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http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/bush-cheney-drugs.html
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FTW October 24, 2000 - The success of Bush Vice Presidential running
mate Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five year $3.8
billion "pig-out" on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is
only a partial indicator of what may happen if the Bush ticket wins in
two weeks. A closer look at available research, including an August 2,
2000 report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) at
www.public-i.org, suggests that drug money has played a role in the
successes achieved by Halliburton under Cheney's tenure as CEO from
1995 to 2000. This is especially true for Halliburton's most famous
subsidiary, heavy construction and oil giant, Brown and Root. A deeper
look into history reveals that Brown and Root's past as well as the
past of ***** Cheney himself, connect to the international drug trade
on more than one occasion and in more than one way.
This June the lead Washington, D.C. attorney for a major Russian oil
company connected in law enforcement reports to heroin smuggling and
also a beneficiary of US backed loans to pay for Brown and Root
contracts in Russia, held a $2.2 million fund raiser to fill the
already bulging coffers of presidential candidate George W. Bush. This
is not the first time that Brown and Root has been connected to drugs
and the fact is that this "poster child" of American industry may also
be a key player in Wall Street's efforts to maintain domination of the
half trillion dollar a year global drug trade and its profits. And
***** Cheney, who has also come closer to drugs than most suspect, and
who is also Halliburton's largest individual shareholder ($45.5
million), has a vested interest in seeing to it that Brown and Root's
successes continue.
Of all American companies dealing directly with the U.S. military and
providing cover for CIA operations few firms can match the global
presence of this giant construction powerhouse which employs 20,000
people in more than 100 countries. Through its sister companies or
joint ventures, Brown and Root can build offshore oil rigs, drill
wells, construct and operate everything from harbors to pipelines to
highways to nuclear reactors. It can train and arm security forces and
it can now also feed, supply and house armies. One key beacon of Brown
and Root's overwhelming appeal to agencies like the CIA is that, from
its own corporate web page, it proudly announces that it has received
the contract to dismantle aging Russian nuclear tipped ICBMs in their
silos.
Furthermore, the relationships between key institutions, players and
the Bushes themselves suggest that under a George "W" administration
the Bush family and its allies may well be able, using Brown and Root
as the operational interface, to control the drug trade all the way
from Medellin to Moscow.
Originally formed as a heavy construction company to build dams, Brown
and Root grew its operations via shrewd political contributions to
Senate candidate Lyndon Johnson in 1948. Expanding into the building
of oil platforms, military bases, ports, nuclear facilities, harbors
and tunnels, Brown and Root virtually underwrote LBJ's political
career. It prospered as a result, making billions on U.S. Government
contracts during the Vietnam War. The "Austin Chronicle" in an August
28 Op-ed piece entitled "The Candidate From Brown and Root" labels
Republican Cheney as the political dispenser of Brown and Root's
largesse. According to political campaign records, during Cheney's
five year tenure at Halliburton the company's political contributions
more than doubled to $1.2 million. Not surprisingly, most of that
money went to Republican candidates.
Independent news service "newsmakingnews.com," also describes how in
1998, with Cheney as Chairman, Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to
purchase oil industry equipment and drilling supplier Dresser
Industries. This made Halliburton a corporation that will have a
presence in almost any future oil drilling operation anywhere in the
world. And it also brought back into the family fold the company that
had once sent a plane - also in 1948 - to fetch the new Yale Graduate
George H.W. Bush, to begin his career in the Texas oil business. Bush
the elder's father, Prescott, served as a Managing Director for the
firm that once owned Dresser, Brown Bothers Harriman.
It is clear that everywhere there is oil there is Brown and Root. But
increasingly, everywhere there is war or insurrection there is Brown
and Root also. From Bosnia and Kosovo, to Chechnya, to Rwanda, to
Burma, to Pakistan, to Laos, to Vietnam, to Indonesia, to Iran to
Libya to Mexico to Colombia, Brown and Root's traditional operations
have expanded from heavy construction to include the provision of
logistical support for the U.S. military. Now, instead of U.S. Army
quartermasters, the world is likely to see Brown and Root warehouses
storing and managing everything from uniforms to rations to vehicles.
