Tuesday, August 25, 2015

CIA archives: Langley had its hands heavily involved in treason against President Carter




CIA archives: Langley had its hands heavily involved in treason against President Carter by Wayne Madsen

Declassified Central Intelligence Agency archives indicate that the top brass at Langley was concerned about press reports in 1980 that not only did the Ronald Reagan-George Bush-William Casey campaign team engineer an "arms-for-no-hostages" deal with Ayatollah Khomeini's government in Iran -- thus ensuring the U.S. embassy hostages would remain in Tehran until after the November presidential election -- but also tipped off Iran about President Jimmy Carter's planned attempt to rescue the hostages using military force.

According to documents held in the CIA archives until they were declassified in 2012,      officials of the Carter White House suspected that the Reagan-Casey team had a mole inside the National Security Council. Moreover, this mole was believed to be directly passing classified information on the military operation to rescue the hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, planned for April 24, 1980. The operation was complex and dangerous. Delta Force commandos were to land at an initial staging area in Khorasan province, code named Desert One. They would then fly 260 miles to a second staging area in the Tehran suburbs, code named Desert Two, where they would link up with CIA agents on the ground in Iran and local Iranian support personnel. The U.S. and Iranian team were to drive to the U.S. embassy compound in trucks and then engage the student hostage takers, and, if the plan worked, free the hostages and exfiltrate them to Deserts One and Two and eventual freedom when they reached Saudi Arabia.    

The CIA's director of security, Robert Gambino, the George H. W. Bush loyalist, retired from the CIA in early 1980 to join the Bush presidential campaign. He then switched to the Reagan-Bush campaign after Reagan selected Bush at the July nominating convention in Detroit. Gambino is mentioned in the documents as a liaison between William Casey and disloyal elements within the CIA. Gambino also gave Jeb Bush his CIA indoctrination in 1977 prior to Jeb leaving for a two year assignment as vice president for Texas Commerce Bank, owned by James Baker, in Caracas. Jeb Bush and Gambino initially worked together on George H. W. Bush's campaign in 1980. They both joined the Reagan-Bush campaign in July after Reagan was nominated by the Republican convention in Detroit with Bush as his running mate. Initially, it appears that the CIA group working against Carter was dealing with both the Reagan and Bush presidential campaigns in early 1980. Although Bush beat Reagan in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, Reagan went on to win most of the later primaries.

The classified information on Eagle Claw and negotiations with Iran were passed to Casey, Richard Allen, Ed Meese, and Judge William Clark. Essentially, these four men were operating a spy operation targeting the Carter White House using one or more moles within the National Security Council. Bush agents within the National Security Council were also active. These included Stefan Halper whose father-in-law was Dr. Ray Cline, former deputy director of the CIA. Cline's network of agents, including Ted Shackley, forced to retire from the CIA in 1979, extended to the Carter National Security Council and CIA officers who were thought to be loyal to its director Admiral Stansfield Turner. However, these old Bush loyalists were loyal not to Turner but to Bush and Casey. Halper, Cline, and Jeb Bush's pal Gambino worked together to ensure as much intelligence as possible was passed from the White House to Allen, Casey, Meese, and Clark. Many CIA officers recalled how Carter's first choice to head the agency was Ted Sorensen, the aide to and speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy. Many CIA old timers, who were called "cowboys" by President Carter, feared that Sorensen would unlock the secrets of Langley's involvement in the assassination of his old boss, JFK. They strenuously blocked Sorensen's nomination.

Although a dry dust storm, known as a haboob, resulted in one of the helicopters from theUSS Nimitz having to abort its rendezvous at Desert One and return to the ship, the series of errors and accidents that doomed the rescue mission were not what ultimately resulted in its failure.



Delta Force attacked an Iranian oil tanker truck at the Desert One location to prevent it from revealing the operation. One of the passengers in the tanker truck survived and he escaped in a pickup truck. The resulting nighttime explosion also gave away the U.S. presence to a passing Iranian passenger bus that was taken captive by the U.S. assault team. Eagle Claw was aborted by Carter's order. As the U.S. force was withdrawing from Desert One and amid the swirling sand from the haboob, one of the Marine helicopters collided with an Air Force EC-130, resulting in yet a second explosion that killed eight U.S. servicemen.

The debacle at Desert One merely added fuel to the Reagan and Bush campaigns' charges that Carter was an ineffectual president. However, it did not matter whether the haboob caused Eagle Claw's failure or not. The treason committed by both campaigns had already resulted in the Iranians knowing beforehand about the covert operation.

On April 20, 1980, just four days before the commencement of Eagle Claw, The Washington Star ran a piece by longtime CIA Middle East officer Miles Copeland, a man who participated in the CIA's Operation Ajax that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohamed Mosadeq and placed the Shah of Iran in firm power, that provided details of the involvement of Oman, Egypt, and U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf of Oman in a planned hostage rescue mission. The Carter White House went into damage control mode over the obvious leak. Radio Iran broadcast the Star's story the same day that it ran in Washington, April 20.

