The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  North arranged for Haskell and Owen to be introduced to Fernandez. Fernandez minimized and concealed from his superiors at the CIA the true nature of his contacts with North and North’s private representatives. Fernandez and North eventually developed a secret communications network using National Security Agency (NSA)-supplied KL-43 encryption devices, outside normal CIA communications channels. [. . .] Under the direction of North, Fernandez and US Ambassador to Costa Rica Lewis A. Tambs used their influence as representatives of the United States to obtain the support of senior Costa Rican officials for the airstrip project.

  Second, North directed Secord to purchase aircraft capable of resupplying Contra forces. From January to August 1986, private parties working on behalf of North and Secord purchased four military aircraft costing approximately $1.8 million, as well as additional equipment for operation of these aircraft. The funds for these purchases came from Hakim and Secord’s secret Swiss bank accounts.

  North took an active part in the purchase of the aircraft. He reviewed and approved a technical proposal for the resupply organization solicited by Secord from Richard B. Gadd, a Secord associate. North and Secord then directed Gadd in November 1985 to approach the Government of Venezuela in an unsuccessful attempt to purchase military aircraft. North used his influence as a Government official to vouch for Gadd’s bona fides with the government of Venezuela. Similarly, North exercised final approval on major expenditures for equipment. In January 1986, North personally directed Secord to provide Gadd with over $100,000 for anticipated costs. Later in 1986, North directed Secord to purchase a package of spare parts required by the resupply operation that cost in excess of $200,000. North personally approved the purchase of a fourth military aircraft in August 1986 at a cost of $250,000. When there was a dispute between Gadd and Secord as to the ownership of the aircraft, North resolved it in favor of Secord’s Enterprise.

  Third, North secretly undertook to obtain the use of Ilopango air base in El Salvador for his resupply operation. In a letter dated September 20, 1985, North requested that Felix Rodriguez, an American citizen with close ties to the commander of the Salvadoran Air Force, solicit permission to use the base for his resupply operation. [. . .]

  Fourth, at North’s instruction, Secord through Clines purchased in Europe and delivered to Central America thousands of pounds of arms from December 1985 to September 1986. The cost of purchase and transport of these arms was paid from the secret Swiss accounts.

  Fifth, North, with the assistance of Secord, secretly directed the actual administration of the resupply project during 1986. Secord hired first Gadd and then Robert Dutton as project managers. Gadd and Dutton, through the corporation Amalgamated Commercial Enterprises (ACE), in turn hired numerous other employees. By the summer of 1986, the resupply operation had over 20 full-time employees whose combined salaries totalled over $60,000 per month. The cost of equipment and salaries for the operation was paid from the Enterprise’s secret Swiss accounts.

  The activities at the Ilopango air base were supervised by Quintero for Secord. Rodriguez served as liaison with the base commander, General Juan Rafael Bustillo. Additional assistance and supervision was provided by the military group detailed to the US Embassy in El Salvador.

  Gadd and Dutton reported directly to Secord. At the same time, they had frequent – often daily – contact with North, from whom they accepted guidance and direction. North frequently gave them orders regarding specific operations, usually in order to accelerate resupply drops to the Contras. [. . .]

  Under North’s and Secord’s direction, the resupply operation in 1986 improved and ultimately delivered to the Contras in the field in Nicaragua thousands of pounds of arms previously purchased by Secord. North generally received detailed inventories of the lethal supplies provided [to] Contra forces. The resupply operation also delivered substantial quantities of nonlethal aid and engaged in projects such as training Contra forces in the use of explosives. These operational activities of the Enterprise ended in early October 1986 when an Enterprise aircraft was shot down over Nicaragua, killing three crew members and leading to the capture of Eugene Hasenfus, an American who told his Nicaraguan captors that he was working for the CIA.

