Nov. '98

On November 23, 1998 the Crack The CIA Coalition held a press conference on the steps of the Federal Bldg. in downtown LA. to protest the revelations of Volume II of the CIA report and begin the cry for open hearings and reparations. Although ignored by the major media, the conference drew a crowd of over 100 and received good coverage from the Spanish language press and radio station KPFK. Here, I describe CIA's confessions in the report and how, in the cases of General Guillen of Venezuela, Khun Sa in Burma and especially the case of the U.S. vs. Roy Reagan involving Arizona firm T&G aviation the CIA is still massively involved in the drug trade. [More on this in the December issue.]

- MCR

PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT OF MICHAEL C. RUPPERT

for the CRACK THE CIA COALITION

November 23, 1998

Two years ago, on November 15, 1996, then CIA Director John Deutch came to a town hall meeting at Locke High School and faced the anger of South Central Los Angeles. On that day, even as the community expressed outrage, John Deutch fell into a familiar pattern, promising a full and complete investigation and promising us that, "When this investigation is over, I intend to make the results public so that any person can judge the adequacy of the investigation." On that day he told us that the investigation would be completed in about six weeks. That was two years ago.

Since that day the CIA has stalled, exerted massive influence on the press and encouraged a policy of trashing, destroying and slaying any messenger who tried to inform the public and Congress of CIA's complicity in drug dealing. Early this year it released Volume I of it's report which hid many confirmations of its role in protecting drug traffickers. On November 8, 1998 the CIA released only about half of its Inspector General's long awaited Volume II. On that day the whole world changed forever - because CIA confessed.

This is a brand new day in the history of CIA and Drugs. For the first time ever The Crack The CIA Coalition, the members of the community gathered here and I encourage the press to slay the messenger. Today the messenger IS the Central Intelligence Agency.

Two years ago, Gary Webb, then of the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a series of stories entitled The Dark Alliance. That series used government documents and court transcripts to describe how Norwin Meneses and Danillo Blandon had, with CIA protection and knowledge, distributed tons of cocaine and helped set off a crack cocaine epidemic which ravaged this city and then spread to urban areas throughout the country. In his book of the same name, published this year, Gary Webb produced mountains of additional documentation to show that not only cocaine but large quantities of weapons were smuggled into Los Angeles with the knowledge and protection of the CIA.

Gary's stories, like Uncle Tom's Cabin of a hundred and forty years ago, put a human face on the suffering caused by an evil and despicable practice. They provoked outrage and caused the CIA to investigate itself under the eyes of Congress and an increasingly skeptical public. Most importantly, the unceasing criticism and activism of groups like The Crack The CIA Coalition and writers like Bob Parry, along with the dedicated and fearless voice of Congresswoman Maxine Waters refused to let the story die. Former law enforcement officers like Celerino Castillo and Mike Levine of DEA and I, a former LAPD officer who worked narcotics in South Central in the 1970s and who came from a CIA family, continued to write, to publish to lecture and to speak out. We would not let the story die either.

After a less than honest and utterly misleading report in Volume I and after an equally disappointing, disingenuous and misleading report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, the CIA released Volume II of its Contra drug investigation on October 8^th. And it confessed. I repeat, it confessed.

It confessed to misleading Congress and stopping investigations and prosecutions of traffickers in its employ.

It confessed to entering into a conspiratorial set of negotiations with the Department of Justice, which first took large categories of people in 1982 and arbitrarily made them "non-employees". Then it specifically removed any obligation from itself to report drug dealing on the part of non-employees. In a letter dated February 11, 1982 Reagan Attorney General William French-Smith wrote to CIA Director William Casey at the conclusion of the negotiations, "In light of these provisions, and in view of the fine cooperation the Drug Enforcement Administration has received from CIA, no formal requirement regarding the reporting of narcotics violations has been included in these procedures."

The CIA confessed that every contra group throughout the entirety of the contra war was somehow connected to drugs. And the contra war was entirely a CIA operation.