Dramatic expansion of Brown and Root's operations in Colombia also
suggest Bush preparations for a war inspired feeding frenzy as a part
of "Plan Colombia." This is consistent with moves by former Bush
Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady to open a joint Colombian-American
investment partnership called Corfinsura for the financing of major
construction projects with the Colombian Antioquia Syndicate,
headquartered in Medellin. (See FTW June, 00). And expectations of a
ground war in Colombia may explain why, in a 2000 SEC filing, Brown
and Root reported that in addition to owning more than 800,000 square
feet of warehouse space in Colombia, they also lease another 122,000
square feet. According to the filing of the Brown and Root Energy
Services Group, the only other places where the company maintains
warehouse space are in Mexico (525,000 sq. feet), and the U.S.
(38,000) square feet.
According to the web site of Colombia's Foreign Investment Promotion
Agency Brown and Root had no presence in the country until 1997. What
does Brown and Root, which, according to the AP has made more than $2
billion supporting and supplying U.S. troops, know about Colombia that
the U.S. public does not? Why the need for almost a million square
feet of warehouse space that can be transferred from one Brown and
Root operation (energy) to another (military support) with the stroke
of a pen?
DRUGS
As described by the Associated Press, during "Iran-Contra"
Congressman ***** Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a
rabid supporter of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of
the fact that North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White House
briefing. Oliver North's own diaries and subsequent investigations by
the CIA Inspector General have irrevocably tied him directly to
cocaine smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts
for one firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did
not stop Cheney from actively supporting North's 1994 unsuccessful run
for the U.S. Senate from Virginia just a year before he took over the
reins at Brown and Root's parent company, Dallas based Halliburton
Inc. in 1995.
As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm
(1990-91), Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish
rebels in northern Iran. The Kurds' primary source of income for more
than fifty years has been heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and
Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Having had some personal
experience with Brown and Root I noted carefully when the Los Angeles
Times observed that on March 22, 1991 that a group of gunmen burst
into the Ankara, Turkey offices of the joint venture, Vinnell, Brown
and Root and assassinated retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant John
Gandy.
In March of 1991, tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees, long-time
assets of the CIA, were being massacred by Saddam Hussein in the wake
of the Gulf War. Saddam, seeking to destroy any hopes of a successful
Kurdish revolt, found it easy to kill thousands of the unwanted Kurds
who had fled to the Turkish border seeking sanctuary. There, Turkish
security forces, trained in part by the Vinnell, Brown and Root
partnership, turned thousands of Kurds back into certain death.
Today, the Vinnell Corporation (a TRW Company) is, along with the
firms MPRI and DynCorp (FTW June, 00) one of the three pre-eminent
private mercenary corporations in the world. It is also the dominant
entity for the training of security forces throughout the Middle East.
Not surprisingly the Turkish border regions in question were the
primary transhipment points for heroin, grown in Afghanistan and
Pakistan and destined for the markets of Europe.
A confidential source with intelligence experience in the region
subsequently told me that the Kurds "got some payback against the
folks that used to help them move their drugs." He openly acknowledged
that Brown and Root and Vinnell both routinely provided NOC or
non-official cover for CIA officers. But I already knew that.
From 1994 to 1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans
where, according to "The Christian Science Monitor" and "Jane's
Intelligence Review," the Kosovo Liberation Army controls 70 per cent
of the heroin entering Western Europe, Cheney's Brown and Root made
billions of dollars supplying U.S. troops from vast facilities in the
region. Brown and Root support operations continue in Bosnia, Kosovo
and Macedonia to this day.
***** Cheney's footprints have come closer to drugs than one might
suspect. The August Center for Public Integrity report brought them
even closer. It would be factually correct to say that there is a
direct linkage of Brown and Root facilities - often in remote and
hazardous regions - between every drug producing region and every drug
consuming region in the world. These coincidences, in and of
themselves, do not prove complicity in the trade. Other facts,
however, lead inescapably in that direction.
A DIRECT DRUG LINK
The CPI report entitled "Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal
Trough" written by veteran journalists Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller
describes how, under five years of Cheney's leadership, Halliburton,
largely through subsidiary Brown and Root, enjoyed $3.8 billion in
federal contracts and taxpayer insured loans. The loans had been
granted by the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation (OPIC). According to Ralph McGehee's "CIA Base
©" both institutions are heavily infiltrated by the CIA and routinely
provide NOC to its officers.