The White House response was that U.S. military planes in Oman were there to supply the Afghan "freedom fighters." However, Carter was forced to reveal the true nature of the planes to both British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was even then close to candidate Reagan, and her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington. British MI-6 officers in Oman were, in turn, informed about the hostage rescue mission and they were duty bound to inform Oman's Sultan, Qabus bin Said, what actual mission the U.S. planes on Masirah island were about to embark upon. Soon, the secret plans to rescue the hostages were known in the Persian Gulf city that was the center of all political gossip in the region: Dubai, where Iranian agents were in great abundance. Explanations through diplomatic channels also had to be provided by President Carter to the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, both of which were revealed to be part of the covert operation. The supposed highly-classified plan to rescue the U.S. hostages was leaking like a sieve.

Retired Rear Admiral Robert Garrick had actually organized a group of retired military officers to conduct surveillance of U.S. air and naval bases and report to him, who would, in turn, inform the Reagan campaign, any sudden and large movements of planes, ships, or military personnel from the United States to the Middle East. Garrick's job for the campaign was titled "director of research and policy development of the Reagan-Bush Campaign Committee." After Reagan's inauguration, Garrick became deputy counselor to the president under Meese. 
Max Hugel, Casey's campaign assistant, ensured that intelligence assistance for Reagan was supplied by Israel's many agents inside the White House and Pentagon. Hugel became Casey's CIA director of operations in 1981 but soon resigned after it was discovered that Hugel was loose with his lips in passing secrets to Israeli government officials. Hugel resigned, officially for Wall Street securities fraud.

The identity of the mole or moles inside the Carter White House have long been the subject of intense speculation. Robert Gates, a Bush loyalist in the National Security Council and a future CIA director, was one major suspect. Another was Donald Gregg, who started with the National Security Council in 1979 upon transferring from the CIA headquarters where he reported to Shackley. He later became national security adviser to Vice President Bush. The fact that Allen received the same copies of daily CIA intelligence reports that were received by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski made the likely source of the reports the NSC. Brzezinski had briefed H. Ross Perot, who had already freed from an Iranian prison two of his Electronic Data Systems (EDS) employees, on the operation. Perot contracted with former Green Berets to successfully free his employees and Brzezinski was eager for Perot's experience in carrying out the rescue mission. However, Perot was also close to top Republicans, including fellow Texan oil man Bush, as well as Reagan.

Two enterprising Washington, DC newswomen smelled the Reagan/Bush rat with regard to treason against Carter. They were Elizabeth Drew of The New Yorker and Mary McGrory ofThe Washington Post. The theft of CIA intelligence reports and presidential debate briefing materials from the Carter White House was enough to convince Drew and McGrory, two veteran reporters who covered Watergate, that something was amiss with the Reagan/Bush campaigns. Later, The New Republic's Daniel Schorr joined Drew and McGrory in their suspicions about high-level treason in the Reagan/Bush ranks. However, the two women were facing charges of acting as "conspiracy theorists" from Reagan's willing media accomplices, including George Will, William Buckley, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak, and even muckraking columnist Jack Anderson.

Vice President Walter Mondale was among those who believed that the White House suffered from those who were leaking highly-classified information to the Reagan-Bush campaigns.

Some members of the press were enlisted in the Reagan/Bush treason against Carter. In September 1980, Washington Post Pentagon correspondent George Wilson received in the mail a document titled "OPLAN EAGLE CLAW Loss Estimate." The document claimed that the hostage rescue mission, had it not been aborted, would have resulted in 60 percent of the hostages killed or wounded during the operation. The document, however, turned out to be a clever forgery. It was not the only forgery crafted by the Reagan-Bush-Casey team that was designed to make Carter look bad.

The mole or moles inside the Carter White House would plague him until October 1980, when Carter's sensitive debate "briefing book" was stolen from the Carter team and ended up in the hands of Reagan and his cronies.

The Reagan-Bush treason also resulted in some 100 CIA agents operating in Iran being compromised after the rescue mission failed. Among the CIA assets were several moles placed among the Iranian students who were holding the embassy. Many agents were actually pulled out of Tehran prior to the Desert One catastrophe, fearing the Copeland article had compromised the operation.

One of the CIA assets compromised by the Reagan-Bush treason was Iranian foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who had, in September 1980, told Agence France-Presse that the Reagan-Bush campaign was trying to forestall a negotiated release of the hostages. The AFPreport quoted Ghotbzadeh as saying that the Reagan people were "'trying to block a solution' to the hostage crisis . . . Two friends of Ghotbzadeh who spoke to him frequently during this period said that he insisted repeatedly that the Republicans were in contact with elements in Iran to try to block a hostage release."