These are not my words. These are not Gary Webb's words. These are the CIA's words, in their own report, from their own cable traffic and documents.

In Paragraph 35 of Inspector General Fred Hitz's report the CIA states, "CIA acted inconsistently in handling allegations or information that Contra-related organizations and individuals were involved in drug trafficking. In some five cases, CIA pursued confirmation of allegations or information of drug allegations. In other [sic] acted to end a relationship after receiving drug trafficking allegations or information. In another six cases, CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their employment by CIA. In other [sic} at least two of those cases, CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so."

Moises Nunez, a CIA asset and field operative with the Contras owned a shrimp company, which was caught with more than 400 pounds of cocaine. In paragraph 490 the CIA report states, "Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council (NSC). 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 NSC. Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved."

In Paragraph 491 CIA adds, "Headquarters cabled in April 1987 that a decision had been made to 'debrief' Nunez regarding the revelations he had made. The next day however, a Headquarters cable stated that 'Headquarters had decided against…debriefing Nunez.' The cable offered no explanation for the decision."

In paragraph 816 the CIA discusses its relations with a firm named SETCO. Owned by major trafficker, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, who was ranked a cartel level trafficker by DEA, SETCO was responsible for moving as much as four to five tons of cocaine a month into the U.S. The CIA report states "SETCO was chosen by NHAO (The Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office of the State Department) to transport goods on behalf of the Contras from late 1985 through the mid 1986. According to testimony by FDN leader Adolfo Calero before the Iran-Contra committees, SETCO received funds for Contra supply operations from the bank accounts that were established by Oliver North."

Paragraph after paragraph. Page after page. The CIA confesses and opens the door to further and readily available proof that it handled both drugs and money. Information other investigators and I have developed, witnesses who are eager to testify, place both drugs and money in CIA hands. The CIA report itself leads directly to CIA proprietaries like Markair, Evergreen and Southern Air Transport, which actually flew the drugs themselves.

I will not take the time I could to read to you all of the 44 pages which I have extracted from the 400 page report. The entire report is available free of charge on the web at www.odci.gov. My 44 pages of extracts and commentary are available if you call me at 818-788-8791 or visit my web site at www.copvcia.com. I have made free copies of these extracts available for members of the press here today.

In a story printed just last week in the L.A. WEEKLY, Gary Webb wrote of Volume II, "By 1987, the CIA report shows, the U.S. government was sitting on six years’ worth of cables and reports from field agents, station chiefs, informants, assets, private citizens and some of the contras themselves, all indicating that Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters” were shipping planeloads of cocaine and marijuana into the U.S. CIA and Justice Department files bulged with evidence of contra drug running, including eyewitness testimony from inside informants. Ditto for the State Department. The CIA had even prepared a detailed briefing on the subject, complete with names and dates, for Vice President George Bush."

From this moment on nothing more is necessary for the people of the inner cities and all of this country to demand explanations, justice and reparations. From this moment on, nothing more is necessary to prompt swift and comprehensive well-publicized hearings in Congress.

On behalf of Gary Webb, who sends his support today; On behalf of myself, who has devoted twenty years of his life to this issue; On behalf of the brave heroes like Cele Castillo, Mike Levine and Bob Parry; On behalf of pioneers like Professor Al McCoy of the University of Wisconsin; On behalf of every concerned citizen who came here today and every citizen everywhere in this country, I ask just one question, "How right do we have to be?"

How right do we have to be?

I encourage the press to read this report because the members of the community, your readers and viewers, are reading it. They can see CIA's admissions in their own words. Contrary to what the Washington Post might say, they can read. And these words are the ticket to billions in reparations if the people have the will to make it happen. And I assure you they do.

But there is another, more compelling reason for you to pursue this. That is the fact that the CIA is, to this day, still an active and major participant in the drug trade.

If you examine the records you will see that on November 22, 1996, just days after John Deutch's visit to Los Angeles, General Ramon Guillen-Davila of Venezuela was indicted for smuggling 22 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Guillen was a CIA employee and CIA let the drugs flow onto our streets, knowingly. These drugs were stored in a Venezuelan warehouse, which was run and entirely funded by CIA. To this day the CIA refuses to divulge information on this to Congress on grounds of national security.