One of those loans to Russian financial/banking conglomerate The Alfa
Group of Companies contained $292 million to pay for Brown and Root's
contract to refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by the Russian Tyumen
Oil Company. The Alfa Group completed its 51% acquisition of Tyumen
Oil in what was allegedly a rigged bidding process in 1998. An
official Russian government report claimed that the Alfa Group's top
executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven "allegedly
participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through
Russia and into Europe."
These same executives, Fridman and Aven, who reportedly smuggled the
heroin in connection with Russia's Solntsevo mob family were the same
ones who applied for the EXIM loans that Halliburton's lobbying later
safely secured. As a result Brown and Root's work in Alfa Tyumen oil
fields could continue - and expand.
After describing how organized criminal interests in the Alfa Group
had allegedly stolen the oil field by fraud, the CPI story, using
official reports from the FSB (the Russian equivalent of the FBI),
oil companies such as BP-Amoco, former CIA and KGB officers and press
accounts then established a solid link to Alfa Tyumen and the
transportation of heroin.
In 1995 sacks of heroin disguised as sugar were stolen from a rail
container leased by Alfa Echo and sold in the Siberian town of
Khabarovsk. A problem arose when many residents of the town became
"intoxicated" or "poisoned." The CPI story also stated, "The FSB
report said that within days of the incident, Ministry of Internal
Affairs (MVD) agents conducted raids of Alfa Eko buildings and found
'drugs and other compromising documentation.'
"Both reports claim that Alfa Bank has laundered drug funds from
Russian and Colombian drug cartels.
"The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official
met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now imprisoned financial
mastermind of Colombia's notorious Cali cartel, 'to conclude an
agreement about the transfer of money into the Alfa Bank from offshore
zones such as the Bahamas, Gibraltar and others. The plan was to
insert it back into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock
in Russian companies.
"É He [the former KGB agent] reported that there was evidence
'regarding [Alfa Bank's] involvement with the money laundering ofÉ
Latin American drug cartels."
It then becomes harder for Cheney and Halliburton to assert mere
coincidence in all of this as CPI reported that Tyumen's lead
Washington attorney James C, Langdon, Jr. at the firm of Aikin Gump
"helped coordinate a $2.2 million fund raiser for Bush this June. He
then agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers and lobbyists in the capital
to raise $25,000 each for W's campaign."
The heroin mentioned in the CPI story, originated in Laos where
longtime Bush allies and covert warriors Richard Armitage and retired
CIA ADDO (Associate Deputy Director of Operations) Ted Shackley have
been repeatedly linked to the drug trade. It then made its way across
Southeast Asia to Vietnam, probably the port of Haiphong. Then the
heroin sailed to Russia's Pacific port of Valdivostok from whence it
subsequently bounced across Siberia by rail and thence by truck or
rail to Europe, passing through the hands of Russian Mafia leaders in
Chechnya and Azerbaijan. Chechnya and Azerbaijan are hotbeds of both
armed conflict and oil exploration and Brown and Root has operations
all along this route.
This long, expensive and tortured path was hastily established, as
described by FTW in previous issues, after President George Bush's
personal envoy Richard Armitage, holding the rank of Ambassador, had
traveled to the former Soviet Union to assist it with its "economic
development" in 1989. The obstacle then to a more direct, profitable
and efficient route from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Turkey into
Europe was a cohesive Yugoslavian/Serbian government controlling the
Balkans and continuing instability in the Golden Crescent of
Pakistan/Afghanistan. Also, there was no other way, using heroin from
the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos and Thailand), to deal with China and
India but to go around them.
It is perhaps not by coincidence again that Cheney and Armitage share
membership in the prestigious Aspen Institute, an exclusive
bi-partisan research think tank, and also in the U.S. Azerbaijan
Chamber of Commerce. Just last November, in what may be a portent of
things to come, Armitage, played the role of Secretary of Defense in
an practical exercise at the Council on Foreign Relations where he and
Cheney are also both members. Speculation that the scandal plagued
Armitage, who resigned under a cloud as Assistant Secretary of Defense
in the Reagan Administration, is W's first choice for Secretary of
Defense next year is widespread.
The Clinton Administration took care of all that wasted travel for
heroin with the 1998 destruction of Serbia and Kosovo and the
installation of the KLA as a regional power. That opened a direct line
from Afghanistan to Western Europe and Brown and Root was right in the
middle of that too. The Clinton skill at streamlining drug operations
was described in detail in the May issue of FTW in a story entitled
"The Democratic Party's Presidential Drug Money Pipeline." That
article has since been reprinted in three countries. The essence of
the drug economic lesson was that by growing opium in Colombia and by
smuggling both cocaine and heroin from Colombia to New York City
through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (a virtual straight
line), traditional smuggling routes could be shortened or even
eliminated. This reduced both risk and cost, increased profits and
eliminated competition.