It was later discovered that Ghotbzadeh and his loyalists were part of the Eagle Claw operation. Two days after the November 5th U.S. election, Ghotbzadeh was arrested in Tehran for treason. Although he was released, he became a chief suspect among the Iranian radicals as a Western agent-of-influence. In 1982, he was re-arrested and charged with plotting against the government. Ghotbzadeh was executed by firing squad on September 15, 1982. Ghotzbzadeh was not the only American asset executed. Thanks to the treason of Reagan, Bush, and their teams, a number of other U.S. intelligence assets were caught and executed in Iran.


Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, compromised by Reagan-Bush treason against Jimmy Carter.

As Jeb Bush condemns President Obama for the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran, it should be recalled that he, like his father, committed treason against a sitting president in 1980. Ironically, the treason concerned Iran. Jeb Bush's opposition to Obama and the Iran nuclear deal should be seen in light of his treasonous past rather than in a mere policy difference with the current president. As President Carter begins treatment for cancer, the country owes it to him to fully explain the treason of the Bush family, Ronald Reagan, and their cohorts and cronies in 1980. It does not matter how many continuing classified documents need to be leaked to give Jimmy Carter a sense of satisfaction that it was high treason, not political ineptness, that sank his presidency.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Mossad either getting sloppier or more arrogant in Bangkok bombing by Wayne Madsen




Mossad either getting sloppier or more arrogant in Bangkok bombing
by Wayne Madsen

Thailand's all-points bulletin for a young black-haired man of "Middle Eastern" and/or "European" extraction who is wanted for placing an explosive-laden backpack among mostly Chinese tourists at Bangkok's Lord Brahma Hindu shrine at Erawan in the Chidlom district, in the heart of Bangkok's busy shopping and tourist area, is either a sign that Israel's Mossad is getting sloppier in its false flag attacks or more arrogant in carrying them out.

The bombing killed 27 people, including four Chinese nationals, and wounded more than 120. Among the dead were, in addition to the Chinese, Thais, Malaysians, Singaporeans, and one Filipino, one Indonesian, and one British national. Although no claims of responsibility were made, Israel quickly tried to link the bombing to Iran. This is a major clue as to who was responsible for the attack, along with the fact that the Israeli media was proclaiming that no Israelis were killed or injured in the bombing but that it took place in an area often frequented by Israeli tourists and shoppers. If the area had so many Israeli shoppers normally present why were no Israelis among the dead or injured? The Israeli embassy in Bangkok was quick to report no Israeli casualties in the bombing. One explanation is the Israelis had some form of advance warning to steer clear of Erawan. The fact that no Israelis were harmed in the bombing is even more astounding considering the fact that Thai authorities stated that the intended targets were, in fact, foreigners. Among the injured were Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysians, Hong Kongers, Japanese, Singaporeans, and a Philippines citizen, an Omani, a Qatari, an Indonesian, and a Maldivian. But no Israelis in one of their "hot spots" in Bangkok.

The Israeli media also lauded the work of the Chabad House in Bangkok for taking care of many Israeli tourists who flocked there for news about the bombing and mutual support. WMR previously reported on our trip to the Chabad House in 2007. It was clear that "non-Middle Eastern looking" people are not welcome there and that it serves the interests, as do all Chabad Houses, of the local Mossad intelligence stations.

The New York Jewish newspaper "The Algemeiner" reported that the Erawan Shrine and adjacent MBK Shopping Complex are known as an "Israeli hot spot" in Bangkok.
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Chief suspect in Bangkok bombing (above from security camera) is reported to be "Middle Eastern-looking" and of "European" descent. Some security experts believe the man in the security footage was wearing a wig and glasses as a disguise because he was aware of the number of security cameras in the area. A Mossad team that carried out an assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai in 2010 also wore crude disguises, This is coded law enforcement language for "Israeli." Thai police sketch of perpetrator (below).


Law enforcement agencies around the world, including INTERPOL, are forced to use terms like "Middle Eastern-looking," "Mediterranean-looking," or, as the Thai National Police have recently used in its quest for the Bangkok bomber, "European/Middle Eastern in appearance." To use the term "Israeli" would mean a barrage of howls from Jewish and Israeli organizations that the police agencies are "anti-Semitic." The situation is so bad at the U.S. FBI, any use of the term "Israeli" to suggest terrorism or espionage is seen as a "career killer" for the offending agent.

Plainly, if a suspect were Arab, South Asian, or Muslim, those terms would be used by the police, whether in Thailand, which has a history of fighting a Muslim insurgency in the south of the country, to Britain, which has a sizable Muslim community. Thai police have described the main suspect as a "khaek khao," which means a light-skinned person of South Asian, Persian, or Middle Eastern extraction, not, as is being mis-reported by the Western media, Asian or Middle Eastern "Muslims." Khaek kao could mean a Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Muslim, or Jew hailing from India in the east to the Levant in the west and anyplace in between.

khaek khao

The political correctness involved in investigating the Bangkok bombing has resulted in conflicting information coming from the Thai government. The police said they are looking for a "tall foreign man" with a "prominent nose." The police also said the suspect spoke neither Thai nor English but "another foreign language." Security cameras caught a tall man wearing a yellow T-shirt leave a backpack at the scene of the bombing 15 minutes before the explosion. Police are also looking for two other suspicious people spotted near the man with the backpack. However, a military spokesman said the bombers were not tied to any "international terrorists." Mossad operational teams often consist of 3 to 4 people, with one often a female. Other Thai law enforcement sources said there may be as many as 10 people involved in carrying out the bombing. A later Thai police report suggests that the main suspect may have already fled Thailand, an indication of a sophisticated operation that was not only responsible for the bombing but the exfiltration from Thailand of the team of bombers.

