975. According to-his informants, those files had instead been offered to the school district.

Halverson admitted that files had been offered to him for storage, but he said that they were never accepted. However, Halverson said that someone in military intelligence might have taken them.

Investigations growing out of the ACLU suit have dug up evidence of a partnership between elements of PDID and the Western Goals Foundation. According to a deposition taken from the chief file keeper for the PDID, Lt. Thomas Shiedecker, Jay Paul had presented the LAPD with a scheme to acquire a new computer for the department. Paul said that he had conservative businesspartners who would donate a computer; one of those business partners was Congressman Larry McDonald. The LAPD agreed to the deal.

The computer was placed in the law offices of Paul’s wife, Anne Love, in Long Beach, to be programmed. The ground rules set by the LA police commission were that the computer would be accessible to Western Goals but no PDID files would be put into the computer.

At a recent Alexandria, VA, court hearing to compel foundation director Guell to testify in LA, a LAPD detective stated publicly that Western Goals computer discs do, in fact, contain information from the LAPD intelligence files. Meanwhile, in Baltimore September 15, a judge ordered John Rees to testify in LA and supply the jury with discs and printouts sent by Paul.


Edit: A couple notes...

Per "Inside the League," Anderson, pg. 156, Roy Cohn was part of the Western Goals "advisory board." I am following up on this, unsure if I am reading it right.

pg. 304 - "The LAPD Intelligence Division was not, however, the only source of material for Western Goals. According to reporter David Lindorff (The Nation May 5 1984) - "It appears, from testimony in the Jay Paul case, that Western Goals also got information from private corporations, such as Exxon and Security Pacific Bank."
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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Apr 02, 2014 9:47 pm

Nelson Bunker Hunt is identified in "Inside the League" as a "primary sponsor" of Western Goals.

He also shows up in Jim Hougan's Spooks on a very relevant...

pg 74

Working for the very wealthy can be hazardous to your health, however, as former FBI agent Paul Rothermeil claims to have discovered. In conversations with reporter Peter Noyes, and subsequently with myself, Rothermeil described his peculiar past association with the fabulously wealthy Hunt family of Texas. While employed in the secret service of the patriarch, H. L. Hunt, Rothermeil said that the old man's son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, approached him in connection with a plan to form a paramilitary group for "political purposes," a killer force that would train on desert estates in the West.

...

According to Rothermeil, however, Hunt was not content with mere riches, and therefore organized the so-called American Volunteer Group (AVG) -- organized it, that is, with supposedly lethal intent.

...

Denying any knowledge of paramilitary affairs or European "gas guns," Nelson Bunker Hunt urged this writer to investigate Rothermeil's government background. "I think you'll find he's CIA," the billionaire said, although he declined to elaborate on the significance of that belief...


Great bibiolography @ Namebase: http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb01?_A ... TEER_GROUP
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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Apr 02, 2014 10:45 pm

Via: http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brusse ... ction.html

The Facts Behind a Sinister Connection

1970: Los Angeles Police Chief Edward M. Davis -- a staunch conservative -- created the Public Disorders Intelligence Division (PDID). Five years earlier Davis had formed the Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS), California's top political intelligence-gathering operation.

1971: Louis Tackwood, agent-provocateur for the Los Angeles Police Department, exposed police involvement in "dirty tricks and murderous things" (Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1971). Tackwood later identified White House plumbers "Martin" and "White," linking the Pentagon to the LAPD (June 18, 1972). "Martin" and "White" were actually former CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, both implicated in the Watergate break-in. Before the 1972 Republican National Convention was switched from San Diego to Miami, members of the LAPD formulated plans to incite riots, kidnap protesters and incredibly -- because they thought Vice President Spiro Agnew's outspoken conservatism was more to their liking -- plotted the assassination of President Nixon.

1973-1975: The Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Watergate and Related Activities refused to expose the connections between Watergate and the LAPD. They were aware of -- and suppressed -- what had been festering for many years.

1975: The Los Angeles Police Commission, a civilian agency, ordered 2 million police-intelligence files to be destroyed. These files contained information on law-abiding citizens and had nothing to do with criminals. This information was obtained through infiltration, provocateurs, burglaries in homes and offices, bugging and wiretapping during massive spy operations throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

1970-1972: Lawsuits against police abuses escalated as it became apparent that spying was continuing. The files ordered to be destroyed were never removed from LAPD intelligence.