If you investigate a class action suit filed by DEA Agent Rick Horn against the CIA you will learn of CIA's direct involvement with opium warlord Khun Sa in the Golden Triangle through 1995 before Horn was forced to leave. Just last week Rick told me that he was aware of CIA operations involving heroin as late as 1996.

If you examine federal court records in Chicago and in the Arizona federal lawsuit entitled The U.S. vs. Roy Reagan you will see how the CIA laundered C 130 cargo aircraft to major drug smuggling operations in Peru and Mexico and that two of these planes were caught with loads of drugs just last year.

I will be covering this case in more detail in an upcoming issue of my newsletter, From The Wilderness, and I will continue to expose CIA's role in the drug trade because I am more afraid of what will happen if I do not than if I do. For members of the press who are interested I have the current issue of my newsletter available here for you today.

I cannot speak highly enough of the work done by Gary Webb for, without him, we would not be standing here today. And we most certainly would not be standing here with these, the CIA's own admissions, in our hands.

This is a new day. You, the members of the press and you, the citizens of Los Angeles and America now hold the future in your hands. I would like to ask the members of the press, for just one brief and vulnerable moment to step out from behind your viewfinders and micro-cassettes and notebooks and become, as you really are, citizens with the rest of us. An Agency of your government has just admitted to horrendous criminal acts - in black and white. We have gone from debating the existence of a smoking gun to holding the confession in our hands.

Is not history full of the tales of tyrants who, unchecked, went on to progressively more horrible crimes? I can think only of a tale from a survivor of Nazi Germany who said, "First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out. Then they came for the socialists and communists and I did not speak out. Then they came for the labor unions and I did not speak out. Then they came for the Catholics and I did not speak out. And when they came for me there was no one left to speak out."

If Volume II is not addressed by this country I shudder to think of the future. Gary Webb, in his piece for the L.A. WEEKLY wrote: "Though hacked and shredded to about half its original length for alleged national-security reasons, the 361-page Volume II paints such a damning picture of official malfeasance that it is now obvious why neither Congress nor the Reagan administration wanted the issue of contra drug dealing aired in 1987. Had the information contained in this latest CIA report surfaced during the firestorm of controversy then raging over Iran-contra, it is likely that neither the agency nor the administration would have survived the conflagration."

There are those who believe that perhaps the government and the nation itself could not survive the kind of scrutiny that the material in Volume II now demands. I, The Crack The CIA Coalition and the people of South Central and around the country who have been victimized by this believe that country cannot survive without it.

Accordingly, we come here today seeking several things:

1. That the press devote appropriate resources to covering the contents of Volume II and to questioning members of Congress and the White House about what steps are being taken to follow up on its contents.

2. That public hearings be held in Congress with advance notice and that they be adequately covered and reported to the American public.

3. As my friend and colleague, Deacon Alexander will explain shortly, we want CIA to come back to Los Angeles to explain the contents of Volume II. And,

4. That after a satisfactory investigation, the United States Government undertake to compensate for their attendant losses, any citizens of this country, of any color, who suffered as a result of this criminal activity. This should be done in the same way that the U.S. Government offered compensation to Japanese-Americans who were interred during World War II and to the families of those African Americans who suffered biological experimentation with syphilis at the Tuskegee Institute.

Thomas Jefferson once said that he believed that the general public, properly armed with the facts, would almost always come to the right decision. Today we have the facts. Today we demand justice. And we now have a yardstick against which we can measure our success. Today we decide whether we will speak out against an American holocaust or turn our heads and let it continue.