The fact that the bombing is similar to a previous one in Bangkok linked to Mossad suggests both the Thai police and military are correct. The perpetrator is "foreign" and the Mossad is not considered per se an "international terrorist" organization, although it has carried out a number of terrorist acts around the world. The yellow shirt-clad suspect disappeared into a Bangkok neighborhood where a number of Uighur refugees from China live. The escape route was clearly intended to pin the blame for the attack on the Muslim Uighurs, 109 of which were forcibly deported by Thailand to China last month. The Israeli media could not seem to decide on whether the perpetrators were Iranian or Uighurs. Rupert Murdoch's pro-Israeli newspapers tried to pin blame for the attack on Hezbollah.

Thai police said the bomb was a pipe bomb packed with ball bearings that is typically used in terrorist explosions abroad. The bomb's ball bearing shrapnel is designed to kill and maim large numbers of people and not destroy much property. A similar bomb exploded at 
Sathon pier the next day but it caused no casualties.

WMR reported on the attempt by Israel to pin a 2012 bombing in Bangkok on Iran. Our February 15, 2012 report: "
The motto of Mossad has long been based on practicing the art of deception to engage in covert and overt warfare. Mossad's motto "By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War" (Hebrew: be-tahbūlōt ta`aseh lekhā milkhamāh) is being carried out in supposed Iranian-engineered bomb plots against Israeli diplomats in New Delhi, India; Tbilisi, Georgia; and Bangkok, Thailand.

The Israeli ambassador to Thailand, Itzhak Shoham, is alleging that the latest bomb plot in Bangkok, in which two men said to be carrying Iranian passports were caught trying to carry out a bomb plot against Israeli diplomatic targets, were similar to two other operations in Tbilisi and New Delhi. The Tbilisi and New Delhi operations saw amateurish homemade magnetic 'sticky bombs,' similar to those that Israel and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) have used to carry out car bomb assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran, being used against Israeli embassy targets.

In Bangkok, 'sticky bombs' made from C-4 explosives went off prematurely in the home of two suspects. The residence is located on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok. One of the alleged Iranians caught by Thai police is Saeid Moradi. Moradi lost his legs while tossing a grenade at police while they were chasing Moradi.

Earlier, a bomb attached to an Israeli diplomatic vehicle exploded, slightly wounding the wife of an Israeli diplomat. The woman was released from the hospital later the same day. In Tbilisi, a bomb attached to an Israeli diplomatic vehicle was defused before it as detonated . . . 
Israeli officials have promised retaliation for the alleged Iranian attacks. However, Iran has stated that Israel carried out the attacks in order to damage Tehran's good relations with India, Georgia, and Thailand. Thailand recently recognized the statehood of Palestine.
Thai authorities had been expecting a Mossad operation for the past month in retaliation for Thailand's recognition of Palestine . . . Moradi, the alleged Iranian grenade thrower, flew to Bangkok from Seoul. After arriving in Thailand, Moradi traveled to Phuket and then to Chonburi, remaining for several days during the Cobra Gold exercise. It is believed by Thai sources that Moradi obtained the hand grenades from the U.S. Special Forces team in Chonburi. Moradi threw the grenades at police on Sukhumvit Soi 7 in the Nana area of Bangkok
 [the area is close to the Nana sois 3,5, 9, and 11, where the suspected Erawan shrine bomber is believed to have escaped after carrying out the bombing of the shrine] .. . Thai sources also point out that Moradi is of Persian Jewish origin. A number of prominent Iranian Jewish families, some of whom are in exile in the United States, have the last name Moradi . . . A number of international terrorism experts claim the Bangkok operation lacked the sophistication that would be expected from Iranian intelligence or Iran's Quds special operations force . . . WMR has learned from Thai sources that the Ekkamai safe house was being used as an assembly center for car explosives. The devices were magnetic packages that were designed to be detonated by radio signal. The bomb packages were being shipped by the MEK from Thailand to Iran disguised as consumer electronics. The Thailand-to-Iran route is how previous car bombs targeting Iranian scientists were being smuggled into Iran.WMR followed up the 2012 bombing story on February 17, 2012: "As the old saying goes, 'when you're trapped in a hole, stop digging.' The more Israel 'reveals' about a four-nation terrorist plot allegedly aimed at Israel by Iran and Hezbollah, the more it becomes an obvious blatant propaganda ploy by Tel Aviv to pin blame on Iran and its allies.