January 4, 1983: Representing 131 clients, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the LAPD and continued its efforts to locate files on over 200 organizations being spied upon. Among them were the following: Coalition Against Police Abuse; Alliance for Survival; U.S. Communist Party; Black Panther Party; Teamsters for Democratic Union; Peace and Freedom Party; Progressive Labor Party; Greater Watts Justice Center; Church of Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard); La Raza Unida; People's College of Law; Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee; Venceremos Brigade; antinuclear groups (all of them); American Friends Service Committee; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; United Farm Workers Local 80; American Civil Liberties Union; Community Relations Conference; Juvenile Justice Center; Socialist Workers Party; New Mount Pleasant Baptist Church; and Women For. PDID officer Jay Paul finally admitted he had removed between 50 and 100 cartons of police intelligence files to his garage in Long Beach, California. His wife, attorney Ann Love, was receiving a salary of $30,000 a year to put information from those cartons into a computer.

May 24, 1983: The Los Angeles Times ran the following headline: "DETECTIVE IN SPYING CASE LINKED TO BIRCH LEADER - Suspect in Police Probe Ran Private Computer That Keeps Records on Leftists in U.S." Representative Larry McDonald, chairman of the John Birch Society, was publicly exposed for obtaining stolen documents ordered destroyed years before. Western Goals, a tax-free foundation, was paying for the computer and labor to transfer these "crown jewels" to McDonald's Alexandria, Virginia, and German offices.

June 6, 1983: "L.A.'s Police Probe Leads to Prominent Right-Wing Lawmaker." (The headline should have read "Right-Wing Lawbreaker.") Western Goals was reported to have filled the gap caused by legal restraints imposed on the FBI and the abolition in 1975 of the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was also reported that Los Angeles faced a threat of terrorist action during the 1984 Olympics that would be comparable to the Palestine Liberation Organization's attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Robert Byron Watson's alleged (November 1977) affidavit connected McDonald to the Palestinian organizations that, along with the CIA, caused the Munich massacre. McDonald justified his Western Goals involvement with LAPD intelligence files as necessary for "future Olympic Games security." Evidence emerged that Western Goals, members of the LAPD and Pentagon personnel planned previous riots and fatal provocations.

August 19, 1983: McDonald and Western Goals were ordered to turn over 30 computer floppy discs and their printouts, plus storage tape and printouts, to a Los Angeles grand jury. Lawyers won a delay of the August 9 subpoena for a hearing on September 13.

September 1, 1983: Representative Larry McDonald, chairman of Western Goals, was killed on Flight 007.

September 15, 1983: Linda Guell, the new Western Goals chairman, stated she would not testify before the Los Angeles grand jury unless she received immunity from prosecution. Otherwise she would invoke the Fifth Amendment. The irony, of course, was that Guell would be using one Constitutional amendment (the Fifth) to abuse another (the First).

September 15, 1983: LAPD Detective Ben Lovato, one of those being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union, was accused of threatening to kill Western Goals editor John Rees.
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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Apr 26, 2014 12:43 pm

Can't leave Mae B out of this party: http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brusse ... onald.html

The first indication that something was even more rotten than usual in California came on August 15, 1980, when Warren Hinckle – the former editor of Ramparts magazine – noted that the snooping of Jerry Ducote appeared to involve members of Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial staff. (Ducote was a former sheriff's deputy employed by Reagan's backers, who infiltrated suspected subversive groups.)

"What is happening in Santa Clara County today is the germ of the biggest scandal of the next 1 1/2 years," Hinckle said. "People thought that with Watergate it was all over. But this is the next layer of Watergate."

On January 4, 1983, nearly 2 1/2 years after Hinckle's prediction, Detective Jay Paul of the Los Angeles Police Department supplied a weary team of investigators with what was going to be the connection between Larry McDonald and Ronald Reagan. That day marked the end of McDonald's usefulness to the larger network he served. He had become a liability to some very important people.

What brought down a carefully constructed web of deceit were massive numbers of files illegally assembled on law-abiding citizens by the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID). These files were ordered destroyed in 1975, but it was later discovered that LAPD officers kept the data-bank information.