FTW suspects the hand of Medellin co-founder Carlos Lehder in this
process and it is interesting to note that Lehder, released from
prison under Clinton in 1995, is now active in both the Bahamas and
South America. Lehder was known during the eighties as "The genius of
transportation." I can well imagine a ***** Cheney, having witnessed
the complete restructuring of the global drug trade in the last eight
years, going to George W and saying, "Look, I know how we can make it
even better." One thing is for certain. As quoted in the CPI article,
one Halliburton Vice President noted that if the Bush-Cheney ticket
was elected, "the company's government contracts would obviously go
through the roof."
THE DARK PAST
In July of 1977 this writer, then a Los Angeles Police officer
struggled to make sense of a world gone haywire. In a last ditch
effort to salvage a relationship with my fiancŽe, Nordica Theodora
D'Orsay (Teddy), a CIA contract agent, I had traveled to find her in
New Orleans. On a hastily arranged vacation, secured with the blessing
of my Commanding Officer, Captain Jesse Brewer of LAPD, I had gone on
my own, unofficially, to avoid the scrutiny of LAPD's Organized Crime
Intelligence Division (OCID).
Starting in the late spring of 1976 Teddy had wanted me to join her
operations from within the ranks of LAPD. I had refused to get
involved with drugs in any way and everything she mentioned seemed to
involve either heroin or cocaine along with guns that she was always
moving out of the country. The Director of the CIA then was George
Herbert Walker Bush.
Although officially on staff at the LAPD Academy at the time, I had
been unofficially loaned to OCID since January when Teddy, announcing
the start of a new operation planned in the fall of 1976 had suddenly
disappeared. She left many people, including me, baffled and twisting
in the breeze. The OCID detectives had been pressuring me hard for
information about her and what I knew of her activities. It was
information I could not give them. Hoping against hope that I would
find some way to understand her involvement with CIA, LAPD, the royal
family of Iran, the Mafia and drugs I set out alone into eight days of
Dantean revelations that have determined the course of my life from
that day to this.
Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found her living in an
apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler phones,
night vision devices and working from sealed communiquŽs delivered by
naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air
Station, Teddy was involved in something truly ugly. She was arranging
for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for
Iran. At the same time she was working with Mafia associates of New
Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of
service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the
city. The boats arrived at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by
even the New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with divers,
military men, former Green Berets and CIA personnel.
The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf
of Mexico, oil rigs in international waters, oil rigs built and
serviced by Brown and Root. The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently
Vietnam era surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also
owned or leased by Brown and Root. And more than once during the eight
days I spent in New Orleans I met and ate at restaurants with Brown
and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran
within days. Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the
wrong question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.
Disgusted and heart broken at witnessing my fiancŽe and my government
smuggling drugs, I ended the relationship. Returning home to LA I made
a clean breast and reported all the activity I had seen, including the
connections to Brown and Root, to LAPD intelligence officers. They
promptly told me that I was crazy. Forced out of LAPD under threat of
death at the end of 1978, I made complaints to LAPD's Internal Affairs
Division and to the LA office of the FBI under the command of FBI SAC
Ted Gunderson. I and my attorney wrote to the politicians, the
Department of Justice, the CIA and contacted the L.A. Times. The FBI
and the LAPD said that I was crazy.
According to a 1981 two-part news story in the "Los Angeles Herald
Examiner" it was revealed that The FBI had taken Teddy into custody
and then released her before classifying their investigation without
further action. Former New Orleans Crime Commissioner Aaron Cohen told
reporter Randall Sullivan that he found my description of events
perfectly plausible after his thirty years of studying Louisiana's
organized crime operations.
To this day a CIA report prepared as a result of my complaint remains
classified and exempt from release pursuant to Executive Order of the
President in the interests of national security and because it would
reveal the identities of CIA agents.
On October 26, 1981, in the basement of the West Wing of the White
House, I reported on what I had seen in New Orleans to my friend and
UCLA classmate Craig Fuller. Craig Fuller went on to become Chief of
Staff to Vice President Bush from 1981 to 1985.
