The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee Harvey, Osvaldo
Thursday, April 28, 2016
The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee Harvey, Osvaldo
In downtown Los Angeles, there is a place called the Civic Center Mall. It is known as containing the largest concentration of government employees in the United States outside of Washington, D.C. On a personal level, it is an area I spent a great deal of time hanging out with the LA branch of the #Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall of 2011. But it is also an area where a plot to assassinate President Jimmy Carter was foiled on May 5, 1979 that may have influenced future events that put in motion the sinister forces that conspired to perpetrate one of the grossest violations of the U.S. Constitution known as the Iran/Contra scandal.
Civic Center Mall Photo credit: www.paulrwilliamsproject.org
The Iran/Contra scandal was revealed on November 25, 1986 by Edwin Meese as a criminal enterprise where funds from the sales of US arms to Iran were diverted to the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. There is the known scandal covered by the mainstream media that led to the histrionic hearings where Lt. Col. Oliver North displayed his crisp uniform and his not-so-crisp memory, the Tower Commission issued their report which like most government commissions uncovered minimal criminality and zero systemic accountability, and all outstanding indictments for six of the known perpetrators (former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert C. McFarlane, Alan Fiers, Clair George and Duane Clarridge) were pardoned by lame-duck President George H. W. Bush as he was about to leave office.
But there are also the more clandestine elements not as widely publicized that illustrate just severely our democratic processes have been subverted. Just to mention a few, there was the "readiness exercise" called Rex-84 in which Oliver North worked with FEMA to draw up plans to, among other things, detain hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens, surveillance and detention of political dissidents, including US citizens, and identifying scenarios for suspending the US Constitution. There was the CIA-Contra-crack scandal that I've written multiple blog entries on that Gary Webb lost his career and his life over. There was the financial legerdemain perpetrated by these shadow networks through shady institutions like BCCI, another scandal I've written about previously.
Intersecting all of these elements were the "secret teams" of intelligence agents, military operatives and others working in the private world of covert operations detailed in the book The Iran Contra Connection by Jonathan Marshall, Jane Hunter and Peter Dale Scott. These covert teams probably existed on an ad hoc basis throughout US history (General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket gives a good summary of how this happened prior to WWI.) but really became institutionalized in 1947 with the creation of the CIA and the NSC. One of the first prime examples of this type of secret team was what Paul Helliwell did for Chaing Kai-Shek's Kuomintang Army (KMT) in Taiwan in the 1950s. A career OSS/CIA officer, (who also helped Walt Disney set up an unconstitutional form of government on his Florida land purchase for what would ultimately become Disney World) Helliwell tried to prepare Chaing's KMT for a future mainland China invasion by setting up a clandestine arrangement for CIA fronted companies Civil Air Transport (CAT) and the Sea Supply Corporation to ship opium for the benefit of the KMT. CIA involvement with the drug trade continued into the 1960s as focus shifted from a presumed offensive out of Taiwan to a defensive posture in Laos and Vietnam. CAT was renamed Air America and was extremely important in maintaining covert, often illegal operations. Helliwell was transferred to provide business cover for the CIA's Cuban operations in 1960.
Paul Helliwell Photo credit: www.spartacus-educational.com
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