Enraged by this disobedience, the Los Angeles Police Commission officially requested the files. But by then, Lieutenant Thomas Scheidecker had stolen at least 10,000 pages of documents. And PDID Detective Jay Paul had moved a huge batch of files into the garage of his Long Beach, California, home, where his wife – attorney Ann Love – was being paid $30,000 a year to feed a sophisticated, $100,000 computer this information that had been ordered destroyed.


The information eventually wound up in the computer of the Western Goals Foundation. And lo and behold, the man who paid Ann Love was Representative Larry McDonald, head of Western Goals.

Also caught up in the web was John Rees, editor of the Western Goals Foundation and a longtime associate of Jerry Ducote through their common bosses and similar methods of accumulating data. Both acted as agents provocateurs.

"An agent provocateur is a police agent who is introduced into any political organization with instructions to foment discontent . . . or to take a case in order to give his employers the right to act against the organization in question," according to Victor Kaledin, a colonel in the Imperial Russian Military Intelligence.

Ducote was employed in such activities by Ronald Reagan's backers and by the John Birch Society. Rees worked with the Birch Society and virtually every other right-wing group, feeding them information they could use to harass and embarrass those who opposed their point of view.

Reagan's man (Ducote) and Larry McDonald's crony (John Rees) worked together at the San Francisco-based Western Research, also known as Research West. Ducote secluded himself behind unmarked doors, running a blacklisting service for industry. The results of his spying were added to a repository of information used by Governor Reagan to screen out potential state employees with leftist political tendencies that were contrary to his own beliefs.

At the same time, photographs of rallies and demonstrations – along with copies of underground newspapers – were being supplied to Western Research by agents of the Los Angeles Police Department. In turn, Western Research sold background information about employees, advising corporations about possible risks.

Research West, as it was later called, maintained close ties with law-enforcement agencies and private data banks, using its spies to supply information to utility companies anxious to identify anti-nuclear activists. Clearly, blacklisting hadn't ended with the death of Senator Joseph McCarthy years before. The witch hunt never ceased.


Last January in Los Angeles the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of 131 law-abiding groups and individuals who were illegally spied upon. Among the defendants in this case are 54 police officers who are members of the LAPD's Public Disorder Intelligence Division.

The law firm representing these defendants – its highly sensitive files were being funneled to Representative Larry McDonald's Western Goals Foundation – is Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher. Curiously enough, Attorney General William French Smith was a partner in that firm. And none other than President Ronald Reagan is a client of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher for all personal matters.

In any event, time was running out on Larry McDonald's many years of stealing, bugging and compiling. He was about to be subpoenaed by a Los Angeles County grand jury. His testimony, particularly the portions telling of how his Long Beach computer was being fed with illegal police intelligence files, could embarrass and even damage a great number of powerful people.


...

A far more sinister organization, Larry McDonald's Western Goals Foundation, was formed in 1979. Members of its advisory board are listed in brochures and newspaper advertisements. They include the following:

Jean Ashbrook, Mrs. Walter Brennan, Taylor Caldwell, Roy M. Cohn, Congressman Philip M. Crane (R-Illinois), General Raymond Davis, Henry Hazlitt, Dr. Mildred F. Jefferson, Dr. Anthony Kubek, Robert Milliken, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, E. A. Morris, Vice-Admiral Lloyd M. Mustin, Mrs. John C. Newington, General George S. Patton III, Dr. Hans Sennholz, General John Singlaub, Dan Smoot, Robert Stoddard, Congressman Bob Stump (D-Arizona), Mrs. Helen Marie Taylor, Dr. Edward Teller, General Lewis Walt and Dr. Eugene Wigner.

The executive staff of Western Goals consists of Linda Guell, director; John Rees, editor; and Julia Ferguson, research associate.

Two members of Western Goals bear special mention. According to Seymour Hersh's recent book The Price of Power in the Nixon White House, Admiral Thomas Moorer masterminded the surreptitious removal of sensitive data from President Nixon's office. Working through Yeoman Charles Radford, Moorer stole papers clearly marked "President's Eyes Only" and had them delivered to the Pentagon.