The more Thai police look into the Ekkamai safe house used by the so-called Iranians to plan their bomb attacks against Israeli targets in Bangkok, the more it becomes clear that the house was part of a Mossad operation using Mojahedin-e-Khalk (MEK) terrorists and Iranian Jews as go-betweens.

The Ekkamai safe house was rented by an 'Iranian' woman named Leila Rohani. It is known that Rohani is an Iranian Jewish name specific to musicians in the old Persian royal court. There are a number of Iranian Jewish Rohanis living in the Los Angeles area among members of the de-throned Shah's family.

Singapore has debunked a story that was obviously planted by Mossad in a Kuwaiti newspaper that claimed that Iranian agents, all part of the same ring that allegedly targeted Israeli facilities in Georgia, India, and Thailand, planned to assassinate Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak while he was attending the Singapore Air Show. Singapore police denied they arrested a three-man Iranian-Hezbollah team in the country to kill the Israeli Defense Minister. The information was said to have been passed on by Mossad to Singapore authorities but Singapore and even the Israeli embassy in Singapore deny the story . . .

With information obtained by WMR from Thailand that the magnets used for the bombs in New Delhi and Bangkok came from the same sheet and that the toy-size bomb in New Delhi was constructed at the Ekkamai safe house factory rented by Leila Rohani, the India and Georgia operations appear to have been training missions carried out by Mossad for the benefit of MEK terrorists and their Persian Jewish handlers. A bomb slapped on to an Israeli vehicle at the Israeli embassy in Tbilisi failed to detonate.

Thai authorities are now claiming that a man who lost his legs after a bomb he was carrying detonated prematurely was merely in possession of an Iranian passport, not that he, himself, was identified as Iranian. The man, Saeid Moradi, is now in a Bangkok hospital. Moradi, like Rohani, is a common Iranian Jewish last name.

Moradi and two accomplices were reported to have cavorted with prostitutes at bars in Pattaya Beach, Thailand, before traveling to Bangkok. Actual Quds Force operatives and Iranian special operations covert units have mullahs or junior religious scholars traveling with them, acting as political officers and chaplains . . .

The team of terrorists flew to Pattaya Beach from Phuket. Phuket was near the venue where the U.S. was conducting Cobra Gold military exercises with Thai, South Korean, Japanese, Indonesian and Malaysian forces. One man seen with Moradi and two others in Bangkok, Javad Nikkhahfard, is believed to be the chief bomb maker and is now on the run from authorities. Thai authorities describe Nikkhahfard as of 'Middle Eastern descent' but give no nationality. 'Middle Eastern descent' is a common code used by American and other 'politically Semite-sitive' law enforcement agencies to describe Israelis without endangering their careers.

Another alleged Iranian in Thailand, 
Masoud Sedaghatzadeh, was arrested in Malaysia while attempting to fly back directly to Iran. Thai sources have stated that this shows that Mossad tried too hard to pin the bombings in Bangkok on Iran. Any competent intelligence agency would have, if we are to believe that the Iranian team in Bangkok was caught red-handed, have immediately found local cover, gained contact with their case officer -- presumably an official 
co
ver Iranian diplomat or non-official cover businessman in Bangkok, and then use back-up identification/passport to travel to a third  country, for example, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, or Pakistan, before returning to Iran. The Mossad had obviously pre-paid the air tickets for their 'Iranians' using their actual names for false flag purposes. However, by being stereotypically cheap, the Mossad is rapidly blowing the cover off their shoddy operation."Israelis would be so bold as to try to pin the Erawan shrine bombing on Iran. As seen in their 2012 caper in Bangkok, the Mossad was so sloppy in its operations its fingerprints began to appear all over the Bangkok crime scenes.

Jeb Bush must be asked about the 1980 October Surprise by Wayne Madsen


 Jeb Bush must be asked about the 1980 October Surprise
by Wayne Madsen

GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush has some "'splainin to do" over his knowledge of the 1979-80 operations by his father's loyalists within the Central Intelligence Agency to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term by ensuring Iran maintained custody of the U.S. embassy hostages in Tehran until after the November 1980 presidential election. A recent document uncovered by WMR from the CIA archives indicates that the man who gave Jeb Bush his CIA indoctrination before heading off to represent Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas in 1977, Robert Gambino, the deputy director for security, had an official relationship with Ted Shackley, a Bush loyalist who was fired by Carter's CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner. After his retirement from the CIA in 1980, Gambino went to work for the Bush and then Bush-Reagan presidential campaign, where he reported to Reagan campaign manager William Casey, Reagan's CIA director. Within the campaign, Gambino worked with Shackley, a veteran of CIA operations in Cuba, Chile, and Southeast Asia. Shackley was also later involved heavily in the Iran-contra scandal, which was laid by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh directly at the doorstep of Vice President George H. W. Bush.

