The Origin of Robert Parry’s Consortium News

[Octafish]

From DU2, June 25, 2006:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1505128

[Dont call me Shirley]

1. And before that came this...

http://www.truth-out.org/progressive-picks/item/13994-how-richard-nixon-sabotaged-1968-vietnam-peace-talks-to-get-elected-president

"Possibly the most notorious "October Surprise" case – and the first of this modern era – occurred in fall 1968 when Republican Richard Nixon was locked in a tight presidential race with Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and President Johnson was making progress in Vietnam peace negotiations.

At that point, a half million American soldiers were in the war zone and more than 30,000 had already died, along with Vietnamese dead estimated at about one million. In late October 1968, Johnson saw a chance for a breakthrough that would involve a bombing halt of North Vietnam and a possible framework for peace.

However, Johnson encountered surprising resistance from U.S. allies in South Vietnam. President Nguyen van Thieu was suddenly laying down obstacles to a possible settlement in the Paris peace talks.

On Oct. 29, 1968, Johnson got his first clear indication as to why. According to declassified records at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, Eugene Rostow, Johnson's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, got a tip from Wall Street financier Alexander Sachs who said that one of Nixon's closest financial backers was describing Nixon's plan to "block" a peace settlement.

Nixon's backer was sharing this information at a working lunch with his banking colleagues in the context of helping them place their bets on stocks and bonds. In other words, the investment bankers were colluding over how to make money with their inside knowledge of Nixon's scheme to extend the Vietnam War."

[hifiguy]

3. Ah yes, the famous "Chennault channel."

Well known to anyone who has bothered to read the history but still an obscure fact to most.

[Octafish]

4. You know it Dont call me Shirley. And Parry was on the case.

Profiting Off Nixon’s Vietnam ‘Treason’

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002723853#post2

[Dont call me Shirley]

6. Johnson should have piped up! What a shame he kept his mouth shut! A much different (better)

world it would be now.

[Octafish]

8. ''Treason'' was the word LBJ used.

An Insider’s View of Nixon’s ‘Treason’

Special Report: A recently released oral history by one of President Nixon’s secretive operatives sheds new light on perhaps Nixon’s darkest crime, the sabotaging of Vietnam peace talks so he could win the 1968 election, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com, July 5, 2014

Tom Charles Huston, the national security aide assigned by President Richard Nixon to investigate what President Lyndon Johnson knew about why the Vietnam peace talks failed in 1968, concluded that Nixon was personally behind a secret Republican scheme to sabotage those negotiations whose collapse cleared the way to his narrow victory – and to four more years of war.

“Over the years as I’ve studied it, I’ve concluded that there was no doubt that Nixon was – would have been directly involved, that it’s not something that anybody would’ve undertaken on their own,” Huston said in an oral history done for the Nixon presidential library in 2008 and recently released in partially redacted form.

Huston, who is best known for the 1970 Huston Plan to expand spying on the anti-Vietnam War movement, said he was assigned the peace-talk investigation after Nixon took office because Nixon was told by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that President Johnson had learned of Nixon’s sabotage through national security wiretaps.

Those wiretaps had revealed that Nixon’s campaign was promising South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu a better deal if he boycotted the Paris peace talks, which Thieu did in the days before the U.S. presidential election in 1968.

“I think clearly there was no doubt that the Nixon campaign was aggressively trying to keep President Thieu from agreeing,” Huston said in his oral history [To see the transcripts, click here and here.]

Johnson’s failure to achieve a breakthrough stalled a late surge by Vice President Hubert Humphrey and enabled Nixon to prevail in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. Nixon then expanded the war with heavier strategic bombing over Indochina and with an invasion of Cambodia before winding down U.S. troop levels by 1973.

In those Nixon years, a million more Vietnamese were estimated to have died along with an additional 20,763 U.S. dead and 111,230 wounded. The war also bitterly divided the United States, often turning parents against their own children.

Hoover’s Double Game

According to Huston, Hoover briefed Nixon on his potential vulnerability regarding Johnson’s wiretap evidence even before Nixon took office. “That goes back to the meeting that Nixon had with Hoover at the Pierre Hotel in New York after the election, at which Nixon made it clear to Hoover that he was going to reappoint him, which is what Hoover wanted.

“But, you know, Hoover was a piece of work. I mean, at the same time that pursuant to instructions from Lyndon Johnson he’s got his agents scurrying all over the damn Southwest, you know, trying to dig up dirt on the vice president-elect [Spiro Agnew for his purported role in the peace-talk sabotage], [Hoover]’s sitting with the President-elect and telling him that Johnson had bugged his airplane during the ’68 campaign,” a specific claim that was apparently false but something that Nixon appears to have believed.

Faced with uncertainty about exactly what evidence Johnson had, Nixon ordered up a review of what was in the files, including whatever obstacles that the peace talks had encountered, an area that Huston felt required examining the issue of Republican obstruction, including contacts between Nixon campaign operative Anna Chennault and senior South Vietnamese officials.

“I wasn’t really asked specifically to address Chennault, but you couldn’t really look at [Johnson’s] bombing halt and the politics of the bombing halt without — at least in my judgment, without looking at what Johnson was looking at,” Huston said. “What Johnson was looking at was this perception that the Nixon campaign was doing whatever it could to sabotage his efforts to achieve a bombing halt.”

Huston found that nearly all the national security files at the White House had been packed up and shipped to the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas, so Huston began piecing together the material from records recovered from the FBI and other federal agencies. According to the National Archives, Nixon, as the sitting president, would have had relatively easy access to the material shipped to Austin if he had wanted it.

The X-Envelope

But Johnson had taken no chances that Nixon’s team might recover the file containing the evidence on what Johnson called Nixon’s “treason.” As Johnson was leaving the White House in January 1969, he ordered his national security aide Walt Rostow to take that file and keep it in his personal possession. Rostow labeled the file “The X-Envelope,” although it has since become known to Johnson archivists as the “X-File.”

Describing his investigation, Huston said he eventually “got so frustrated … because I knew I wasn’t getting all of the information that would allow me to really understand what had happened in Paris. And so I decided to go out and start bird-dogging on my own,” reaching out to other federal agencies.

Huston said “there is no question” that the Nixon campaign approached senior South Vietnamese officials with promises of a better deal if they stayed away from the Paris peace talks.

“Clearly, [campaign manager John] Mitchell was directly involved. Mitchell was meeting with her [Chennault], and, you know, the question, was the candidate himself directly involved, and, you know, my conclusion is that there is no evidence that I found, nor that anyone else has found that I can determine, that I regard as credible, that would confirm the fact that Nixon was directly involved.

“I think my understanding of the way in which — having been in the ’68 campaign, and my understanding of the way that campaign was run, it’s inconceivable to me that John Mitchell would be running around, you know, passing messages to the South Vietnamese government, et cetera, on his own initiative.”

Though Huston reported to Nixon that the Johnson people apparently lacked a “smoking gun” that personally implicated him in the scheme, the whereabouts of the missing evidence and exactly what it showed remained a pressing concern to Nixon and his inner circle, especially in June 1971 when major American newspapers began publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers. That report revealed the deceptions that had pervaded the Vietnam conflict from its post-World War II origins through 1967, covering mostly Democratic lies.

A Dangerous Sequel

But Nixon knew what few others did, that there was the potential for a devastating sequel, the story of how the Nixon campaign had torpedoed peace talks that could have ended the war. Given the intensity of anti-war sentiment in 1971, such a revelation could have had explosive and unforeseeable consequences, conceivably even impeachment and certainly threatening Nixon’s reelection in 1972.

Huston had come to believe that a detailed report on the failed Paris peace talks, possibly containing the evidence of the Republican sabotage, had ended up at the Brookings Institution, then regarded as a liberal think tank housing many of Nixon’s top critics.

“I send [White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob”] Haldeman a memo and I said, basically, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ Here I’ve spent all these months, I’ve been chasing all over the God-dang’d government try to get everybody to give me bits and pieces and trying to do this job that you told me to do, and the God-dang’d Brookings Institution is sitting over here with a God-dang’d multi-volume report that I don’t have. And if Brookings can get the damn thing, I don’t see any reason why I can’t get it.”

According to Brookings officials and U.S. government archivists, Huston appears to have been wrong in his conclusions about the existence of such a “multi-volume report” hidden at Brookings, but his memo would have historical repercussions because it became the focus of a frantic Oval Office meeting on June 17, 1971, as Nixon and his top aides were assessing their own exposure as the Pentagon Papers filled the front pages of the New York Times.

Blow the Safe

Nixon summoned Haldeman and national security advisor Henry Kissinger into the Oval Office and – as Nixon’s own recording devices whirred softly – pleaded with them again to locate the missing file. “Do we have it?” Nixon asked Haldeman. “I’ve asked for it. You said you didn’t have it.”

Haldeman: “We can’t find it.”

Kissinger: “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”

Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”

Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.”

Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file on it.”

Nixon: “Where?”

Haldeman: “Huston swears to God that there’s a file on it and it’s at Brookings.”

Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan [for White House-sponsored break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.”

Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”

Nixon: “I want it implemented. … Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need to –“

Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.”

Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t know for sure that we don’t have them around.”

But Johnson did know that the key file documenting Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage was safely out of Nixon’s reach, entrusted to his former national security advisor Walt Rostow.

Forming the Burglars

On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.

“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. … Just go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”

Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”

Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.”

For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never took place – although Brookings officials say an attempted break-in was made – but Nixon’s desperation to locate Johnson’s peace-talk evidence was an important link in the chain of events that led to the creation of Nixon’s burglary unit under Hunt’s supervision. Hunt later oversaw the two Watergate break-ins in May and June of 1972.

While it’s possible that Nixon was still searching for the evidence about his Vietnam-peace sabotage when the Watergate break-ins occurred nearly a year later, it’s generally believed that the burglary was more broadly focused, seeking any information that might have an impact on Nixon’s re-election, either defensively or offensively.

As it turned out, Nixon’s burglars were nabbed inside the Watergate complex during their second break-in at the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972, exactly one year after Nixon’s tirade to Haldeman and Kissinger about the need to blow the safe at the Brookings Institution in pursuit of the missing Vietnam peace-talk file.

Ironically, too, Johnson and Rostow had no intention of exposing Nixon’s dirty secret regarding LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks, presumably for the same reasons that they kept their mouths shut back in 1968, out of a benighted belief that revealing Nixon’s actions might somehow not be “good for the country.” [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

The Scandal Grows

In November 1972, despite the growing scandal over the Watergate break-in, Nixon handily won reelection, crushing Sen. George McGovern, Nixon’s preferred opponent. Nixon then reached out to Johnson seeking his help in squelching Democratic-led investigations of the Watergate affair and slyly noting that Johnson had ordered wiretaps of Nixon’s campaign in 1968.

Johnson reacted angrily to the overture, refusing to cooperate. On Jan. 20, 1973, Nixon was sworn in for his second term. On Jan. 22, 1973, Johnson died of a heart attack.