His reward for stealing these top-secret documents was a promotion to the prestigious Joint Chiefs of Staff. Merry Christmas, Cambodia! Bypassing every member of Congress, Henry Kissinger and Admiral Moorer conducted their own private war against that country – which has not fought the United States at any time – gleefully selecting bombing targets that cost the lives of millions of innocent people.

It later developed that the Los Angeles Police Department files on 2 million Californians were assessed by Moorer's and McDonald's Western Goals computer.

So it comes to pass that the criminal keep track of the innocent. Information about you is probably already filed and computerized in their secret data banks. Would you trust people like this with your good name?

A second Western Goals advisory-board member worth noting is Edward Teller, Hungarian-born father of the hydrogen bomb. The same day that McDonald made the front page of the Washington Post – when Western Goals was ordered to answer the stolen-documents subpoena in Los Angeles – Teller was attending a European seminar on nuclear warfare that was critical to America's future foreign policy.
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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun May 11, 2014 4:56 pm

"Operating out of a quaint townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia's colonial Old Town, Western Goals seeks to keep track of 'subversives' in the United States. It was the brainchild of Representative John P. McDonald, the late chairman of the John Birch Society, who once described Martin Luther King, Jr., as a man 'wedded to violence.' Until his death aboard Korean Air Line flight 007 in September 1983, McDonald watched Western Goals grow dramatically. Today, Western Goals carries on its business; the martyred McDonald's office within the townhouse is preserved as something of a shrine. To his fellow ultra-rights, McDonald was 'the first victim of World War Three.'

"Established in 1979, Western Goals brought together a whole range of rightists who lamented the passing of domestic surveillance of 'subversives.' Among its primary sponsors are Nelson Bunker Hunt, the Texas billionaire who made an unsuccessful bid to corner the international silver market in 1982. On the advisory board are General Singlaub and another member of the United States Council of World Freedom, Anthony Kubek. In Western Goals they are in the company of conservative congressmen (Bob Stump, R-Arizona, and Philip Crane, R-Illinois), retired high-ranking military officers (Admiral Thomas Moorer, General Raymond Davis, General Lewis Walt, and General George S. Patton III) and such McCarthy-era luminaries as redbaiting lawyer Roy Cohn.

"Western Goals is open about its mission: it seeks a return to the internal surveillance practices of the 1950s. One of its 'documentary' films, The Subversion Factor, details the internal security problems that in their view have beset the United States since the late 1950s. It also operates a weekly radio program that is carried by over seventy stations throughout the country and publishes a newsletter and such monographs as D'Aubuisson on Democracy and The War Called Peace, 'a startling account of those who are actually financing the nuclear freeze movement.'

"Not content to merely pine for the past and lament the present, Western Goals has a plan and the means to implement it.

In the field of Marxists, terrorism and subversion, Western Goals has the most experienced advisors and staff in the United States. Acting on the advice of these nationally known professionals, the Foundation has begun the computerization of thousands of documents relating to the internal security of our country and the protection of government and institutions from Communist-controlled penetration and subversion.

"Such a programme hit a responsive chord among the New Right; from a modest budget in 1980, revenues increased over 500 percent the following year. According to the Goal's own records, 29 percent of this came from foundations, with another 14 percent from corporations/ By 1983, it had an operating budget of nearly a half-million dollars."

(Inside the League, Scott & Jon Anderson, pgs. 155-156)

Transcription via Visup: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2013/11/a ... ecret.html

Who also offers this commentary on the above excerpt:

It's entirely possible that a good chunk of the funding for Western Goals also came from off-the-books sources as well, as shall be examined in just a moment. First, two quick points need to be made about the above quote: the longtime JBS chairman and founder of Western Goals was actually named Larry P. McDonald, and not John. Otherwise everything else the Anderson bros wrote about McDonald is correct, including the patron saint-like status he occupies in the modern day Patriot movement.
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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri May 16, 2014 1:09 pm

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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby Grizzly » Fri May 16, 2014 7:25 pm

Fuck, no wonder this country is in the state that it's in... "The witch hunt never ended.."


“I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.” ― Gregory David Roberts
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Western Goals & American Phoenix

Postby tapitsbo » Tue Dec 08, 2015 12:30 pm

An interesting contrast to this top-down sort of program are the programs of simultaneous assassination such as practiced by Zionist terrorists in the early twentieth century.

Funny that nothing like that has ever properly taken off in America, either.
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