As Jeb Bush turns up the heat on President Obama over the Iran nuclear pact and as President Carter confronts the most formidable challenge of his life, fighting liver cancer that has spread to other parts of his body, a full accounting by Jeb Bush over his role in the October Surprise -- a Reagan-Bush-Casey gambit to convince Ayatollah Khomeini to keep the U.S. hostages in return for weapons shipments ("arms-for-no-hostages" as opposed to the later "arms-for-hostages" conspiracy) must be made.

In May 1976, CIA director Bush appointed Shackley deputy director of clandestine operations. Shackley retired from the agency in 1979 after Turner continued his purge of Bush loyalists from the clandestine service and operations ranks. During Bush's 1980 presidential and vice presidential campaigns, Shackley met weekly with Bush. Jeb Bush and Gambino also worked closely with Shackley. George H W Bush has always denied that he participated in the October Surprise scandal that saw the Republican campaign deal directly with Iran on holding the hostages and dealing a fatal blow to Carter's re-election. In his father's stead, Jeb Bush's involvement in the 1980 campaign and his close connections to Shackley and Gambino demand a full accounting from the 2016 presidential hopeful.

An October 24, 1978 Top Secret CIA memo to Gambino, in which CIA responsibility for Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearances was proposed to be transferred to Gambino, describes how Gambino and Shackley worked together with "a few other groups" to defeat Carter's and Turner's proposed streamlining of the SCI compartmentation behemoth, which grew to over 50 special access programs under Bush's one-year tenure


Bush loyalists Gambino discussed ways to sink Jimmy Carter's and Stansfield Turner's special access program reforms in 1978 memo. Were one of these special access programs the one that initiated the 1980 October Surprise to sink a second term for Jimmy Carter?The CIA past of George H W Bush certainly troubled Bush's 1988 Democratic opponent for the White House, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. An April 16, 1988 memo from William Baker, the CIA's director of Public Affairs, describes how the statements of Dukakis and Jesse Jackson about Bush's CIA past were being monitored closely by the CIA and being transmitted to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.

One statement by Dukakis alarmed the Bush loyalists within the CIA. On January 29, 1988, UPI reported that Dukakis said, "The next president should convert the CIA from an organization that 'assassinates people' into an organization that advises presidents. Dukakis added, "We have to decide in this country what the CIA is going to be -- an independent agency or an assassination agency . . . the next president also must appoint agency heads who 'respect the law and human rights.'"

After President Carter's defeat in 1980, lame duck CIA director Turner, according to an internal CIA memo, decided to strike some names off his official CIA Christmas card list. These were obviously critics of himself and Carter. They included: 

- Senator and Mrs. Henry Bellmon
- Senator and Mrs. Lloyd Bentsen
- Senator and Mrs. Dale Bumpers
- Senator and Mrs. John Chaffee
- Senator and Mrs. Thomas F. Eagleton
- Senator and Mrs. Edward M. Kennedy
- Senator and Mrs. James McClure
- Senator and Mrs. Warren G. Magnuson
- Senator and Mrs. Abraham Ribicoff
- Senator and Mrs. Richard S. Schweiker
- Senator and Mrs. Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.
- Senator and Mrs. Milton R. Young
- Congressman and Mrs. Jack Brooks
- Congressman and Mrs. Bill Burlison
- Congressman and Mrs. Melvin Price
- Congressman and Mrs. Morris K. Udall
- Congressman and Mrs. Jamie L. Whitten

Apparently, George H W Bush's Christmas card list when he served his one year term as CIA director remains classified. 

When George H W Bush became president, he appointed Gambino to head the Selective Service System. After his involvement in the Iran-contra scandal, Shackley fell out of sight. He died from cancer at his Bethesda, Maryland home in 2002.

Jeb Bush's missing CIA years: Caracas banker and Miami money launderer by Wayne Madsen



Jeb Bush's missing CIA years: Caracas banker and Miami money launderer
by Wayne Masen
During the recent Republican presidential candidates' "debate" in Cleveland, former Florida Governor John Ellis Bush (JEB) wanted to recount his eight years as governor of the Sunshine State. However, it is not Bush the politician who should be of interest to voters but Bush the Central Intelligence Agency "non-official cover" banker in Venezuela and Miami-based real estate businessman/money launderer who should alarm the American electorate. While Jeb's brother, George W. Bush, glossed over his AWOL status with the Texas Air National Guard, Jeb does not have a military record to defend but he does have a CIA employment record to fess up to.

Jeb's early work in Venezuela and south Florida is much more troubling than Dubya pretending to be on active duty in Texas while he was actually off in Alabama helping a GOP U.S. Senate campaign and getting sloppy drunk in redneck bars. Jeb should fully explain his relationship with Alberto Duque, a Colombian national  who laundered drug money for the Medellin and Cali narco-cartels and Nicaraguan contras while serving as owner of City National Bank of Miami and president of the General Coffee Company of Colombia. Apparently, there was more than coffee arriving in sacks of coffee coming into Miami from Colombia. Duque financed a $30 million real estate development project run by Jeb Bush. In 1983, Duque was convicted for fraud and sent to federal prison. Duque hired a Bush family CIA crony to serve as City National Bank's president. He was Don Beazley, who previously worked for the CIA's Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Before it collapsed, Nugan Hand was responsible for laundering money from the CIA's Golden Triangle opium and heroin smuggling operations from Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle and paying off U.S. surrogates in Asia, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Park Chung Hee in South Korea, and various Thai generals.