Michael C. Ruppert

Nov. 23, 1998

The Daughter of Oliver North's and George Bush's Bagman, Al Carone, Breaks Her Silence About the Mafia and CIA

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Dee Carone-Ferdinand Broadcast with Dave Emory Airs in Eight Cities

Dee Carone-Ferdinand, daughter of Albert Vincent Carone, CIA operative, retired NYPD Detective, Army Reserve Colonel and Mafia figure who laundered millions in illegal drug profits for the CIA over thirty years and served as a bagman for Oliver North and George Bush during Iran-Contra, broke her silence recently and gave a first ever live radio interview to syndicated radio talk-show host David Emory. The show, taped on October 30, has since aired in eight major cities (see below) and attracted strong listener response.

In the hour-long interview, which featured this writer and Massachusetts attorney Ray Kohlman as guests with Ferdinand, the mid-forties, Albuquerque horse trainer with a disarming Brooklyn accent revealed information that had previously been held as "off the record" by From The Wilderness which arranged the interview. Some of the material revealed by Ferdinand was shocking and offered an all too rare glimpse into the inner workings of both organized crime and the CIA.

As reported in previous issues, I met Dee in 1994 after receiving a phone call from retired CIA Case officer David MacMichael who advised me that Dee was seeking assistance after her father's mysterious death four years earlier. She claimed that Al Carone had been deeply involved in Contra era drug running for the CIA out of New Mexico and that he had been murdered by the Agency in 1990 after losing his stomach for the work following a particularly "messy" mission in 1985.

Her pleas for assistance arose from the fact that, after her father's death, every conceivable record pertaining to him, and every asset he held, many of which were held jointly with Dee, every bank account - one of which was Dee's checking account, every life insurance policy, every medical benefit, even his driver's license and birth records disappeared. The family was still desperately struggling with huge bills and a government which denied that Al Carone existed after World War II.

It didn't take long for Dee to convince me that her father was who she said he was. I saw military records, photographs, a passport, bank records, NYPD pension stubs and a personal phone book which held many names and addresses including the home addresses and private telephone numbers of Gambino crime boss Pauley Castellano and Reagan CIA Director William Casey. Four days of intense work with Dee and her husband Tommy convinced me that I had found the missing link between Iran-Contra drug operations and organized crime.

Carone's position was ultimately acknowledged to Dee by none other than retired CIA Deputy Director Ted Shackley who personally ordered Carone's headstone changed from Staff Sergeant to full Colonel in 1994.

A copyrighted report which I prepared, (available on the back page of this newsletter with follow-up reports through 1998) is now Carone's official military record and the only record the military will now acknowledge on Carone. Subsequent to Shackley's intervention the military reversed its position and acknowledged Carone's existence but refused to release any information on him by stating that he was still, eight years after his death, on active duty.

Albert Carone has become more significant in recent months and more information corroborating his life and hugely significant role in American history has come to light. Just recently Dee Ferdinand and her husband Tommy prepared video affidavits in the lawsuit filed by former Army Special Forces troop Bill Tyree against the CIA, George Bush, Massachusetts Governor Paul Celluci, Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, Oliver North and President Bill Clinton. Her affidavit in that suit reveals that her father was in possession of diaries kept by Tyree's deceased wife, also in the Army, which documented illegal activities connected to CIA at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Elaine Tyree was murdered in 1979 and an innocent Bill Tyree has been serving a life sentence for that murder to keep him silent about CIA drug missions in the 70s and missions he undertook later, while at Fort Devens. In those affidavits Tommy describes having seen the diaries, which Tyree wants returned, in Carone's possession sometime after the murder. Through the years Al Carone had referred only to a young kid named "Sandy" who had been a Green Beret on missions where Carone delivered payments and orders. The name "Sandy" was familiar to Ferdinand and her husband but the name Tyree was not. It was not until a small New Mexico paper published my report on Carone in 1996, and Tyree, sitting in a Massachusetts prison read it, that the connection was made. Tyree had earned the nickname "Sandy" from Carone because of his hair color and also because of his participation in a series of covert assassination missions dubbed Operation Sandman.