In the weeks that followed Nixon’s Inauguration and Johnson’s death, the scandal over the Watergate cover-up grew more serious, creeping ever closer to the Oval Office. Meanwhile, Rostow struggled to decide what he should do with “The ‘X’ Envelope.”

On May 14, 1973, in a three-page “memorandum for the record,” Rostow summarized what was in “The ‘X’ Envelope” and provided a chronology for the events in fall 1968. Rostow reflected, too, on what effect LBJ’s public silence then may have had on the unfolding Watergate scandal.

“I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways to the Watergate affair of 1972,” Rostow wrote. He noted, first, that Nixon’s operatives may have judged that their “enterprise with the South Vietnamese” – in frustrating Johnson’s last-ditch peace initiative – had secured Nixon his narrow margin of victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

“Second, they got away with it,” Rostow wrote. “Despite considerable press commentary after the election, the matter was never investigated fully. Thus, as the same men faced the election in 1972, there was nothing in their previous experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn them off, and there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit – and beyond.” [To read Rostow’s memo, click here, here and here.]

Tie to Watergate

What Rostow didn’t know was that there was a third – and more direct – connection between the missing file and Watergate. Nixon’s fear about the evidence in the file surfacing as a follow-up to the Pentagon Papers was Nixon’s motive for creating Hunt’s burglary team in the first place.

Rostow apparently struggled with what to do with the file for the next month as the Watergate scandal expanded. On June 25, 1973, fired White House counsel John Dean delivered his blockbuster Senate testimony, claiming that Nixon got involved in the cover-up within days of the June 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee. Dean also asserted that Watergate was just part of a years-long program of political espionage directed by Nixon’s White House.

The very next day, as headlines of Dean’s testimony filled the nation’s newspapers, Rostow reached his conclusion about what to do with “The ‘X’ Envelope.” In longhand, he wrote a “Top Secret” note which read, “To be opened by the Director, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, not earlier than fifty (50) years from this date June 26, 1973.”

In other words, Rostow intended this missing link of American history to stay missing for another half century. In a typed cover letter to LBJ Library director Harry Middleton, Rostow wrote: “Sealed in the attached envelope is a file President Johnson asked me to hold personally because of its sensitive nature. In case of his death, the material was to be consigned to the LBJ Library under conditions I judged to be appropriate. …

“After fifty years the Director of the LBJ Library (or whomever may inherit his responsibilities, should the administrative structure of the National Archives change) may, alone, open this file. … If he believes the material it contains should not be opened for research [at that time], I would wish him empowered to re-close the file for another fifty years when the procedure outlined above should be repeated.”

Ultimately, however, the LBJ Library didn’t wait that long. After a little more than two decades, on July 22, 1994, the envelope was opened and the archivists began the long process of declassifying the contents.

Yet, by withholding the file on Nixon’s “treason,” Johnson and Rostow allowed for incomplete and distorted histories of the Vietnam War and Watergate to take shape – and for Nixon and his Republican cohorts to escape the full opprobrium that they deserved.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

SOURCE w/links: https://consortiumnews.com/2014/07/05/an-insiders-view-of-nixons-treason/

FTW: Robert Parry allows DUers to post entire article as "Thanks!" for helping ConsortiumNews out back in 2006. The great DUer blm helped arrange it.

[leveymg]

27. thanks for posting this!

[Historic NY]

28. This is treason........

http://millercenter.org/presidentialclassroom/exhibits/this-is-treason

[elias49]

2. Bookmarked.

Thanks.

[Octafish]

5. October Surprise figure and now Federal Judge Laurence SILBERMAN today...

Federal Appeals Judge Compares People Who Say Bush Lied To Rise Of Nazis

A federal appeals judge wrote in a column published on Sunday that people who accuse former President George W. Bush of lying about the Iraq War are peddling myths like those that led to the rise of Hitler.

Laurence H. Silberman, a federal appellate judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the idea the Bush administration "lied us into Iraq" has gone from "antiwar slogan to journalistic fact."

"It is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised," he wrote. "It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam."

After re-litigating the case for invading Iraq, Silberman wrote that the charge could have "potentially dire consequences."

"I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been 'stabbed in the back' by politicians," he wrote.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/laurence-silberman-bush-lied-nazis

via kpete: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6201723

SILBERMAN knows no shame to come up with that one.

[Dont call me Shirley]

7. It's the PeeWee Herman defense "I know you are but what am I"

[Octafish]

9. It really is.

And what amazes me is how little attention this important news gets on DU, which increasingly reflects the same POV as corporate owned news. I'm sure it's a coincidence, but if there were an honest news media -- all Americans would know these NAZIs and traitors for what they are.

[bananas]

30. Wow - I missed that!

Thanks for linking to it.

Silberman's WSJ is paywalled, hoped to find it with google but found articles about it at C&L and NY Magazine:

"Wingnut Judge: People Who Say Bush Lied Us Into War Are Just Like Nazi Propagandists"
http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/federal-judge-tries-rewrite-george-bushs

"Republicans Still Denying Bush Lied About Iraq"
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/republicans-still-denying-bush-lied-about-iraq.html

[Octafish]

31. Please let me know if anyone forwards the WSJ article.

Silberman is something else:

“Silberman has been more involved with cover-ups in the Middle East than with any attempts to unravel them (including) the October surprise episode in 1980 in which the Republicans were later accused of colluding with the revolutionary government of Iran to keep 52 American hostages confined in Iran so that they could not be freed by the Jimmy Carter administration in time to influence the 1980 presidential election….(I)n 1980 as part of that year's Republican campaign, he attended at least one of the October surprise meetings where an Iranian representative discussed what Iran would want in exchange for keeping the hostages.” -- Kevin Philips, former GOP strategist.

SOURCE: http://www.pfaw.org/press-releases/2004/02/laurence-silberman-the-right-man-or-the-rights-man

This guy's done the heavy lifting for the BFEE.

[sabrina 1]

42. Sad, but I think you are correct re DU more and more resembling corporate news.

I don't bother with the LBN forum as I know that most of the 'approved' media there is Corporate Media.

There is a reason for that, we have watchers here now, watching what people read.

However some of those same people applauded a link to Little Green Footballs which is a hate site, former far right wing site that was involved in the Dan Rather affair, part of the Right Wing Noise machine.

I wasn't surprised at all, but it shows how things on DU have changed since the people who made it what it was, have moved on for the most part to other venues, unwilling to waste time on the trivia that distracts from the most important issues.

[wildbilln864]

10. k & freakin r! n/t

[Octafish]

15. “counter-narcotics programs in Central America were not a priority of CIA personnel..."

This is the story that made a lot of people in the BFEE blow a fuse and I bet it's old news to you, wildbilln864.

CIA Admits Tolerating Contra- Cocaine Trafficking in 1980s

By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com, June 8, 2000

In secret congressional testimony, senior CIA officials admitted that the spy agency turned a blind eye to evidence of cocaine trafficking by U.S.-backed Nicaraguan contra rebels in the 1980s and generally did not treat drug smuggling through Central America as a high priority during the Reagan administration.

“In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,” CIA Inspector General Britt Snider said in classified testimony on May 25, 1999. He conceded that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in “a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.”

Still, Snider and other officials sought to minimize the seriousness of the CIA’s misconduct – a position echoed by a House Intelligence Committee report released in May and by press coverage it received. In particular, CIA officials insisted that CIA personnel did not order the contras to engage in drug trafficking and did not directly join in the smuggling.

But the CIA testimony to the House Intelligence Committee and the body of the House report confirmed long-standing allegations – dating back to the mid-1980s – that drug traffickers pervaded the contra operation and used it as a cover for smuggling substantial volumes of cocaine into the United States.

Deep in the report, the House committee noted that in some cases, “CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual.”

Former CIA officer Duane Clarridge, who oversaw covert CIA support for the contras in the early years of their war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government, said “counter-narcotics programs in Central America were not a priority of CIA personnel in the early 1980s,” according to the House report.

The House committee also reported new details about how a major Nicaraguan drug lord, Norwin Meneses, recruited one of his principal lieutenants, Oscar Danilo Blandon, with promises that much of their drug money would go to the contras. Meneses and Blandon were key figures in a controversial 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News that alleged a “dark alliance” between the CIA and contra traffickers.

That series touched off renewed interest in contra-drug trafficking and its connection to the flood of cocaine that swept through U.S. cities in the 1980s, devastating many communities with addiction and violence. In reaction to the articles by reporter Gary Webb, U.S. government agencies and leading American newspapers rallied to the CIA’s defense.

Like those responses, the House Intelligence Committee report attacked Webb’s series. It highlighted exculpatory information about the CIA and buried admissions of wrongdoing deep in the text where only a careful reading would find them. The report’s seven “findings” – accepted by the majority Republicans as well as the minority Democrats – absolved the CIA of any serious offenses, sometimes using convoluted phrasing that obscured the facts.

For instance, one key finding stated that “the CIA as an institution did not approve of connections between contras and drug traffickers, and, indeed, contras were discouraged from involvement with traffickers.” The phrasing is tricky, however. The use of the phrase “as an institution” obscures the report’s clear evidence that many CIA officials ignored the contra-cocaine smuggling and continued doing business with suspected drug traffickers.

The finding’s second sentence said, “CIA officials, on occasion, notified law enforcement entities when they became aware of allegations concerning the identities or activities of drug traffickers.” Stressing that CIA officials “on occasion” alerted law enforcement about contra drug traffickers glossed over the reality that many CIA officials withheld evidence of illegal drug smuggling and undermined investigations of those crimes.

Normally in investigations, it is the wrongdoing that is noteworthy, not the fact that some did not participate in the wrongdoing.

A close reading of the House report reveals a different story from the “findings.” On page 38, for instance, the House committee observed that the second volume of the CIA’s inspector general’s study of the contra-drug controversy disclosed numerous instances of contra-drug operations and CIA knowledge of the problem.

“The first question is what CIA knew,” the House report said. “Volume II of the CIA IG report explains in detail the knowledge the CIA had that some contras had been, were alleged to be or were in fact involved or somehow associated with drug trafficking or drug traffickers. The reporting of possible connections between drug trafficking and the Southern Front contra organizations is particularly extensive.

“The second question is what the CIA reported to DOJ [Department of Justice]. The Committee was concerned about the CIA’s record in reporting and following up on allegations of drug activity during this period. … In many cases, it is clear the information was reported from the field, but it is less clear what happened to the information after it arrived at CIA headquarters.”

In other words, the internal government investigations found that CIA officers in Central America were informing CIA headquarters at Langley, Va., about the contra-drug problem, but the evidence went no farther. It was kept from law enforcement agencies, from Congress and from the American public. Beyond withholding the evidence, the Reagan administration mounted public relations attacks on members of Congress, journalists and witnesses who were exposing the crimes in the 1980s.