In return for CIA money gifts, Marcos ordered his Energy Minister, Geronimo Velasco, to have the Philippines National Oil Corporation enter into business relationships with three Bush family-owned businesses: Zapata Petroleum Corporation, Zapata Offshore Company, and Overbey Oil Development Corporation. The three Bush firms were also linked to various CIA activities, including the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Jeb Bush's Texas Commerce Bank was also the bank used by the Zapata companies. Velasco died of a sudden heart attack in San Francisco in 2007. Velasco's Republic Glass Corporation became a holding company that owned a number of British Virgin Islands-based subsidiaries.

Beazley had also been president of Great American Bank of Miami. The bank was indicted for drug money laundering in 1982. Beazley also negotiated the sale of Second National Bank of Homestead, a subsidiary of Great American, to Nugan Hand. It was in this environment of interconnected CIA money laundering banks that Jeb Bush found himself and his real estate business immersed in the 1980s.

On January 25, 1980, Frank Nugan, the Australian co-founder of Nugan Hand Bank, was found dead in his car near Bowenfels, New South Wales from a "self-inflicted" rifle shot wound to his head. The card of ex-CIA director William Colby, who, himself was found floating in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland in 1996, was found in Nugan's pocket. Colby was Nugan Hand's legal counsel. Hand had planned to move with his wife and three young children to Florida but someone apparently did not like the idea of Nugan showing up in Florida during the year George H W Bush was trying to become the president of the United States.

After serving as vice president for Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas from 1977 to 1979, Bush joined his father's presidential campaign in 1980. Serving with Bush on the campaign was the CIA official who gave him his in-brief at Langley in 1977, Robert Gambino, the deputy director of security at the agency. In the 1980s, Jeb Bush provided liaison between his father's national security adviser, Donald Gregg, and various Florida-based right-wing Nicaraguan and Cuban exile organizations helping to fight the clandestine war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Jeb was appointed by his father to the board of the National Republican Institute, the GOP branch of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA-financed money laundering operation that saw millions pour into the coffers of the Nicaraguan contras, Cuban exile groups, and Salvadorean, Guatemalan, and Honduran death squads. Jeb acted as a liaison between Dr. Mario Castejon, a right-wing candidate for president of Guatemala, and Vice President Bush. Castejon sought funding for a secret shipment of arms to the contras and other right-wing rebel groups in Central America that would be masked as "medical supplies."

Jeb Bush's relationship with City National Bank, whose other senior director was Leonard Abess, a director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Foundation, ensured that a large share of NED money flowed to Israeli security firms like Tadiran, which helped Guatemala and Honduras track down leftist guerrillas and exterminate them. Jeb Bush's current support for Israel stems from his early business relationships with Zionists like Abess and other offshoots of the Meyer Lansky "Kosher Nostra" crime family in south Florida. Abess is currently a member of the Federal Reserve Bank branch of Miami. [See linked article below in "Summary" on pre-9/11 Fed money movement to Fed branch in Miami].


Jeb's thank you letter to Gambino after his 1977 CIA in-briefing at Langley. Texas Commerce Bank was owned by the family of James Baker, an early George H W Bush adviser as well as close friend.

It could be argued that Jeb Bush, from his in-brief by Gambino at the CIA in 1977, to his unsuccessful run for governor of Florida in 1994 was a reliable CIA and Israeli asset. In 1990, Jeb urged his father to pardon Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, a man wanted for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian passenger plane that had taken off from Bridgetown, Barbados. Jeb Bush was also a supporter of the U.S. House of Representatives candidacy of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, one of the most rabid anti-Castro and pro-Israeli members of Congress. Jeb also succeeded in having his father name Dexter Lehtinen, Ileana's husband, to be U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida. Lehtinen permitted a number of Jeb's friends in the Cuban and Jewish communities in southern Florida to escape prosecution for crimes ranging from drug money laundering to narcotics smuggling and contract assassinations to banking fraud.

Most of Jeb's business friends were CIA-linked bankers. In addition to Beazley, Duque, and Abess, these included Paul Helliwell, a Miami-based lawyer and the owner of two CIA money laundering banks, Great American Bank of Miami, later bought by Nugan Hand and indicted in 1982 for drug money laundering, and Castle Bank & Trust Ltd. of Nassau in the Bahamas. Helliwell, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Security (OSS) during World War II, died at the age of 62 on Christmas Eve of 1976, just a few weeks before George H W Bush departed as CIA director. The autopsy said Helliwell died from "complications of emphysema." Castle Bank shut down in 1977, the same year that Jeb moved to Caracas to work for Texas Commerce Bank. An affiliated bank that shared directors with Castle Bank, Mercantile Bank & Trust of Freeport, Bahamas, also suspended operations in 1977. Castle Bank, which had laundered CIA money to pay off such dictators as Marcos in the Philippines, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, saw much of its revenue initially come from Nationalist Chinese drug smugglers operating out of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia.