Dee's affidavit describes, among other things, how her father went to Dallas, Texas on November 21, 1963 and met with Jack Ruby and a noted JFK assassination figure connected to Lee Harvey Oswald named Ruth Payne. In the radio interview Dee describes how her father arrived home around midnight on

the evening of November 23 wearing his Class A uniform and told her that the military had been ordered to "stand down" that day, instead of performing standard duties connected to Presidential security. The purpose of Carone's trip to meet Ruby was to give him a cash pay-off in advance of the assassination for his role in handling Oswald. In her affidavit Dee also relates that her father had been on a rooftop at Love Field with a rifle as JFK arrived but could not get off a shot.

Dee's interview, under the expert and well-informed guidance of Emory was riveting. As Emory, who has decades of experience and research in matters related to covert operations, offered questions, Ferdinand responded with equal aplomb and displayed a comfort level with material most consider arcane and which indicated that she had grown up with it her entire life.

Of her father's background she stated, "Dad's involvement with the families started with Vito Genovese when he was a young boy growing up on the streets of Brooklyn. "He did running work for them and if Vito wanted something brought somewhere he would give dad a quarter.

"Vito had a bar down the street in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Vito felt sorry for Dad… Dad was Vito's 'son of the heart'."

Carone was a child of the streets. Even though his brother. Pat, went on to become chief psychiatrist for NYPD and conducted LSD research for the CIA, the young Carone, whose allegiance was increasingly bound to Genovese, often spent the night sleeping in Genovese's bar.

It was Vito Genovese who the Office of Strategic Services, CIA's progenitor, sent into Sicily in 1943 to pave the way for the Allied invasion and who supervised, through the end of the forties, a massive heroin trade coursing through Corsican and French heroin labs, evolving into the French connection.

Carone, having made his bones, entered the Army and served in the OSS. After the war, according to Dee, Albert Carone joined NYPD and became the "bagman" for NYPD to protect CIA shipments of drugs when they were delivered by the Agency to the families."

Dee grew up in an environment where Sam "Momo" Giancana, Santos Trafficante, Pauley Castellano, Joe Colombo and Joe Perscillia were all known as "Uncle". Dee stressed that business was never discussed in front of the children but she was always advised that if she ever needed anything she should go to one of her uncles. Then she quipped that she didn't know that she lived in a "dysfunctional family", she thought it was normal.

Another man who filled the role of uncle, if not the title, was William Casey who, in the 1970s served as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Before that Casey had been a mega-broker on Wall Street. Of Bill Casey she said, "Casey and my father were very close and there was a lot of insider information that got passed between Casey and Castellano by my father. Casey and Pauley Castellano were good friends. A lot of money was made by a lot of people thanks to Bill Casey."

William Casey attended the christening of Dee's son Vincent as an honored guest.

Dee went on to shed light on other murky events of the Contra era. One of those was the kidnap-torture-murder of DEA Agent "Kiki" Camarena in Mexico in 1985. According to Dee, Camarena was "allegedly" working both sides of the street according to her father and was getting greedy and threatening to expose the operations of a CIA connected drug cartel run by Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro-Quintero at a time when

they were operating a Contra training base near Veracruz. It was this mission, known to Dee as Amadeus, and which was connected to George Bush, which caused Carone to return home and say that he had had enough, because not only were Camarena and his pilot killed, but a whole Mexican village was massacred with the bodies of men women and children dumped in one common, unmarked grave.

These events prompted Carone to lose his spirit and comment that, "The men in the black suits were going to come and get him." It was about a year or so after that that Carone went to meet with famed Israeli Mossad agent Michael Harrari and it was shortly after that that an unknown chemical poisoning rendered Carone violently ill and led to the atrophy of the left side of his brain.

Albert Vincent Carone died in 1990 as a result of "chemical toxicity of unknown etiology." It was not a pleasant death.

As previously described in From The Wilderness, and as described in vivid detail by his daughter in this radio interview; for more than thirty years, whenever CIA needed a "Mr. Fixit", a paymaster to carry the money and issue the orders, it was Al Carone. When the secret history of America is really written he will deserve more than a little piece of the action.