In a sense, those attacks continue to this day, with reporter Gary Webb excoriated for alleged overstatements in the Mercury News stories. As a result of those attacks, Webb was forced to resign from the Mercury News and leave daily journalism. No member of the Reagan administration has received any punishment or even public rebuke for concealing evidence of contra-cocaine trafficking. [For details on the CIA’s internal report, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

Besides confirming the CIA’s internal admissions about contra-drug trafficking and the CIA’s spotty record of taking action to stop it, the House committee included in its report the Reagan administration’s rationale for blacking out the contra-cocaine evidence in the 1980s.

“The committee interviewed several individuals who served in Latin America as [CIA] chiefs of station during the 1980s,” the report said. “They all personally deplored the use and trafficking of drugs, but indicated that in the 1980s the counter-narcotics mission did not have as high a priority as the missions of reporting on and fighting against communist insurrections and supporting struggling democratic movements.

“Indeed, most of those interviewed indicated that they were, effectively speaking, operating in a war zone and were totally engaged in keeping U.S. allies from being overwhelmed. In this environment, what reporting the CIA did do on narcotics was often based on one of two considerations: either a general understanding that the CIA should report on criminal activities so that law enforcement agencies could follow up on them, or, in case of the contras, an effort to monitor allegations of trafficking that, if true, could undermine the legitimacy of the contras cause.”

In other words, the CIA station chiefs admitted to the House committee that they gave the contras a walk on drug trafficking. “In case of the contras,” only monitoring was in order, as the CIA worried that disclosure of contra-drug smuggling would be a public relations problem that “could undermine the legitimacy of the contra cause.”

The House report followed this CIA admission with a jarring – and seemingly contradictory – conclusion. “The committee found no evidence of an attempt to ‘cover up’ such information,” the report said.

Yet, that “no cover-up” conclusion flew in the face of both the CIA inspector general’s report and the report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Both detailed case after case in which CIA and senior Reagan administration officials intervened to frustrate investigations on contra-connected drug trafficking, either by blocking the work of investigators or by withholding timely evidence.

In one case, a CIA lawyer persuaded a federal prosecutor in San Francisco to forego a 1984 trip to Costa Rica because the CIA feared the investigation might expose a contra-cocaine tie-in. In others, Drug Enforcement Administration investigators in Central America complained about obstacles put in their path by CIA officers and U.S. embassy officials. [For more details, see Lost History.]

In classified testimony to the House committee, CIA Inspector General Snider acknowledged that the CIA’s handling of the contra-cocaine evidence was “mixed” and “inconsistent.” He said, “While we found no evidence that any CIA employees involved in the contra program had participated in drug-related activities or had conspired with others in such activities, we found that the agency did not deal with contra-related drug trafficking allegations and information in a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.”

Even in this limited admission, Snider’s words conflicted with evidence published in the CIA inspector general’s report in October 1998. That report, prepared by Snider’s predecessor Frederick Hitz, showed that some CIA personnel working with the contras indeed were implicated in drug trafficking. The tricky word in Snider’s testimony was “employees,” that is, regular full-time CIA officers.

Both the CIA report and the House report acknowledged that a CIA “contractor” known by the pseudonym Ivan Gomez was involved in drug trafficking. In the early 1980s, the CIA sent Gomez to Costa Rica to oversee the contra operation. Later, Gomez admitted in a CIA polygraph that he participated in his brother’s drug business in Florida.

In separate testimony, Nicaraguan drug smuggler Carlos Cabezas fingered Gomez as the CIA’s man in Costa Rica who made sure that drug money went into the contra coffers.

Despite the seeming corroboration of Cabezas’s allegation about Ivan Gomez’s role in drug smuggling, the House committee split hairs again. It attacked Cabezas’s credibility and argued that the Gomez drug money could not be connected definitively to the contras. “No evidence suggests that the drug trafficking and money laundering operations in which Gomez claimed involvement were in any way related to CIA or the contra movement,” the House report said.

What the report leaves out is that one reason for this lack of proof was that the CIA prevented a thorough investigation of Ivan Gomez’s drug activities by withholding the polygraph admission from the Justice Department and the U.S. Congress in the late 1980s. In effect, the House committee now is rewarding the CIA for torpedoing those investigations.

In one surprise disclosure, the House committee uncovered new details about the involvement of Nicaraguan drug smuggler Oscar Danilo Blandon in trafficking intended to support the contras financially. Blandon, a central figure in the Mercury News series, said he was drawn into the drug business because he understood profits were going to the contra war.

In a deposition to the House committee, Blandon described a meeting with Nicaraguan drug kingpin Norwin Meneses at the Los Angeles airport in 1981. “It was during this encounter, according to Blandon, that Meneses encouraged Blandon to become involved with the drug business in order to assist the contras,” the House report stated.

“We spoke a lot of things about the contra revolution, about the movement, because then he took me to the drug business, speaking to me about the drug business that we had to raise money with drugs,” said Blandon. “And he explained to me, you don’t know, but I am going to teach you. And, you know, I am going to tell you how you will do it. You see, you keep some of the profit for you, and some of the profit we will help the contra revolution, you see. … Meneses was trying to convince me with the contra revolution to get me involved in drugs. Give a piece of the apple to the contras and a piece of the apple to him.”

Blandon accepted Meneses’s proposal and “assumed the money he had given Meneses was being sent by Meneses to the contra movement. However, Blandon stated that he had no firsthand knowledge that this was actually occurring,” the House report said.

Though Blandon claimed ignorance about the regular delivery of cocaine cash to the contras, other witnesses confirmed that substantial sums went from Meneses and other drug rings to the contras. A Justice Department investigation discovered several informants who corroborated the flow of money.

One confidential informant, identified in the Justice report only as “DEA CI-1,” said Meneses, Blandon and another cohort, Ivan Torres, contributed drug profits to the contras.

Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, also described sharing drug profits with the contras, while acting as their northern California representative. Pena quoted a Colombian contact called “Carlos” as saying “We’re helping your cause with this drug thing. … We’re helping your organization a lot.”

The Justice report noted, too, that Meneses’s nephew, Jairo, told the DEA in the 1980s that he had asked Pena to help transport drug money to the contras and that his uncle, Norwin Meneses, dealt directly with contra military commander Enrique Bermudez.

The Justice report found that Julio Zavala and Carlos Cabezas ran a parallel contra-drug network. Cabezas said cocaine from Peru was packed into hollow reeds which were woven into tourist baskets and smuggled to the United States. After arriving in San Francisco, the baskets went to Zavala who arranged sale of the cocaine for contra operatives, Horacio Pereira and Troilo Sanchez. Cabezas estimated that he gave them between $1 million and $1.5 million between December 1981 and December 1982.

Another U.S. informant, designated “FBI Source 1,” backed up much of Cabezas’s story. Source 1 said Cabezas and Zavala were helping the contras with proceeds from two drug-trafficking operations, one smuggling Colombian cocaine and the other shipping cocaine through Honduras. Source 1 said the traffickers had to agree to give 50 percent of their profits to the contras.

The House report made no note of this corroborating evidence published in the DOJ report.

The broader contra-cocaine picture was ignored, too. The evidence now available from government investigations over the past 15 years makes clear that many major cocaine smuggling networks used the contra operation, either relying on direct contra assistance or exploiting the relationship to gain protection from U.S. law enforcement.

Sworn testimony before an investigation by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, in the late 1980s disclosed that the contra-drug link dated back to the origins of the movement in 1980. Then, Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suarez invested $30 million in several Argentine-run paramilitary operations, according to Argentine intelligence officer Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.

The Suarez money financed the so-called Cocaine Coup that ousted Bolivia’s elected government in 1980 and then was used by Argentine intelligence to start the contra war against Nicaragua’s leftist government. In 1981, President Reagan ordered the CIA to work with the Argentines in building up the contra army.

According to Volume Two of the CIA report, the spy agency learned about the contra-cocaine connection almost immediately, secretly reporting that contra operatives were smuggling cocaine into South Florida.

By the early 1980s, the Bolivian connection had drawn in the fledgling Colombian Medellin cartel. Top cartel figures picked up on the value of interlocking their operations with the contras. Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans played a key matchmaker role, especially by working with contras based in Costa Rica.

U.S. agencies secretly reported on the work of Frank Castro and other Cuban-American contra supporters who were seen as Medellin operatives. With the Reagan administration battling Congress to keep CIA money flowing to the contras, there were no high-profile crackdowns that might embarrass the contras and undermine public support for their war.

No evidence was deigned good enough to justify sullying the contras’ reputation. In 1986, for example, Reagan’s Justice Department rejected the eyewitness account of an FBI informant named Wanda Palacio. She testified that she saw Jorge Ochoa’s Colombian organization loading cocaine onto planes belonging to Southern Air Transport, a former CIA-owned airline that secretly was flying supplies to the contras. Despite documentary corroboration, her account was dismissed as not believable.

Another contra-cocaine connection ran through Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega, who was recruited by the Reagan administration to assist the contras despite Noriega’s drug-trafficking reputation. The CIA worked closely, too, with corrupt military officers in Honduras and El Salvador who were known to moonlight as cocaine traffickers and money-launderers.

In Honduras, the contra operation tied into the huge cocaine-smuggling network of Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros. His airline, SETCO, was hired by the Reagan administration to ferry supplies to the contras. U.S. government reports also disclosed that contra spokesman Frank Arana worked closely with lieutenants in the Matta Ballesteros network.

Though based in Honduras, the Matta Ballesteros network was regarded as a leading Mexican smuggling ring and was implicated in the torture-murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.

The CIA knew, too, that the contra-cocaine taint had spread into President Reagan’s National Security Council and into the CIA through Cuban-American anti-communists who were working for two drug-connected seafood companies, Ocean Hunter of Miami and Frigorificos de Puntarenas in Costa Rica. One of these Cuban-Americans, Moises Nunez, worked directly for the NSC.

In 1987, the CIA asked Nunez about allegations tying him to the drug trade. “Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council,” the CIA contra-drug report said. “Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC.”

The CIA had its own link to the Frigorificos/Ocean Hunter operation through Felipe Vidal, a Cuban-American with a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker. Despite that record, the CIA hired Vidal as a logistics coordinator for the contras, the CIA report said. When Sen. Kerry sought the CIA’s file on Vidal, the CIA withheld the data about Vidal’s drug arrest and kept him on the payroll until 1990.

These specific cases were not mentioned in the House report. They also have gone unreported in the major news media of the United States.

Now, with the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committees joining with their Republican counterparts, the official verdict on the sordid contra-drug history has been delivered – a near full acquittal of the Reagan administration and the CIA. The verdict is justified as long as no one reads what’s in the government's own reports.

SOURCE: https://consortiumnews.com/2000/060800a.html

This old stuff should be front page news TODAY as it is virtually unknown to most everyone in the United States, thanks to Corporate McPravda.

[grasswire]

11. think what Nixon could have done with today's surveillance...

......capabilities. Geez.

[Octafish]

16. Ray McGovern called the situation: ''J Edgar Hoover on Supercomputers''

Worse. The guys who got rid of Nixon -- and Frank Church -- have the latest gear.