  Funding of the Resupply Operation

  Funds for the secret war came primarily from three sources: (a) the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty (NEPL); (b) the Iran arms sales; and (c) foreign governments. As set forth in the “Flow of Funds” chapter of this Report, the total amount of funds deposited in Enterprise accounts in Switzerland was $47.6 million. By the time the Iran/Contra affair became public, the Enterprise had given to the Contras or had spent on efforts related to the Contras approximately $17.6 million of these funds.

  Foreign Donations

  From December 1984 through July 1985, the Contras paid into Enterprise accounts approximately $11.3 million for a variety of services and goods. Most of these funds came from the Saudis, who contributed $32 million in 1984 and 1985. The Saudi funds were nearly exhausted by mid-1985.

  After North held his June meeting in Miami, the Contras were no longer the direct recipient of such funds. Thereafter, the conspirators directed to Enterprise bank accounts all funds from third countries that had been solicited by US officials on behalf of the Contras, even though some of them had been restricted for only humanitarian purposes.

  In August 1985, North asked Gaston Sigur, an NSC staff officer, to arrange a meeting between North and an official of the Taiwanese government for the purpose of soliciting funds for the Contras. Following this meeting, North had Sigur confirm the decision by Taiwan to provide the Contras with $1 million. North then directed Robert Owen to deliver an envelope containing the number of an Enterprise account to the Taiwanese official. On 20 September 1985, $1 million was received by the Enterprise. In late 1985, North renewed his request, via Sigur, that Taiwan provide additional funds to the Contras. In February 1986, a second transfer of $1 million was received in an Enterprise account.

  Similarly, in June 1986, when the State Department planned to raise $10 million for the Contras from the Sultan of Brunei, North undertook to divert the funds to the Enterprise by giving one of its Swiss account numbers to Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams. Fawn Hall, North’s secretary, apparently made a transcription error in the account number so the funds were misdirected and never received.

  On November 20, 1985, the Enterprise received $1 million from the government of Israel to pay the Enterprise for transporting a number of shipments of weapons from Israel to Iran. That weapons transfer was abandoned after the first shipment. The Enterprise’s expenses for that shipment were less than $200,000, but the Enterprise kept the balance.

  [. . .]

  Exploitation of the Iran Arms Sales

  The Iran arms sales were the major source of the Enterprise’s funds for the secret war activities. In all, the Enterprise received slightly more than $30 million for the sale of Government arms and returned only $12.2 million to the United States. At least $3.6 million was to fund the Enterprise’s resupply operation in support of the Contras.

  Concealment

  Soon after the June 1985 meeting in Miami, a series of congressional inquiries sought to determine exactly what the US Government, and North in particular, were doing on behalf of the Contras. McFarlane, Poindexter and North responded by actively deceiving committees of Congress with a series of false statements and by other efforts to ensure that Congress would never find out about the secret Contra military support.

  The first false statements came in McFarlane’s 5 September 1985 letter to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a letter on which McFarlane, Poindexter, and North all worked. The letter contained false denials of North’s fund-raising activities and his provision of tactical advice to the Contras, as well as a false assurance that no one on the NSC staff had “violate[d] the letter or spirit” of the Boland prohibition on military aid. 12 September 1985 and 7 October 1985 letter
s under McFarlane’s signature, both jointly drafted by North and McFarlane, contained similar false statements.

  McFarlane’s replacement by Poindexter as National Security Advisor on 4 December 1985 did not alter the pattern of deceit. North continued to work to prevent dissemination of information about his activities. On 16 June 1986, North sent Fernandez a KL-43 message that stated in part:

  I do not think we ought to contemplate these operations without [Quintero] being on scene. Too many things go wrong that then directly involve you and me in what should be deniable for both of us.

  On 15 May 1986, Poindexter sent this computer message to North:

  I am afraid you are letting your operational role become too public. From now on I don’t want you to talk to anybody else, including Casey, except me about any of your operational roles. In fact you need to generate a cover story that I have insisted that you stop.

  North responded to Poindexter on the same day with a computer note that said “Done.” North subsequently had Robert Dutton inform Enterprise employees in El Salvador that the resupply operation had been taken over by a new entity known as “B.C. Washington.”