In 1982, then UCLA political science professor Paul Jabber, filled in
many of the pieces in my quest to understand what I had seen in New
Orleans. He was qualified to do so because he had served as a CIA and
State Department consultant to the Carter administration. Paul
explained that, after a 1975 treaty between the Shah of Iran and
Saddam Hussein the Shah had cut off all overt military support for
Kurdish rebels fighting Saddam from the north of Iraq. In exchange the
Shah had gained access to the Shat al-Arab waterway so that he could
multiply his oil exports and income. Not wanting to lose a long-term
valuable asset in the Kurds, the CIA had then used Brown and Root,
which operated in both countries and maintained port facilities in the
Persian Gulf and near Shat al-Arab to rearm the Kurds. The whole
operation had been financed with heroin. Paul was matter-of-fact about
it.
In 1983 Paul Jabber left UCLA to become a Vice President of Banker's
Trust and Chairman of the Middle East Department of the Council on
Foreign Relations.
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If one is courageous enough to seek an "operating system" that
theoretically explains what FTW has just described for you, one need
look no further than a fabulous two-part article in "Le Monde
Diplomatique" in April of this year. The brilliant stories, focusing
heavily on drug capital are titled "Crime, The World's Biggest Free
Enterprise." The brilliant and penetrating words of authors Christian
de Brie and Jean de Maillard do a better job of explaining the actual
world economic and political situation than anything that I have ever
read.
De Brie writes, "By allowing capital to flow unchecked from one end of
the world to the other, globalization and abandon of sovereignty have
together fostered the explosive growth of an outlaw financial marketÉ
"It is a coherent system closely linked to the expansion of modern
capitalism and based on an association of three partners: governments,
transnational corporations and mafias. Business is business: financial
crime is first and foremost a market, thriving and structured, ruled
by supply and demand.
"Big business complicity and political laisser faire is the only way
that large-scale organized crime can launder and recycle the fabulous
proceeds of its activities. And the transnationals need the support of
governments and the neutrality of regulatory authorities in order to
consolidate their positions, increase their profits, withstand and
crush the competition, pull off the "deal of the century" and finance
their illicit operations. Politicians are directly involved and their
ability to intervene depends on the backing and the funding that keep
them in power. This collusion of interests is an essential part of the
world economy, the oil that keeps the wheels of capitalism turning."
After confronting CIA Director John Deutch on world television on
November 15, 1996 I was interviewed by the staffs of both the Senate
and House Intelligence Committees. I prepared written testimony for
Senate Intelligence which I submitted although I was never called to
testify. In every one of those interviews and in my written testimony
and in every lecture since that time I have told the story of Brown
and Root. I will tell it again at the USC School of International
Relations on December the 8th, 2000 - regardless of who wins the
election.
Michael C. Ruppert
www.copvcia.com
Sources:
- The Center for Public Integrity, "Cheney Led Halliburton to Feast at
Federal Trough", Knut Royce & Nathaniel Heller,
http://www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm
-"Le Monde - Diplomatique", April 2000.
- The U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce
-The Aspen Institute, www.aspeninst.org
-"The Austin Chronicle", August 28, 2000
-The Associated Press, "Study: US Could Save Cost in Balkans" -
10/10/00
-The Associated Press, "Cheney, North Relationship Probed" - 8/11/00
-"The New York Times" Index
-The Council on Foreign Relations
-"The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush" - Webster Tarpley and
Anton Chaitkin
-"CIA Base" © 1992, Ralph McGehee
-CIA Inspector General Report of Investigation: Allegations of
Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the
United States. Volume II: The Contra Story - Report 96-0143-IG.
-newsmakingnews.com, 27 August 2000, "The ***** Cheney Data Dump"
- Securities and Exchange Commission - "Edgar" Data base.
-Halliburton/Brown and Root - www.Halliburton.com/brs
-The Vinnell Corporation - www.Vinnell.com
-"The New York Press," 8/1/00
-"The Los Angeles Times," March 23, 1991.
-"The Los Angeles Herald Examiner:, Oct. 11 & 18, 1981
-"The Christian Science Monitor" - Oct. 20, 1994
-"Jane's Intelligence Review" - February 1, 1995.
-Written testimony of Michael C. Ruppert for the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence dated 10/1/97 -
http://www.fromthewilderness.com//free/ciadrugs/ssci.html
-"From The Wilderness" (4/99, 4/00, 6/00)
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