J. Edgar Hoover With Supercomputers

by Ray McGovern
AntiWar.com, January 6, 2006

On Dec. 19, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Director of National Intelligence Gen. Mike Hayden held a press conference in which they once again misled the American people.

Gonzales and Hayden answered questions about reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), which Hayden directed from 1999 to 2005, was eavesdropping on Americans via a special program in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The implications for privacy – and our system of checks and balances – are immense.

As long as he read from his prepared statement, Attorney General Gonzales did just fine with the press. He conceded that FISA requires a court order to authorize the surveillance the president ordered the NSA to undertake, and then hammered home the administration's "legal analysis:" the twin arguments that Congress' post-9/11 authorization of force and the president's power as commander in chief trump the legal constraints of FISA.

When the reporters' questions began, though, Gonzales faltered and twice spilled the beans. Asked why the administration decided to flout rather than amend FISA, choosing instead a "backdoor approach," Gonzales said:

"We have had discussions with Congress … as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."

So they went ahead and did it anyway.

SNIP...

[font color="green"]Another concern is that, among the groups of American citizens most likely to be sucked up by the NSA's vacuum cleaner – because of the nature of their work and their international calls/contacts – are members of Congress and journalists. A key question that raises its ugly head is this: If hundreds of calls and e-mails involving Americans are being intercepted each and every day, and juicy tidbits are learned about, say, prominent officials or other persons, there will be an almost irresistible temptation to make use of this information. Former FBI special agent Coleen Rowley, who for many years monitored court-authorized electronic surveillances and wiretaps relating to organized criminal and drug conspiracy groups, recently underscored how much one can learn about someone by listening in on his/her private communications. She reminds us that the blackmail potential is clear.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=8349

Hannah Arendt warned us where all this is going:



The goal of wholesale surveillance, [font color="green"]as (Hannah) Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” [/font color]And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy

[JEB]

12. K&R for the original post and subsequent informative posts and links.

[Octafish]

17. 'The Danger of NSA Spying on Members of Congress'

From The Atlantic, via WillyT:

-------------------------------------------------------------

The Danger of NSA Spying on Members of Congress

An executive-branch agency has been empowered to store revealing information about the communications of everyone in the legislature.

Conor Friedersdorf
Jan 6 2014, 12:00 PM ET

EXCERPT...

Should anyone doubt how much mischief could come from spying on even one member of Congress, let's look back at the story of former Democratic Representative Jane Harman and what happened when the NSA intercepted and transcribed one of her telephone calls. That's right: There's a known instance in which a legislator's private communications were captured by the NSA, though it's a complicated story, and there isn't any conclusive evidence that the NSA did anything wrong. In fact, the NSA's apparent blamelessness is what makes this story particularly instructive: It shows that intercepting congressional communications has a high cost even when it's done innocently, inadvertently, and defensibly.

The story begins with the NSA surveilling two Israeli nationals suspected of being spies. Unbeknownst to them, their phone calls were being recorded by the NSA–and one day, a conversation with Harman got swept up in the ongoing wiretap. No one on the call knew it was being recorded.

[font color="green"]"One of the leading House Democrats on intelligence matters was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage," [/font color] the New York Times reported on April 20, 2009, following up on a story broken by Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein.

Let's assume the NSA wiretap was totally legitimate. As Marcy Wheeler noted at the time, it seems to have been approved by a court as part of a long-running investigation, and "the investigation–and the wiretaps–were the classic, proper use of FISA: for an intelligence investigation targeting suspected agents of a foreign power operating in the US ... We all better hope the NSA listens closely to conversations between powerful members of Congress and suspected spies, and that when they make quid pro quo deals, that conversation gets looked at much more closely."

But the story doesn't end there. [font color="green"]Congressional Quarterly reported that a criminal case against Harman was dropped because she was a useful ally to the Bush Administration: [/font color]

Justice Department attorneys in the intelligence and public corruption units who read the transcripts decided that Harman had committed a “completed crime,” a legal term meaning that there was evidence that she had attempted to complete it, three former officials said. And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court ...

First, however, they needed the certification of top intelligence officials that Harman’s wiretapped conversations justified a national security investigation ... But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened. According to two officials privy to the events, [font color="green"]Gonzales said he “needed Jane”[/font color] to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.

Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.

He was right.

On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”

More: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/the-danger-of-nsa-spying-on-members-of-congress/282827/

Thank you for caring about the situation, JEB. It means the world.

[JEB]

18. Another interesting link.

Thank you for all your efforts.

[woo me with science]

13. K&R

[Octafish]

19. October Reprisals: Investigators of alleged Iran deal face smears, legal threats

October Reprisals

Investigators of alleged Iran deal face smears, legal threats

By John Canham-Clyne

The debate over the "October Surprise" has embroiled some of the country's most prominent journalists--none more deeply then Robert Parry and Steve Emerson. In the latest skirmish, Emerson has threatened to sue Parry--and Parry has produced documents showing that Emerson made false statements in his efforts to discredit Parry's reporting.

As previously reported in Extra!, Emerson for nearly two years has vigorously tried to debunk the "October Surprise," the allegation that the 1980 Reagan campaign cut a deal with Iran to keep U.S. hostages until after the election. Following publication of a House Foreign Affairs Committee Task Force report on the allegations, Emerson picked up the assault in an 8-page article for the inaugural issue (3/93) of the American Journalism Review (formerly Washington Journalism Review).

Assuming the role of media critic, Emerson covered much the same ground he had covered in an earlier New Republic article (11/18/91) and several Wall Street Journal op-eds. Essentially, Emerson repeated the Task Force's (and his own) conclusion that all the sources for the October Surprise are "fabricators."

Like his earlier work, Emerson's AJR piece was filled with personal slams against Parry, former Carter administration official Gary Sick and reporters Craig Unger and Martin Killian. In AJR, Emerson used a quote from former CIA officer and Village Voice reporter Frank Snepp to accuse Parry and Killian of "massaging sources to manufacture information." In the Wall Street Journal (1/14/93), Emerson even suggested that Congress confiscate the earnings from Sick's book October Surprise, to help defray the cost of the Task Force investigation.

According to Bob Parry and the Secret Service, however, it is Emerson who manufactures information.

Clean or Censored?

Parry, a former AP and Newsweek reporter who broke much of the story of Oliver North's illegal Contra supply network, prides himself on old-fashioned notions of objectivity. When Emerson described October Surprise reporters as "believers" in the New Republic, Parry defended himself in a published letter to the magazine (12/23/91).

Parry pointed out that his Frontline documentary (4/16/91) had reported evidence that tended to disprove some of the October Surprise allegations. For example, the PBS show had presented copies of Secret Service records for the detail protecting George Bush between Oct. 15 and Oct. 20, 1980, which tended to show--albeit not definitely prove--that Bush was in Washington, not at alleged meetings with Iranians in Paris. But Parry pointed out that the documents were not complete--they has been censored, or in government-speak, "redacted."

In a printed response, Emerson slammed Frontline's use of the records:

Parry momentarily raised the Secret Service records only disingenuously to question their accuracy. On Frontline Parry claimed that the records "do not specify with whom the candidate met, nor do they supply any other details as to who was actually in the party." In fact, Secret Service records from the period in question never supplied that information. (By describing the records as "heavily censored," Parry raised further suspicions about their authenticity; yet we obtained a perfectly clean set of records under FOIA. Nothing was hidden.)

Parry was dismayed by Emerson's implication that he had lied about what he received from the Secret Service. When Emerson's AJR piece ran--despite complaints from Parry to the magazine's editors that Emerson's past reporting on the subject had been unfairly slanted--Parry wrote a letter to the editor that accused Emerson of pretending to have access to unredacted records. In an unpublished portion of a letter to AJR's editors (the letter was printed in part, 4/93), Parry said that a Secret Service officer told him that Emerson was "lying" about having uncensored copies.

Rather than responding by producing the complete documents, Emerson threatened to sue Parry for libel. Emerson's attorney, Forrest Hainline, threatened Parry with legal action unless he retracted these mostly unpublished accusations. Hainline asserted that Emerson would not have to prove in court that what Parry said was false, because, the lawyer maintained, Emerson is not a public figure. (Hainline also represents Iran-contra figure Robert McFarlane, who is suing Craig Unger over his October Surprise story in Esquire--a suit Emerson reported on extensively in AJR.)

CONTINUED...

http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/october-reprisals/

Seems the rightwing will go to any lengths to smear an honest journalist.

[woo me with science]

22. Thank you.

Again.

[Scuba]

14. K&R for this informative and important thread.

Thanks Octafish.

[Octafish]

20. Laurence Silberman compared people who say Bush lied America into war to NAZIs.

The history shows the guy got a nice career as reward for service to the rightwing, rather than a trial he so richly deserved for treason.

Federal Appeals Judge Compares People Who Say Bush Lied To Rise Of Nazis

A federal appeals judge wrote in a column published on Sunday that people who accuse former President George W. Bush of lying about the Iraq War are peddling myths like those that led to the rise of Hitler.

Laurence H. Silberman, a federal appellate judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the idea the Bush administration "lied us into Iraq" has gone from "antiwar slogan to journalistic fact."

"It is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised," he wrote. "It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam."

After re-litigating the case for invading Iraq, Silberman wrote that the charge could have "potentially dire consequences."

"I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been 'stabbed in the back' by politicians," he wrote.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/laurence-silberman-bush-lied-nazis

via kpete: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=6201723

Robert Parry in 2009:

Neocon Judge's History of Cover-ups

Laurence Silberman, a U.S. Appeals Court judge and a longtime neoconservative operative – part of what the Iran-Contra special prosecutor called “the strategic reserves” for convicted Reagan administration operatives in the 1980s – is back playing a similar role for the Bush-43 administration.

by Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com, September 23, 2009

On Sept. 11, the eighth anniversary of the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Silberman issued a 2-to-1 opinion dismissing a lawsuit against the private security firm, CACI International, brought by Iraqi victims of torture and other abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

Silberman declared that CACI was immune from prosecution because its employees were responding to U.S. military commands. The immunity ruling blocked legal efforts by 212 Iraqis, who suffered directly at Abu Ghraib or were the widows of men who died, to exact some accountability from CACI employees who allegedly assisted in the torture of prisoners.

"During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor's engagement in such activities shall be preempted," Silberman wrote.

But Silberman is not a dispassionate judge when it comes to the crimes of Republicans committed to advance the neocon cause.

In the 1980s, Silberman played behind-the-scenes roles in helping Ronald Reagan gain the White House; he helped formulate hard-line intelligence policies; he encouraged right-wing media attacks on liberals; and he protected the flanks of Reagan’s operatives who were caught breaking the law.

Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a Republican himself, counted Silberman as one of "a powerful band of Republican [judicial] appointees [who] waited like the strategic reserves of an embattled army," determined to prevent any judgments against Reagan’s operatives who broke the law in the arms-for-hostage scandal.