  Nevertheless, on 10 June 1986 Poindexter reminded North via computer: “I still want you to reduce your visibility.” [. . .]

  In the summer of 1986, Congress renewed its inquiries. On 21 July 1986, responding to a House resolution of inquiry, Poindexter sent letters to two committee chairmen, stating that McFarlane’s 1985 letters to Congress accurately described the activities of the NSC staff. When members of the House Intelligence Committee questioned North in person, he falsely denied his Contra-support activities.

  The deception continued after one of the resupply organization’s planes carrying Hasenfus was shot down in October 1986. Congress was about to authorize resumption of Contra support by the CIA, with an appropriation of $100 million. Administration officials denied any connection with the aircraft. In October and November 1986, North altered, destroyed, and removed documents and official records relating to the resupply operation. On November 23, 1986, he lied to the Attorney General to conceal Secord’s operation and his own responsibility in directing the secret resupply activities and the control of the funds used to finance them. Between 22 and 29 November 1986, Poindexter unsuccessfully tried to delete from the White House computer system all of his communications with North. Finally, on December 8, 1986, McFarlane told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he was unaware that the government or citizens of Saudi Arabia had been involved in financing the Contras. [. . .]

  POPE JOHN PAUL I

  Even in Italy, land of the conspiracy, no plot comes more entangled than the death of Pope John Paul I.

  When white smoke puffed above the Vatican on 26 August 1978 to signal the election of Albino Luciani to the papacy no one was more surprised than Luciani himself. A Vatican low-profiler, Luciani was a deeply modest man, who refused the papal tiara at his coronation and endeared himself to many, not just Catholics, by his smiling kindness.

  Just 33 days later, he was dead. According to the Vatican, John Paul I’s death was natural. But then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

  Suggestions that the new pontiff’s demise was anything but natural circulated immediately, fuelled by the easily disprovable lies and oddities emanating from Vatican itself:

  At first it was announced that John Paul had been found dead in his bed, with a copy of Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ propped before him, by his secretaries Magee and Lorenzi; in fact, the body was discovered by a nun, Sister Vincenza.

  The Vatican blamed John Paul’s untimely death – he was 66 – on his heavy smoking. But he didn’t smoke.

  A false time of death was issued.

  Most controversially of all, a post mortem was not conducted because, insisted the Vatican, post mortems on pontiffs are prohibited by Vatican law. Yet a post mortem had been conducted on the remains of Pope Pius VIII in 1830.

  Within 24 hours of his death John Paul I was embalmed.

  John Paul I had enemies as well as friends. David Yallop, in In God’s Name (1984), identifies Vatican reactionaries, Freemasons, and Mafiosi as an unholy alliance which loathed the new Pope – loathed him enough to murder him by the administration of digitalis to initiate a heart attack. According to Yallop, the liberal John Paul I was intending to soften the Catholic position on contraception, thus raising the ire of Vatican conservatives. The Freemasons of Propaganda Due (P2), meanwhile, feared a papal expose of their secret caucus inside the Vatican. More worried still were the Mafiosi, who believed that the new pontiff was intending to clean up the Vatican Bank.

  Something had long been rotten in the state of the Vatican’s banking system. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Vatican bank officials had laundered money filched by the Nazis, as well as setting up “rat lines” for Nazi war criminals to escape to South America. When the Nazi Gold dried up, the Vatican banks, especially the Istituto per le Opere Religiose (IOR), became money-launderers for the Mafia. The key figures in the IOR’s money-laundering for the Mob were Roberto “God’s Banker” Calvi, director of the IOR’s Milan-based outlet Banco Ambrosiano, and, allegedly, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Michele “The Shark” Sindona, a Sicilian financier, was, in Yallop’s scenario, the linkman between the bank and the Mafia.

  If the Vatican Bank’s corrupt officials were dismissed, the Mafia would lose a favoured means of disposing of its ill-gotten gains. The Pope had to go.