In addition to Nassau, Helliwell's Castle Bank operated out of the Cayman Islands and Panama. Among the bank's account holders were the Pritzker family of Chicago, which owns the Hyatt Hotel chain, and the daughter of President Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan. Between 1964 and 1975, Helliwell's major CIA front company, Sea Supply Corporation, ran covert military operations against Cuba from Andros Island, the largest island in the Bahamas.

Jeb's business deals also put him in close contact with two other Florida banks, Northside Bank of Miami, owned by the Cali cartel, and the Popular Bank and Trust Company, once owned by Nicaragua's Somoza but transferred to CIA control after his assassination by Sandinista commandos in Paraguay in 1980.

After his return from Caracas to Florida in 1979, Jeb befriended the right-wing Nicaraguan community as much as he did the right-wing exiled Cubans. Much of the billions of dollars that the Somoza family stole from Nicaragua ended up in CIA-connected banks that helped finance Jeb's many real estate and other ventures.


Jeb Bush as CIA "NOC" in the late 1970s [left]. Is Jeb Bush [right circled] at the 1980 funeral of ex-Nicaraguan fascist dictator Anastasio Somoza at Miami's Woodlawn Park Cemetery? Others in attendance included U.S. Representatives Larry McDonald (D-GA) and John Murphy (D-NY). Somoza was assassinated by a Sandinista car bomb in Asuncion, Paraguay. The explosion left only Somoza's feet intact.
One of Gambino's last acts as the CIA's director of security was to preserve the myriad of CIA special clearance categories, including those that permitted NOCs like Jeb Bush and drug- and arms-smuggling proprietary companies and money laundering banks to flourish. The Carter administration had ordered the intelligence community to reduce its compartmented access system with over 50 code words to just five special code word compartments by July 1980. The National Security Agency and Gambino balked and the new system, code named APEX, never materialized. When Jeb's father became vice president in 1981, APEX was scrapped for the original system, which saw the number of special compartments grow in number in order to accommodate operations that included trading weapons for hostages with Iran and covertly funding the Nicaraguan contras.

One CIA official who was alarmed over APEX was the man who CIA director George H W Bush named as deputy director for covert operations in 1976, Ted Shackley, aka the "Blond Ghost." Shackley was an old colleague of George H W Bush stemming from his days as the station chief of JMWAVE, the Miami CIA office dedicated to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. It was there that Shackley and Bush became involved with Cuban exile  and mafia parties that were later tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. The "Cuba thing" was mentioned by President Richard Nixon on Oval Office tapes subpoenaed in the Watergate scandal. It is now known that the "Cuba thing" was code for the assassination of Kennedy and the CIA's involvement in the operation. Shackley was also involved with Donald Gregg in the Phoenix assassination program in South Vietnam and Project FUBELT, the CIA operation to overthrow President Salvador Allende of Chile on September 11, 1973.

An undated TOP SECRET memo to Shackley from a CIA official whose name is redacted but believed to be Gambino provides details of Shackley and the CIA's security division opposition to APEX. The memo states: "there is no intention of establishing under the Community Security Group responsibility for a centralized computerized data base of all SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] approvals. The CSG has no functional role in this area at this time, and one is planned for the future. The CIA Special Security Center's Compartmented Information Branch is the home of the community service on special access certifications and records. They handle SPECLE . . . Any effort to upgrade the SPECLE system is years away. Further, NSA has taken no steps toward inputting their COMINT clearances." In other words, the policy of President Jimmy Carter and his CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, to limit CIA special compartments and display more accountability was being undermined by two Bush embeds in Langley, Gambino and Shackley. Shackley and Gambino were eventually forced by Turner to retire. The almost limitless penchant of the CIA to create special compartments permitted assets like Jeb Bush at the Texas Commerce Bank and Barack Obama, Jr. at Business International Corporation to evade public scrutiny as CIA employees. In a January 24, 1980 memo, to Gambino from the CIA member of the APEX Steering Group, special compartments are described as as protecting "industrial" personnel working for the CIA, NSA, and Defense Intelligence Agency.

Shackley became involved in the "October Surprise" plot by Bush and William Casey against Carter, also known as the "arms-for-no-hostages" conspiracy. Gambino joined the 1980 Bush for President and, later, the Reagan-Bush campaign. According to Jeff Stein, writing for Newsday'sJuly 25, 1980 issue, joining Gambino on the campaign were at least 40 other ex-CIA officers hired by Bush and Casey.

Jeb Bush's rise to financial and political power in Florida is coupled with a trail of dead bodies, failed banks and savings and loan institutions accused of laundering money for the CIA, and dubious characters who served as CIA assets. Until Jeb Bush fully accounts for his business activities in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, he is actually more unfit for the presidency than his draft-dodging and AWOL status brother, George W. Bush.