In his 1997 memoir, Firewall, Walsh depicted Silberman as a leader of that partisan band, even recalling how Silberman had berated Judge George MacKinnon, also a Republican, who led the panel which had picked Walsh to be the special prosecutor.

"At a D.C. circuit conference, he [Silberman] had gotten into a shouting match about independent counsel with Judge George MacKinnon," Walsh wrote. "Silberman not only had hostile views but seemed to hold them in anger."

In 1990, after Walsh had secured a difficult conviction of former White House aide Oliver North for offenses stemming from the Iran-Contra scandal, Silberman teamed up with another right-wing judge, David Sentelle, to overturn North’s conviction in a sudden outburst of sympathy for defendant rights.

Trashing Anita Hill

Less publicly, in 1991, Silberman also went to bat for the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas, working with right-wing operatives to destroy the reputation of Anita Hill, a former Thomas employee who testified about his crude sexual harassment.

Author David Brock, then a well-paid right-wing hatchet man who published what he later admitted were scurrilous attacks on Hill, described the support and encouragement he received from Silberman and Silberman’s wife, Ricky. Even after Thomas had won Senate confirmation, Silberman still was pushing attack lines against Hill, Brock wrote in his book, Blinded by the Right.

While George H.W. Bush’s White House slipped Brock a psychiatric opinion that Hill suffered from “erotomania,” Silberman met with Brock to suggest even more colorful criticism of Hill.

“Silberman speculated that Hill was a lesbian ‘acting out’,” Brock wrote. “Besides, Silberman confided, Thomas would never have asked Hill for dates: She had bad breath.”

After Brock published a book-length assault on Hill, called The Real Anita Hill, the Silbermans and other prominent conservatives joined a celebration at the Embassy Row Ritz-Carlton, Brock wrote, noting that also in attendance was Judge Sentelle.

But Silberman’s anything-goes approach to promoting – and protecting – right-wing control of the government dated back even further, to his key role as a foreign-policy and intelligence adviser to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign.

During Campaign 1980, Silberman was a senior figure in what was then a fast-rising neoconservative faction that saw Reagan’s victory – and the defeat of President Jimmy Carter – as vital to expand U.S. military power, to confront the Soviet Union aggressively and to relieve pressure on Israel for a peace deal with the Palestinians.

More than a decade later, congressional investigators discovered that Silberman was assigned to secretive Reagan campaign operations collecting intelligence on what President Carter was doing to secure the release of 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

On April 20, 1980, the Reagan campaign created a group of foreign policy experts known as the Iran Working Group. The operation was run by Richard Allen, Fred Ikle and Silberman, the congressional investigators discovered.

After Reagan’s nomination in July, his campaign merged with that of his vice presidential running mate, George H.W. Bush, who had enlisted many ex-CIA officers who were loyal to Bush as a former CIA director.

October Surprise Obsession

The general election campaign assembled a strategy team, known as the “October Surprise Group,” which was ordered to prepare for “any last-minute foreign policy or defense-related event, including the release of the hostages, that might favorably impact President Carter in the November election,” according to a House Task Force that in 1992 investigated allegations of Republican interference in Carter’s hostage negotiations.

“Originally referred to as the ‘Gang of Ten,’” the Task Force report said the “October Surprise Group” consisted of Allen, Ikle, Charles M. Kupperman, Thomas H. Moorer, Eugene V. Rostow, William R. Van Cleave, John R. Lehman Jr., Robert G. Neumann, Seymour Weiss – and Silberman.

While that reference made it into the Task Force’s final report in January 1993, another part was deleted, which said: “According to members of the ‘October Surprise’ group, the following individuals also participated in meetings although they were not considered ‘members’ of the group: Michael Ledeen, Richard Stillwell, William Middendorf, Richard Perle, General Louis Walt and Admiral James Holloway.”

Deleted from the final report also was a section of the draft describing how the ex-CIA personnel who had worked for Bush’s campaign became the nucleus of the Republican intelligence operation that monitored Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations for the Reagan-Bush team.

“The Reagan-Bush campaign maintained a 24-hour Operations Center, which monitored press wires and reports, gave daily press briefings and maintained telephone and telefax contact with the candidate’s plane,” the draft report read. “Many of the staff members were former CIA employees who had previously worked on the Bush campaign or were otherwise loyal to George Bush.” (I discovered the unpublished portions of Task Force’s report when I gain access to its files in late 1994.)

Another deletion involved a Sept. 16, 1980, meeting ordered by Reagan’s campaign director William Casey, who had become obsessed over the possibility of Carter pulling off an October Surprise release of the hostages.

On that date, Casey met with senior campaign officials Edwin Meese, Bill Timmons and Richard Allen about the “Persian Gulf Project,” according to an unpublished section of the House Task Force report and Allen’s notes. Two other participants at the meeting, according to Allen’s notes, were Michael Ledeen and Noel Koch.

That same day, Iran’s acting foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh was quoted as citing Republican interference on the hostages. “Reagan, supported by [former Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger and others, has no intention of resolving the problem,” Ghotbzadeh said. “They will do everything in their power to block it.”

Exactly what the Reagan-Bush “October Surprise” team did remains something of a historical mystery.

About two dozen witnesses – including former Iranian officials and international intelligence figures – have claimed the Republican contacts undercut Carter’s hostage negotiations, though others insist that the initiatives were simply ways to gather information about Carter’s desperate bid to free the hostages before the election. [For the most thorough account of the “October Surprise” case, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

The L’Enfant Plaza Mystery

One of the many unanswered questions about the October Surprise mystery revolved around a meeting involving Laurence Silberman and an Iranian emissary at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington in September or early October 1980.

Years later, an Iranian arms dealer named Houshang Lavi claimed to be the emissary who met with Silberman, Allen and Robert McFarlane, who was then an aide to Sen. John Tower, R-Texas. Lavi said the meeting on Oct. 2 dealt with the possibility of trading arms to Iran for release of the hostages – and was arranged by Silberman.

Silberman, Allen and McFarlane acknowledged that a meeting happened, but they insisted they had no recollection of the emissary’s name nor who he was.

In 1990, I interviewed a testy Richard Allen about the meeting for a PBS Frontline documentary. Allen said he reluctantly went to the meeting, which he said was proposed by McFarlane. Allen said he took along Silberman as a witness.

“So Larry Silberman and I got on the subway and we went down to the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel where I met McFarlane and there were many people milling about. We sat at a table in the lobby. It was around the lunch hour. I was introduced to this very obscure character whose name I cannot recall. …

“The individual who was either an Egyptian or an Iranian or could have been an Iranian living in Egypt – and his idea was that he had the capacity to intervene, to deliver the hostages to the Reagan forces. Now, I took that at first to mean that he was able to deliver the hostages to Ronald Reagan, candidate for the presidency of the United States, which was absolutely lunatic. And I said so. I believe I said, or Larry did, ‘we have one President at a time. That’s the way it is.’

“So this fellow continued with his conversation. I was incredulous that McFarlane would have ever brought a guy like this or placed any credibility in a guy like this. Just absolutely incredulous, and so was Larry Silberman. This meeting lasted maybe 20 minutes, 25 minutes. So that’s it. There’s no need to continue this meeting. …

“Larry and I walked out. And I remember Larry saying, ‘Boy, you better write a memorandum about this. This is really spaceship stuff.’ And it, of course, set my opinion very firmly about Bud McFarlane for having brought this person to me in the first place.”

‘Swarthy’ Emissary

Allen described the emissary as “stocky and swarthy, dark-complected,” but otherwise “non-descript.” Allen added that the man looked like a “person from somewhere on the Mediterranean littoral. How about that?”

Allen said this Egyptian or Iranian “must have given a name at the time, must have.” But Allen couldn’t recall it. He also said he made no effort to check out the man’s position or background before agreeing to the meeting.

“Did you ask McFarlane, who is this guy?” I asked Allen.

“I don’t recall having asked him, no,” Allen responded.

“I guess I don’t understand why you wouldn’t say, ‘Is this guy an Iranian, is he someone you’ve known for a while?’” I pressed.

“Well, gee, I’m sorry that you don’t understand,” Allen lashed back. “I really feel badly for you. It’s really too bad you don’t understand. But that’s your problem, not mine.”

“But wouldn’t you normally ask that kind of background question?”

“Not necessarily,” Allen said. “McFarlane wanted me to meet a guy and this guy was going to talk about the hostages. I met plenty of people during that period of time who wanted to talk to me about the hostages. … This was no different from anybody else I would meet on this subject.”

“It obviously turned out to be different from most people you’ve met on the subject,” I interjected.

“”Oh, it turned out to be because this guy is the centerpiece of some sort of great conspiracy web that has been spun,” Allen snapped.

“Well, were there many people who offered to deliver the hostages to Ronald Reagan?” I asked.

“No, this one was particularly different, but I didn’t know that before I went to the meeting, you understand.”

“Did you ask McFarlane what on earth this guy was going to propose?”

“I don’t think I did in advance, no.”

What also was unusual about this meeting was what Allen and Silberman did not do afterwards. Though Allen said that he and Silberman recognized the sensitivity of the approach, neither of Reagan’s foreign policy advisers contacted the Carter administration or reported the offer to law enforcement.

Defying Logic

It also defied logic that seasoned operatives like Allen and Silberman would have agreed to a meeting with an emissary from a hostile power without having done some due-diligence about who the person was and what his bona fides were.

Iranian arms dealer Lavi later claimed to be the mysterious emissary. And government documents revealed that Lavi made a similar approach to the independent presidential campaign of John Anderson, although Anderson’s campaign – unlike Allen and Silberman – promptly informed the CIA and State Department.

For his part, Silberman denied any substantive discussion with the mysterious emissary but refused to discuss the meeting in any detail. He did insist that he was out of town on Oct. 2, the date cited by Lavi, but Silberman wouldn’t provide a list of dates when he was in Washington during the fall of 1980.

Though purportedly having arranged the meeting, McFarlare also insisted that he couldn’t recall the identity of the emissary.

Later, when a Senate panel conducted a brief inquiry into whether the Republicans interfered with Carter’s hostage negotiations, a truculent Allen testified – and brought along a memo that he claimed represented his contemporaneous recollections of the L’Enfant Plaza meeting.

However, the memo, dated Sept. 10, 1980, flatly contradicted the previous accounts from Allen, Silberman and McFarlane. It described a meeting arranged by Mike Butler, another Tower aide, with McFarlane only joining in later as the pair told Allen about a meeting they had had with a Mr. A.A. Mohammed, a Malaysian who operated out of Singapore.

“This afternoon, by mutual agreement, I met with Messrs. Mohammed, Butler and McFarlane. I also took Larry Silberman along to the meeting,” Allen wrote in the memo.

According to the memo, Mohammed presented a scheme for returning the Shah of Iran’s son to the country as “a figurehead monarch” which would be accompanied by a release of the U.S. hostages. Though skeptical of the plan, “both Larry and I indicated that we would be pleased to hear whatever additional news Mr. Mohammed might be able to turn up, and I suggested that that information be communicated via a secure channel,” the memo read.

