Reply #192: I've just read the first of these links -- and it's blowing my mind

[starroute]

Finally, everything that was weird and unexplained about the world when I was growing up in the 1950's and 1960's is starting to fit together and make sense.

Whoever wrote the page at http://www.missouri.edu/~quinnl/news/octopus.html believes firmly in the existence of the "Octopus" -- this is how it starts out:

"The Octopus is a term coined by an investigative journalist to describe a tiny clique of people operating at the nefarious intersection of drug trafficking, arms dealing, covert military operations, intelligence, high finance, organized crime, diplomacy and the media. ... This small group has acheived a power vastly disproportional to their numbers by their highjacking of the national security state apparatus which they use to mask criminal and unconstitutional activities, including flooding America with heroin and cocaine.

"Many of the very people who controlled the Octopus during the 1970s and 1980s, many of whom were cited (and convicted) in the Iran-Contra scandal, have returned to government as members of the administration installed by judicial coup d'etat in 2000. They could very well be continuing their operations in much the same manner as they did over the last three decades. If so, they remain a clear and present danger to democracy, prosperity, security, the environment, the rule of law, the integrity of the social fabric and the ongoing evolution of consciousness. They may very well wind up dragging America to the deepest reaches of a hell of its own making."

Here's a summaryof the main points in the story it tells:

As prohibition came to an end in the 1930's, the Mob in the US started to get into drugs instead, in cooperation with the Shanghai heroin cartel. Mussolini had thoroughly disrupted the traditional opium and heroin trade routes, but the US would help put them back in place during World War II, when the OSS allied with the Mafia to patrol the docks against sabotage and to help with the invasion of Sicily. After the war, the Mafia helped destroy the socialist trade unions in Marseilles, and this made it possible for Marseilles to become a major transshipment point for heroin from Iran and Turkey, with Havana as a secondary transshipment point for the US market.

Meanwhile, the Communists had taken over China from the Nationalists, the remains of whose army fled to Burma. The Chinese drug lords were kicked out at the same time and wound up in the Golden Triangle area of Burma, Laos, and Thailand. As a result, the CIA became deeply involved with both the drug trade and arms shipments in Southeast Asia. This was done under the direction of Paul Helliwell, who had been OSS chief of intelligence in China during the war. Then, in the course of the 50's, the CIA moved away from its Chinese associates and in their place assumed the military and drug-running roles of the French in Indo-China.

When Castro overthrew Batista in 1959, a three-way alliance of the Mob, the CIA, and right-wing Cubans dedicated itself to taking the country back -- and Paul Helliwell became paymaster for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Having settled in Miami, Halliwell established Castle Bank in the Bahamas as a conduit for laundering the profits from the Asian heroin trade -- much of which served to finance the CIA's anti-Castro's activities. This same pattern of drug profits going to finance covert military and intelligence operations soon came to characterize the Vietnam War as well.

The usefulness of Castle Bank had worn thin by the 1970's -- largely because of it's over-obvious ties to the Mob -- so the Nugan Hand Bank was established in Australia in 1973 to take its place:

"With the election of Jimmy Carter, the mercenary faction within the American intelligence and covert military communities became even greedier and abandoned any pretense of aligning their entrepreneurial goals with American foreign policy interests. They would, however, continue to hide behind claims of 'national security' and 'protection of sources and methods' to shield disclosure of their wrongdoing.

"They were led by former CIA clandestine services chief Theodore Shackley, CIA operative Thomas Clines and Golden Triangle drug lords like Vang Pao (who managed production), current Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage (who managed transit through Thailand as an embassy employee, with the assistance of national police chief and CIA asset General Phao) and heir to Luciano's heroin network, Florida Mob boss Santos Trafficante, Jr. (who managed stateside sales)."

(Yes, this is the same Richard Armitage who is now being touted as the likeliest successor to Tenet as head of the CIA. Don't it just give you the warm fuzzies?)

Nugan Hand collapsed spectacularly in 1980 and was succeeded by the Hawaiian investment firm of Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham and Wong, which itself collapsed in 1983 and was succeeded by BCCI. By this point, the operation was growing ever more ambitious and branching out into high-level wheeling-dealing and influence peddling. It was associated with all the more dubious events of the 1980's, from Iran-Contra to the cocaine epidemic to the S&L scandals.

The article kinds of trails off at that point, and it isn't the whole story by any means -- there's more at those other links. But I need to take a break and refresh my palate before continuing this particular trip through Hell.

On edit: One thought that occurs to me is that it would explain a lot if the article is correct in asserting that all this drugs/guns/money laundering business became essentially a rogue operation after 1976. Do people like Valerie Plame and Sibel Edmonds represent a "good" face of the CIA and the FBI, which is loyal to America and to the goals of insuring peace and freedom in the world? And are they locked in a death struggle with the evil renegades? (Sorry to go all Saturday morning serial on you, but that's how it's starting to look. Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode ...)