As it stands now, if Dee Carone-Ferdinand were permitted to testify in the upcoming House hearings on Volume II there would be little left to do but pack up the CIA and throw it away - after driving a stake through its heart. The volume of records Carone left behind, which are now safely protected, the witness information and the irrefutable facts of bank account numbers, phone records and other documentation belie the fact that the ghost of Albert Carone is something the CIA needs very much to believe in - and respect.

UPDATE ON THE TYREE CASE - Much of the activity in the Tyree lawsuit against CIA, George Bush et al is now centered on what attorney Ray Kohlman calls "the Discovery Phase" consisting of motions, responses and counter-motions. The suit is still very much alive and, as of publication, both Oliver North and President Clinton have been served. In spite of service to all parties, with the exception of Chip Tatum who is M.I.A., the Justice Department has indicated that it is representing only the CIA as a defendant in the case. At the State level Bill Tyree won a small victory as a Massachusetts Court ruled on October 27^th that there was merit to Tyree's claims against Paul Celucci and Scott Harshbarger for failing to return the diaries to him after his conviction. A motion asking for a criminal complaint against the two state officials has been passed on to a higher court for a ruling. No significant developments are expected in the case until next year.

DAVID EMORY'S - One Step Beyond

Following is a list of the stations which carry all of Dave's excellent and insightful broadcasts. Dave's programs are also carried intermittently by most stations on the Pacifica network. Consult your local directories for the Pacifica affiliate closest to you.

Los Angeles - KPFK 90.7 FM, Wednesdays, Midnight to 2 A.M.

Berkeley - KALX 90.7 FM, Fridays 9:00 - 9:30 AM.

SF Bay Area - KFJC 89.7 FM, Sundays 7:00 11:00 PM

NEW YORK/NJ - WFMU 91.1 FM, Tuesdays 6:00 - 7:00 PM

SANTA CRUZ - KKUP 91.5 FM, Mondays 9:00 - 10:30 PM

LEXINGTON, KY - WRFL 88.1 FM, Wednesdays

9:00 - Midnight

ANN ARBOR, MI - WCBN 88.3 FM, Fridays 6:00 -7:00 PM

VANCOUVER, B.C. - CITR 101.9 FM, Sundays

10:00 - Midnight

(visit Dave's web site at www.kjfc.org/emory)

Throw Your Weight Around!

FROM THE GOVERNMENT WE WANT:

1. Disqualification of retired CIA covert operative J. Porter Goss as Chairman of the House Permanent Select committee on Intelligence before any hearings on grounds of conflict of interest.

2. Adequate public notice in advance of the hearings so that the press may cover them.

3. Testimony from all relevant witnesses including Celerino Castillo, Mike Levine, Rick Horn, Mike Ruppert, Bob Parry and Gary Webb.

THE WHITE HOUSE - President William Clinton, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500. 202-456-1414. E-mail president@whitehouse.gov

THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES - The Hon. Bob Livingston, 2406 Rayburn, Washington, D.C. 20515, 202-225-3015, e-mail bob.livingston@mail.house.gov.

HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE - Rm H-405, US Capitol, Wash., D.C. 20515. Phone 202-225-4121. FAX 202-225-1991.

SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE - Room 211, Hart Bldg., Washington, D.C., 20510. Phone 202-224-1700. FAX 202-224-1772.

BARBARA BOXER - 112 Hart Senate Bldg., Washington, D.C. 20510. 415-403-0100. E-mail senator@boxer.senate.gov.

DIANNE FEINTSTEIN - 331 Hart Senate Bldg., Wash., D.C. 20510. 310-914-7300. E-mail senator@feinstein.senate.gov.

FROM THE MEDIA WE WANT:

FULL PUBLIC COVERAGE OF HEARINGS ON Volume II of the CIA IG report.

COMING IN DECEMBER… What is Joseph Russoniello, the former U.S. Attorney who gave drug money back to the Contras in the frogman case, doing in private practice representing a firm connected to CIA's movement of C-130s for major drug organizations? The beat goes on…