Nearly every important detail was different both in how the meeting was arranged and its contents. Gone was the proposal to release the hostages to candidate Reagan, gone was the abrupt cutoff, gone was the Iranian or Egyptian – some guy from the “Mediterranean littoral” – replaced by a Malaysian businessman whose comments were welcomed along with future contacts “via a secure channel.” The memo didn’t even mention the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, nor was McFarlane the organizer.

A reasonable conclusion might be that Allen’s memo was about an entirely different meeting, which would suggest that Republican contacts with Iranian emissaries were more numerous than previously admitted and that Silberman was more of a regular player.

Also, Silberman, McFarlane and Butler – when questioned by the House Task Force investigating the issue in 1992 – disputed Allen’s new version of the L’Enfant Plaza tale. They claimed no recollection of the A.A. Mohammed discussion.

Nevertheless, the House Task Force, in its determination to turn the page on the complex October Surprise issue, accepted Allen’s memo as the final answer to the L’Enfant Plaza question and pressed ahead with a broader rejection of any wrongdoing by Republicans – even though that required concealing a host of incriminating documents. [See Secrecy & Privilege.]

Tantalizing Clue

The House Task Force also turned a blind eye to another tantalizing clue related to the L’Enfant Plaza mystery. Lavi’s lawyer, former CIA counsel Mitchell Rogovin, provided me a page of his notes from that time period.

Rogovin, who was an adviser to the John Anderson campaign, wrote on his calendar entry for Sept. 29, 1980, a summary of Lavi’s plan to trade weapons for the hostages. After that, Rogovin recorded a telephone contact with senior CIA official John McMahon to discuss Lavi’s plan and to schedule a face-to-face meeting with a CIA representative on Oct. 2.

The next entry, however, was stunning. It read, “Larry Silberman – still very nervous/will recommend … against us this P.M. I said $250,000 – he said why even bother.”

When I called Rogovin about this notation, he said it related to a loan that the Anderson campaign was seeking from Crocker National Bank where Silberman served as legal counsel. The note meant that Silberman was planning to advise the bank officers against the loan, Rogovin said.

I asked Rogovin if he might have mentioned Lavi’s hostage plan to Silberman, who was in the curious position of being a senior Reagan adviser and weighing in on a loan to an independent campaign that was viewed as siphoning off votes from Carter. (Crocker did extend a line of credit to Anderson.)

“There was no discussion of the Lavi proposal,” Rogovin insisted. But Rogovin acknowledged that Silberman was a friend from the Ford administration where both men had worked on intelligence issues, Rogovin from the CIA and Silberman at the Justice Department. Later, Rogovin and Silberman became next-door neighbors and bought a boat together.

In a normal investigation, such coincidences would strain credulity, especially given Lavi’s claim that he took part in a meeting with Republicans at the L’Enfant Plaza on Oct. 2, the same day that he talked with a CIA representative. Lavi also claimed that Silberman had arranged the meeting, which would make sense given Rogovin’s personal ties to Silberman.

However, as on a host of other compelling leads, the House Task Force chose to look the other way.

Reagan’s Victory

On Nov. 4, 1980, with Carter unable to free the hostages and Americans humiliated by the year-long ordeal with Iran, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide.

For his loyal service in the campaign, the neoconservative Silberman was put in charge of the transition team’s intelligence section. The team prepared a report attacking the CIA’s analytical division for noting growing weaknesses in the Soviet Union, a position despised by the neocons because it undercut their case for a costly expansion of the Pentagon’s budget.

Silberman’s transition team accused the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence of “an abject failure” to foresee a supposedly massive Soviet buildup of strategic weapons and “the wholesale failure” to comprehend the sophistication of Soviet propaganda.

“These failures are of such enormity,” the transition report said, “that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.”

In other words, Silberman’s transition team was implying that CIA analysts who didn’t toe the neoconservative line must be Soviet agents. Even anti-Soviet hardliners like the CIA’s Robert Gates recognized the impact that the incoming administration’s hostility had on the CIA analysts.

“That the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover was apparent in the most extraordinary transition period of my career,” Gates wrote in his memoir, From the Shadows. “The reaction inside the Agency to this litany of failure and incompetence” from the transition team “was a mix of resentment and anger, dread and personal insecurity.”

Amid rumors that the transition team wanted to purge several hundred top analysts, career officials feared for their jobs, especially those considered responsible for assessing the Soviet Union as a declining power rapidly falling behind the West in technology and economics.

According to some intelligence sources, Silberman expected to get the job of CIA director and flew into a rage when Reagan gave the job to his campaign director William Casey, who also was tied to the October Surprise operations. (The U.S. hostages in Iran were released immediately upon Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981.)

Silberman’s consolation prize was to be named a judge on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, where he helped frustrate the Iran-Contra investigation by overturning Oliver North’s conviction in 1990 and to this day is a defender of the neocons’ foreign policy -- as witnessed by his Sept. 11, 2009, ruling blocking civil lawsuits against U.S. government contractors implicated in torturing Iraqis.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.


SOURCE w.links: https://consortiumnews.com/2009/092209.html

You are most welcome, Scuba.

[sabrina 1]

43. If it wasn't for great journalists like Robert Parry we would not even have a record of the

history of this recent era which has been filled with crimes against the people. Cheney and Rumsfeld have been involved since the Nixon years. And still, no accountability.

Some day maybe it will happen. When we have a government of the people again.

[Segami]

21. K&R!

[Octafish]

33. Republicans Still Denying Bush Lied About Iraq

By Jonathan Chait
NYMag, Feb. 9, 2015

As America hurtles toward a potential Bush-versus-Clinton dynastic rematch, no Democratic loyalists have yet come forward to insist that Bill Clinton was in fact speaking the truth when he denied having sexual relations with that woman. There is, however, a continual submerged effort to deny that George W. Bush’s administration misled the country into the Iraq War. Today, The Wall Street Journal op-ed page has Republican judge Laurence Silberman fiercely insisting that the Bush administration did not lie, and that the claim it lied is itself a calumny.

Silberman’s argument is a simplistic one aimed at confusing those who have already forgotten the basic sequence of events. Silberman argues that a bipartisan commission, which he co-chaired, investigated the matter, and found that the Bush administration was victimized by faulty intelligence. “Our WMD commission ultimately determined that the intelligence community was ‘dead wrong’ about Saddam’s weapons,” concludes Silberman. So, yes, mistakes happen, but intelligence failures happen, and the Bush administration cannot be blamed for dishonesty.

Silberman does not mention that the commission he chaired did not even investigate whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence. Senate Republicans refused to allow the commission to investigate this matter, fearing it would harm Bush’s reelection prospects. Indeed, Silberman himself wrote in the report at the time, “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.”

SNIP...

Incredibly, Silberman’s op-ed does not mention the Phase II report at all. Silberman simply asserts that his committee, which was specifically instructed not to investigate whether Bush manipulated intelligence, did not find that Bush manipulated intelligence, and presents this as the final word.

It is hard to believe that Silberman expects such a crude exercise in propaganda to actually succeed. His intention appears to be slightly more indirect: to turn the demonstrable fact that the Bush administration deliberately misled the public into, at the very least, a partisan dispute that journalists cannot repeat without fear of being accused of bias. Silberman shrewdly selects as his target Ron Fournier, the apotheosis of the journalistic ethos that the truth lies halfway between the competing claims of the two parties at any given moment.

SOURCE: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/republicans-still-denying-bush-lied-about-iraq.html

The guy's not all bad. Nixon's DOJ gave him the job of reading through J Edgar Hoover's "Secret and Confidential" files. Silberman described it as "the single worst experience of my long governmental service...this country--and the Federal Bureau of Investigation--would be well served if (Hoover's) name were removed from the bureau's building. It is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr. Liberals and conservatives should unite to support legislation to accomplish this repudiation of a very sad chapter in American history."

SOURCE: US News & World Report Aug 18, 2006 via Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Silberman

[NuttyFluffers]

23. to the top with you!

kick!

[Octafish]

34. Real-Life 'National Treasure' -- in Reverse

By Robert Parry
May 6, 2005

The “October Surprise mystery” – did Republicans strike a secret deal with Iran in 1980 to sabotage Jimmy Carter and win the White House for Ronald Reagan? – has similarities to the storyline of the action movie “National Treasure,” only in reverse.

Walt Disney’s “National Treasure” is the imaginative tale of a search for a treasure hidden by America’s Founding Fathers to keep it away from the British monarchy. To find the treasure more than two centuries later, the hero – played by Nicolas Cage – travels from city to city in pursuit of complicated clues, including some concealed in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

The search for the truth behind the October Surprise mystery has seemed almost as unlikely at times, except the narrative is nearly the opposite: today’s American rulers destroy clues that otherwise might lead to knowing whether the democratic process – arguably the greatest national treasure – was stolen in plain sight.

At the center of this October Surprise “treasure hunt in reverse” has been the creation of bogus or dubious alibis for key participants in alleged meetings between Republicans and Iranians in 1980 when Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist government was holding 52 American hostages and President Carter was desperately seeking their release.

SNIP...

Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the chairman of the House October Surprise task force, wrote an Op-Ed article for the New York Times, entitled “Case Closed.” It cited the supposedly solid Casey alibis as key reasons why the task force findings “should put the controversy to rest once and for all.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/050605.html

If the news media did half the job Robert Parry did, Ronald Reagan never would have darkened the doorway of the Oval Office, nor George Herbert Walker Bush and his smirking offspring and all the rest of their connected warmonger and bankster cronies.

[WillyT]

24. HUGE K & R !!! - Thank You !!!

[Octafish]

35. The L’Enfant Plaza Hotel Mystery

Special Report: To understand why U.S. foreign policy is floundering in the Middle East, one must go back to the pivotal 1980 election when President Carter’s hopes for a second term hinged on getting Iran to release 52 U.S. hostages and Republicans went behind his back, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews.com, Feb. 17, 2013

Embedded in the historical question of whether Republicans sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations before Election 1980 is a curious incident involving two of Ronald Reagan’s future National Security Advisors – Richard Allen and Robert McFarlane – who played key roles in arms shipments to Iran after Reagan won.

On Jan. 20, 1981, the Iranians released the 52 American hostages exactly as Reagan was being sworn in as President. Allen moved into the White House as Reagan’s first National Security Advisor. McFarlane was appointed Counselor to the Secretary of State, from which he pushed to let Israel sell arms to Iran, an issue that was referred to Allen at the National Security Council, according to recently disclosed documents from the National Archives.

The documents also reveal that McFarlane pressed to put himself in charge of future U.S. policy toward Iran and arranged a top-secret conduit for collaboration with the Israeli government on Iranian issues without the knowledge of other U.S. officials. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast.”]

So, the curious incident in 1980 – a meeting with an Iranian emissary at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington about one month before the Nov. 4 election – suddenly deserves additional attention. The meeting also involved a third prominent Republican, Laurence Silberman, a neoconservative foreign policy expert who would later become an important judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington.