  In Yallop’s scenario, the murder of John Paul I worked out nearly perfectly, since he was replaced by John Paul II, who was socially conservative (thus opposed to contraception) and who, far from cleaning up the Vatican Bank, gave Archbishop Marcinkus immunity from prosecution.

  Yallop’s case, though strong, is circumstantial. The Vatican Bank was corrupt to the core, and one of the major players, Roberto Calvi, met a retirement not usually associated with the banking profession. But did John Paul I himself meet an unnatural death? A persuasive counter-blast to Yallop’s book came in 1989 with A Thief in the Night by John Cornwell, an English journalist who, after conducting his own investigation, concluded that John Paul I died of a pulmonary embolism. Indeed, John Paul I had manifested the classic symptom of the condition: swollen feet.

  Of course, it might be objected that John Cornwell would say that, wouldn’t he? He was asked to write A Thief in the Night by . . . the Vatican.

  Pope John Paul I was victim of homicidal reactionary and criminal element in Vatican: ALERT LEVEL 6

  Further Reading

  John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, 1989

  David Yallop, In God’s Name, 1984

  JONESTOWN

  Rumours of brainwashing, torture and murder had long attended the People’s Temple, an American hippie cult living in Guyana, when Democratic US Congressman Leo Ryan decided to investigate first-hand. Arriving on 17 November 1978 at “Jonestown”, the cult’s jungle encampment, Ryan was accompanied by Richard Dwyer (a US embassy official in Guyana), media representatives and members of “Concerned Relatives of People’s Temple Members”. After touring around, making notes and gathering together a small group of People’s Temple members who wished to return to the US, Ryan and his entourage made for the airstrip at nearby Port Kaituma. There the Ryan group was ambushed by People’s Temple loyalists of the “Red Brigade”. Ryan, among others, was shot dead.

  Back in Jonestown, the cult’s messianic leader and founder, the “Reverend” Jim Jones, called for a “white night”, one of the practice mass suicides the cult periodically held. This time, however, it was for real: mixed in to the Kool Aid they drank was potassium cyanide and valium. Nearly 920 of Jones’s followers, including 276 children, ingested the poison and died. Photographs taken afterwards show close, orderly rows of bodies, neatly dressed, often with their arms around each other.

  A year later, the House Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress issued a 782-page report in which it concluded that the Jonestown massacre was a mass
suicide brought on by Jones’s “extreme paranoia”. Many disagreed. Initial reports by such heavyweight newspapers as the New York Times suggested that 400 People’s Temple followers had committed suicide, but more had escaped into the jungle; a week later the death toll had risen to 900. So how did the extra 500 die? A Guyanese pathologist, Dr Lesie Mootoo, discounted cyanide as the sole cause of death; many of the Jonestown corpses were free of the eerie rictus that is the hallmark of the agonizing death that comes with cyanide poisoning. Some corpses had strange needle marks on them, and some of the People’s Temple dead had been shot. In fact, Mootoo thought that all but three of the People’s Temple dead had been murdered. Guyanese newpapers reported that Guyanese troops, US green berets and UK Black Watch troops were on exercises near Jonestown at the time of the massacre. Why did they not intervene? Or were they responsible for the deaths of the 500?

  Speculation that the CIA might be involved in the Jonestown massacre started up in 1980 when reporter Jack Anderson published a syndicated article called “CIA Involved in Jonestown Massacre”. According to Anderson, Jim Jones himself was tied to the CIA, and certainly there were oddities in his political background; Jones’s father was a Klansman and Jones Jr had been a virulent anti-Communist before his damascene conversion to utopianism in the mid-1960s. Was the conversion fake and Jones a CIA mole in the counterculture? Anderson also suggested that Richard Dwyer, who accompanied Ryan to Jonestown, was a CIA operative. On the audio tape made by Jones of the Ryan visit, the cult leader can be clearly heard during a fractious moment saying, “Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him!”