Yet, beyond the fact that the L’Enfant Plaza meeting took place, the three Republicans have offered wildly divergent accounts of what happened, and congressional investigators, who looked into the incident years later, never tried very hard to get the trio to explain the discrepancies.

Allen, Silberman and McFarlane all acknowledged a discussion with an Iranian emissary at the hotel, which is situated between the Washington Mall and the Potomac River. But none of them claimed to remember the person’s name, his nationality or his position – not even McFarlane who purportedly arranged the meeting.

A Testy Interview

In a testy interview with me in 1990, Allen said the L’Enfant Plaza meeting occurred after McFarlane called Allen “several times in an attempt to get me to meet with someone about the Iranian problem.” Allen said he was leery about such a meeting because he had been burnt by the controversy over the Richard Nixon’s Vietnam peace-talk interference in 1968. (For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “LBJ’s X-File on Nixon’s ‘Treason.’”)

“Knowing what I’d been through in 1968 on this very problem, I was highly reluctant to do it,” Allen said. “But McFarlane was working for (Texas Sen.) John Tower; John Tower was a friend of mine. McFarlane is not a particular friend, an acquaintance, nothing more than that. He was quite insistent that I do this.”

Allen said he asked Silberman, a lawyer working on Reagan’s foreign policy team, to join him at the meeting. “I want a witness in this meeting because I don’t want it to turn into anything that could run against us. And I won’t meet in this office. I will not have anybody say that he came to my office.

“So Larry Silberman and I got on the subway and we went down to the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel where I met McFarlane and there were many people milling about. We sat at a table in the lobby. It was around the lunch hour. I was introduced to this very obscure character whose name I cannot recall. …

“The individual who was either an Egyptian or an Iranian or could have been an Iranian living in Egypt – and his idea was that he had the capacity to intervene, to deliver the (American) hostages to the Reagan forces. Now, I took that at first to mean that he was able to deliver the hostages to Ronald Reagan, candidate for the presidency of the United States, which was absolutely lunatic. And I said so. I believe I said, or Larry did, ‘we have one President at a time. That’s the way it is.’

“So this fellow continued with his conversation. I was incredulous that McFarlane would have ever brought a guy like this or placed any credibility in a guy like this. Just absolutely incredulous, and so was Larry Silberman. This meeting lasted maybe 20 minutes, 25 minutes. So that’s it. There’s no need to continue this meeting. …

“Larry and I walked out. And I remember Larry saying, ‘Boy, you better write a memorandum about this. This is really spaceship stuff.’ And it, of course, set my opinion very firmly about Bud McFarlane for having brought this person to me in the first place.”

Allen described the emissary as “stocky and swarthy, dark-complected,” but otherwise “non-descript.” Allen added that the man looked like a “person from somewhere on the Mediterranean littoral. How about that?”

Mystery Man

Allen said this Egyptian or Iranian “must have given a name at the time, must have.” But Allen couldn’t recall it. He also said he made no effort to check out the man’s position or background before agreeing to the meeting.

“Did you ask McFarlane, who is this guy?” I asked Allen.

“I don’t recall having asked him, no,” Allen responded.

“I guess I don’t understand why you wouldn’t say, ‘Is this guy an Iranian, is he someone you’ve known for a while?’” I pressed.

“Well, gee, I’m sorry that you don’t understand,” Allen lashed back. “I really feel badly for you. It’s really too bad you don’t understand. But that’s your problem, not mine.”

“But wouldn’t you normally ask that kind of background question?”

“Not necessarily,” Allen said. “McFarlane wanted me to meet a guy and this guy was going to talk about the hostages. I met plenty of people during that period of time who wanted to talk to me about the hostages. … This was no different from anybody else I would meet on this subject.”

“It obviously turned out to be different from most people you’ve met on the subject,” I interjected.

“”Oh, it turned out to be because this guy is the centerpiece of some sort of great conspiracy web that has been spun,” Allen snapped.

“Well, were there many people who offered to deliver the hostages to Ronald Reagan?” I asked.

“No, this one was particularly different, but I didn’t know that before I went to the meeting, you understand.”

“Did you ask McFarlane what on earth this guy was going to propose?”

“I don’t think I did in advance, no.”

Defying Logic

What also was unusual about the L’Enfant Plaza meeting was what Allen and Silberman did not do afterwards. Though Allen said that he and Silberman recognized the sensitivity of the approach, neither of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy advisers contacted the Carter administration or reported the offer to law enforcement.

It also defied logic that seasoned operatives like Allen and Silberman would have agreed to a meeting with an emissary from a hostile power without having done some due-diligence about who the person was and what his bona fides were.

Later, when a Senate panel conducted a brief inquiry into whether the Republicans interfered with Carter’s hostage negotiations, a truculent Allen testified – and brought along a memo that he claimed represented his contemporaneous recollections of the L’Enfant Plaza meeting.

However, the memo, dated Sept. 10, 1980, flatly contradicted the previous accounts from Allen, Silberman and McFarlane. It described a meeting arranged by Mike Butler, another Tower aide, with McFarlane only joining in later as the pair told Allen about a meeting they had had with a Mr. A.A. Mohammed, a Malaysian who operated out of Singapore.

“This afternoon, by mutual agreement, I met with Messrs. Mohammed, Butler and McFarlane. I also took Larry Silberman along to the meeting,” Allen wrote in the memo.

According to the memo, Mohammed presented a scheme for returning the Shah of Iran’s son to the country as “a figurehead monarch” which would be accompanied by a release of the U.S. hostages. Though skeptical of the plan, “both Larry and I indicated that we would be pleased to hear whatever additional news Mr. Mohammed might be able to turn up, and I suggested that that information be communicated via a secure channel,” the memo read.

Nearly every important detail was different both in how the meeting was arranged and its contents. Gone was the proposal to release the hostages to candidate Reagan, gone was the abrupt cutoff, gone was the Iranian or Egyptian – some guy from the “Mediterranean littoral” – replaced by a Malaysian businessman whose comments were welcomed along with future contacts “via a secure channel.” The memo didn’t even mention the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, nor was McFarlane the organizer.

A reasonable conclusion might be that Allen’s memo was about an entirely different meeting, which would suggest that Republican contacts with Iranian emissaries were more numerous and that Silberman was more of a regular player.

Also, Silberman, McFarlane and Butler – when questioned by a House Task Force investigating the issue in 1992 – disputed Allen’s new version of the L’Enfant Plaza tale. They claimed no recollection of the A.A. Mohammed discussion.

For his part, Silberman denied any substantive discussion with the mysterious L’Enfant Plaza emissary but he refused to discuss the meeting in any detail. Though purportedly having arranged the meeting, McFarlare also insisted that he couldn’t recall the identity of the emissary.

Another Account

While the Republicans claimed fuzzy and contradictory memories, two other figures in the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel mystery – Iranian arms dealer Houshang Lavi and Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe – claimed that there was a reason the Republicans didn’t want to say everything they knew: because the L’Enfant Plaza meeting fit into the larger scheme of Republican back-channel negotiations with Iran.

Lavi, who had brokered the Shah of Iran’s $2 billion purchase of F-14s years earlier, told me that he had arranged the meeting not with McFarlane, but with Silberman. “Silberman wanted me to go down to Washington and talk about the American hostage situation,” Lavi said.

Lavi, a chunky man of modest height and dark complexion, described the meeting as occurring at a hotel that was near the Potomac River and had an expansive lobby, both of which fit with the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel. Lavi said the meeting occurred on Oct. 2, 1980.

To support his account, Lavi supplied a lined piece of paper that read: “Oct 2, 80. Eastern Shuttle to D.C. E.Plaza Hotel. … To meet Silberman, Allen, Bob McFar. 40 page document F14 parts already paid for in rtun of hostages. Swap in Karachi. Charter 707.” But there was no way to know when Lavi’s note was actually written.

After arriving at the hotel lobby, Lavi said, “I waited for Mr. Silberman to arrive. He arrived and he was accompanied by two other gentlemen.” Lavi said one was identified as McFarlane, but Lavi didn’t recall if Allen was the third American.

According to Lavi’s account, Silberman did most of the talking: “I believe he is the one who told me that ‘Mr. Lavi, we have one government at a time.’ I took it that they do not want to interfere, but it turned out to be, I found out later on, that that’s not the case. The Reagan-Bush campaign made a deal with the Iranians together with the help of the Israelis for the supply of arms to Iran.”

I also interviewed Lavi’s lawyer, Mitchell Rogovin, who was a former CIA counsel and then a senior adviser to the independent presidential campaign of Republican Congressman John Anderson. Rogovin said he was not aware of any Lavi meeting with Allen, Silberman and McFarlane. But Rogovin pulled out his calendar for that period and showed me that he had set up Lavi with a meeting on the morning of Oct. 2 with a CIA officer.

A partially declassified CIA memo has since confirmed that a CIA officer did meet with Lavi, starting at 10:30 a.m. The meeting lasted 55 minutes and involved Lavi proposing “delivery of $8 million to $10 million of F-14 spare parts” as part of a swap for the 52 American hostages, the memo said.

Though that proposal went nowhere, the CIA memo confirmed that Lavi was promoting a plan similar to the one he claimed to outline to the Reagan campaign representatives later that same day.

A Stunning Entry

The House Task Force investigation, which half-heartedly looked into the so-called October Surprise case in 1992, obtained other Rogovin notes, including an entry for Sept. 29, 1980, indicating that Rogovin had called senior CIA official John McMahon about Lavi’s proposal and had arranged for the Oct. 2 meeting.

But the following Rogovin entry after the McMahon phone call was stunning. It read: “Larry Silberman – still very nervous/will recommend … against us this P.M. I said $250,000 – he said why even bother.”

When I called Rogovin back and asked what that entry meant, he said the Anderson campaign was seeking a loan from Crocker National Bank where Silberman coincidentally served as legal counsel. The note meant that Silberman was planning to advise the bank officers against the loan, Rogovin said. “Silberman was nervous about lending the money,” Rogovin said (though Crocker ultimately did extend a line of credit to the Anderson campaign).

I asked Rogovin if the Lavi hostage plan might have come up during the conversation with Silberman. “There was no discussion of the Lavi proposal,” Rogovin said. But Rogovin acknowledged that Silberman was a friend from the Ford administration when both men had worked on intelligence issues – Rogovin as CIA counsel and Silberman as deputy attorney general.

So there was at least the plausibility of two friends interested in intelligence matters chatting about Iran, especially since Rogovin’s client was busy promoting a hostage deal and Silberman was one of the Reagan campaign officials tasked with keeping tabs on Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations.

After Reagan was elected, Silberman was named a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington and moved into a house next door to Rogovin. Their friendship flourished and the two men bought a boat together. So there also was a reason Rogovin might have played down the Lavi-Silberman connection when I talked with him in the early 1990s. He may have wanted to avoid embarrassing or implicating his friend, Silberman.

An Israeli View

Israeli intelligence officer Ben-Menashe offered another account of the L’Enfant Plaza meeting. In Ben-Menashe’s version, Lavi – an Iranian Jew living in the United States and working with the Israeli government – was involved as a coordinator for the meeting, but he was accompanied by Ben-Menashe and another Iranian, Ahmed Omshei.

Ben-Menashe said the message to the three Republicans was that Israel’s Likud government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin was now tilting in favor of an immediate resolution of the Iran hostage crisis because of the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in mid-September.

If the American hostages could be freed in early October, the way would be cleared for Israel to sell a wider array of military hardware to Iran, which was then under pressure from the Iraqi invasion, Ben-Menashe said. That, of course, would have been bad news for the Reagan campaign, which feared that a resolution of the crisis before the November election – the so-called October Surprise – might give President Carter a major boost toward reelection.

Ben-Menashe said Omshei did most of the talking at the L’Enfant Plaza meeting, telling Allen, Silberman and McFarlane that the hostages would be delivered to a U.S. Air Force plane in Karachi, Pakistan, fitting with Lavi’s’ notation about “rtun of hostages. Swap in Karachi.” Ben-Menashe said McFarlane nodded at the news and said, cryptically, “I’ll report to my superiors.”

However, by the time Ben-Menashe returned to Israel a couple of days later, he said he discovered that the planned release of the American hostages had fallen through because of Republican opposition, according to his memoir, Profits of War.

The Republicans wanted a release of the hostages only after the Nov. 4 election, Ben-Menashe wrote, with the final details of the delayed release to be arranged in Paris between a delegation of Republicans, led by GOP vice presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, and a delegation of Iranians, led by cleric Mehdi Karrubi, a top aide to Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ben-Menashe and other October Surprise witnesses have claimed that the Paris meeting did occur and, according to Ben-Menashe, it established the outlines for a resolution of the crisis that would have the hostages released after the U.S. presidential election. Ben-Menashe said Israel took on the role of middleman for supplying weapons that Iran needed for its war with Iraq.

Ben-Menashe’s version later was backed up by a confidential Russian government report derived from Soviet-era intelligence files. The Russian Report was sent to the House Task Force in early 1993, but the report was apparently never given to the Task Force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, who told me years later that he never saw it. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden.”]

With the Russian Report brushed aside and other evidence implicating the Republicans downplayed or hidden, the House Task Force turned the page on the complex October Surprise issue by concluding that there was “no credible evidence” to prove that the Reagan campaign had sabotaged Carter’s hostage negotiations. [For more on that cover-up, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Regarding the curious L’Enfant Plaza meeting, the Task Force simply accepted Allen’s memo about the Malaysian fellow as the final answer. [See Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

The Outcome

On Nov. 4, 1980, with Carter unable to free the hostages and Americans feeling humiliated by the year-long standoff with Iran, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide.

For his loyal service to the campaign, the neoconservative Silberman was put in charge of the transition team’s intelligence section. The team prepared a report attacking the CIA’s analytical division for noting growing weaknesses in the Soviet Union. Though that analysis turned out to be true, it was despised by the neocons because it undercut their case for a costly expansion of the Pentagon’s budget.

So, Silberman’s transition team accused the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence of “an abject failure” to foresee a supposedly massive Soviet buildup of strategic weapons and “the wholesale failure” to comprehend the sophistication of Soviet propaganda.

“These failures are of such enormity,” the transition report said, “that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.”

In other words, Silberman’s transition team was implying that CIA analysts who didn’t toe the neoconservative line must be Soviet agents. Even anti-Soviet hardliners like the CIA’s Robert Gates recognized the impact that the incoming administration’s hostility had on the CIA analysts.

“That the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover was apparent in the most extraordinary transition period of my career,” Gates wrote in his memoir, From the Shadows. “The reaction inside the Agency to this litany of failure and incompetence” from the transition team “was a mix of resentment and anger, dread and personal insecurity.”

Amid rumors that the transition team wanted to purge several hundred top analysts, career officials feared for their jobs, especially those considered responsible for assessing the Soviet Union as a declining power rapidly falling behind the West in technology and economics.

According to some intelligence sources, Silberman expected to get the job of CIA director and flew into a rage when Reagan gave the position to his campaign director William Casey, who also was tied to the October Surprise operations.

Silberman’s consolation prize was to be named a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. Later, Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh described Silberman as part of “a powerful band of Republican appointees [who] waited like the strategic reserves of an embattled army” to overturn convictions of Reagan administration officials involved in illicit arms sales to Iran.

In 1981, Allen served as Reagan’s first National Security Advisor, coordinating the formation of Reagan’s foreign policy, but his tenure came to an abrupt end in early 1982 when he resigned in the face of an influence-buying scandal.

Overtures to Israel

As for McFarlane, he and other neocons tried during 1981 to loosen U.S. government opposition to third-country arms sales to Iran, thus aligning U.S. policy with what Israel was already undertaking in selling weapons to the Islamic republic for its war against Israel’s perceived greater enemy, Iraq.

When that effort encountered opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which favored a negotiated settlement of the Iran-Iraq War, McFarlane and his close ally at the State Department, Paul Wolfowitz, tried an end-run by trying to get Secretary of State Alexander Haig to put McFarlane in charge of U.S. policy toward Iran, according to a recently disclosed memo dated Sept. 1, 1981,

“What we do recommend is that you give Bud (McFarlane) a charter to develop policy on these issues, both within the Department and interagency, on an urgent basis,” the memo said.

Later in that year, McFarlane and Wolfowitz saw a new opening to bind U.S. policies on Iran more closely to the interests of Israel. In a Dec. 8, 1981, memo, McFarlane told Wolfowitz about a planned meeting he was to have with Israeli foreign policy and intelligence official David Kimche on Dec. 20.

“At this meeting I would like to introduce two new topics to our agenda and for this purpose would appreciate your providing the necessary analysis and talking points,” McFarlane wrote to Wolfowitz. One of those topics was Iran, according to the document.

“Needless to say, this is a sensitive matter and you should not coordinate its development with any other office,” McFarlane wrote. “You should not coordinate it with any other Bureau.”

In the “talking points” regarding Iran, Wolfowitz proposed that McFarlane tell Kimche, “I am anxious to begin a dialogue with Israel on how to influence the evolution of events … We should consider first whether we can set in motion any methods of influencing internal developments in Iran. … Of course, for this dialogue to be fruitful it must remain restricted to an extraordinarily small number of people.”

In other words, McFarlane and Wolfowitz were looking to the Israelis as key partners in devising strategies for affecting the internal behavior of the Iranian government. And the Israelis’ principal currency for obtaining that influence was the shipment of weapons. McFarlane and Wolfowitz also planned to collaborate secretly with Israel in devising broader U.S. policies toward the Middle East and intended to hide those policies from other U.S. government officials.

McFarlane’s secretive dealings with Israel led Israeli intelligence officer Ben-Menashe to conclude that McFarlane, who served as Reagan’s third National Security Advisor from 1983-85, had developed a “special relationship” with Israeli intelligence, including work with spymaster Rafi Eitan.

Ben-Menashe alleged that McFarlane was the mysterious “Mr. X” who gave Israel advice on what U.S. government secrets Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard should steal from American intelligence files. Pollard was caught in 1985, convicted of espionage and is currently in federal prison. Israel has never identified any other Americans who assisted Pollard’s spy operation.

Though McFarlane pleaded guilty in 1988 to withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair, he strongly denied any espionage work for the Israeli government. He even sued Esquire magazine for an article reporting on Ben-Menashe’s assertion. Federal courts, however, rejected McFarlane’s lawsuit saying it failed to show that Esquire displayed a reckless disregard for the truth, the legal standard required when a public figure seeks damages for libel.

While the newly disclosed documents do not offer direct proof that McFarlane aided Israeli espionage against the United States, they do suggest that McFarlane was seeking an unusual relationship with Israeli authorities, including Kimche, a former senior official in Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.

This convoluted tale of neocon influence over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East — and the secrecy that has surrounded these neocon maneuverings — also help explain how American strategy in the region got so far off-track.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

SOURCE w/links: https://consortiumnews.com/2013/02/17/the-lenfant-plaza-hotel-mystery/

PS: Most of the world has never heard of Richard V. Allen. The swell guy who was Reagan's first National Security Advisor for a day and wanted to hock a couple of diamond watches a nice Japanese journalist gave him for a few minutes with Nancy Reagan. While that guy's forgotten, the world of hurt he and the rest of the Secret Government foisted is all around.

[Oilwellian]

25. So interesting

Thanks, Octafish. K&R

[JHB]

26. Hmmm. I have a couple of copies of Parry's print-precursor to Consortium News...

I forget the name off the top of my head, it drew inspiration from I. F. Stone. Had more but some met their fate in a recycling bundle. But I do know for sure I have at least two, maybe more, among stuff in storage.

Edited to add: It was i.F. Magazine, so named to recall I. F. Stone, and George Seldes' In Fact newsletter.

[2banon]

29. You're in Rare Form tonight Octafish, love it when you get in the zone... :) KNR!

For all the links and pieces you posted here in this thread. Thank You.

[Octafish]

32. For DU.

For me, DU is a Truth Machine. Sure, we have to separate the signal from the noise, but there a good many things crucial for democracy published on DU that are not found in -- or are twisted by -- Corporate McPravda.

Thank you, 2banon! And thank you to all DUers who care! And to all the DUers who sent me a Valentine's heart.

You mean the world to me.

[2banon]

36. A "Truth Machine" indeed! And I ALWAYS appreciate reading contributions from you..

a power source of much needed Truth...

[Octafish]

37. Remember that guy who said Manchester UK was only for Muslims? The guy's practically a PNAC scribe.

Coincidentally cough Steven Emerson's the same guy who claimed Robert Parry was wrong on the October Surprise story back in the mid-90s. The facts, of course, backed Parry.

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Emerson_Steven

[2banon]

39. LOL! I hadn't realized it was the same person.. I lose track of these Cretans.

But I am grateful to be reminded of the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you for that!

I haven't stayed in touch with them as often as I used to back in the earlier part of the last decade.

Can't believe how the years have flown and we're still struggling against the same evil doers doing the same evil shite. .

[Rex]

38. You hurt someones feeling by having too many hearts!

Okay, how is this for sad/pathetic/petty...the usual suspects here all have a sadz. Why? Because you have too many hearts! You know what other group latches onto such petty, but predictable things? Yep, I bet you do.

The US seem to be on their last inch of rope. They can't get rid of you and can't stand to see that people like you. I guess they will have to remain sadz until the end of their concern troll days!

[2banon]

40. Must say thank you once more...

[JEB]

41. Kick and bookmark.

[Ramses]

44. I find your articles well sourced, in depth and chock full of factual information

Really good stuff. I have learned a lot recently just from your posts

[polly7]

45. Kick. nt.

[Fumesucker]

46. Seconded...