I want you to consider some quotes. Then I want you to decide for yourself whether or not the suffering of one class, race or group of people somehow trivializes or makes less painful the suffering of another, separate class.

In her book Kiss The Boys Goodbye, about the struggles to find and bring home Vietnam POWs, Emmy Award winning former 60 MINUTES Producer Monika Jensen-Stevenson tells of Henry Kissinger describing military personnel as "mindless beasts." Later in the book her husband Bill, a veteran war correspondent and author, recounts the attitudes of French agents who financed wars in Indochina with opium. He said about the French, "They said that to save France, you had to destroy the human garbage. If the garbage sustained its drug addiction by spending huge amounts of money, and if that money financed wars in Indochina against communism - well, then you got some benefit from the human garbage!"

In 1972, while I was attending UCLA, my closest friend on campus, Craig Fuller, surprised me one day. I had been interning in the Office of LAPD Chief Ed Davis and was committed to a career in law enforcement. I had taken a special interest in narcotics. Craig said to me about drugs, "It's just weeding out the gene pool." I sat in Craig's White House office in 1981 and complained of CIA drug dealing. Craig went on to become George Bush's Chief of Staff in 1985.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good…

"Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors."

I thank author and AIDS researcher Lenny Horowitz for bringing that quote into my life. I had been seeking it a long time.

Now take another quote from Stevenson's book, which describes the condition of the body of Navy pilot Lars Van Rensaleer who had been taken prisoner in 1968 and knowingly left behind after the war. He came home in 1989.

"Lars's finger and toes were missing. His body had been embalmed, and perhaps stored … his teeth were in far worse condition than when Diane had last seen him. The amputation of fingers and toes 'is evidence of the tortures and punishment we tracked,' said Jerry Mooney, the National Security Agency analyst. American prisoners who fought deep interrogation or repeatedly defied work orders had parts cut off, piece by piece."

A high ranking CIA officer who had grown sick of his own government had earlier told Stevenson, "Men who were lost in a war they'd been required to fight can't be discarded because of some higher national interest… There is no higher national interest."

Now the hardest enemies of the U.S. government might say that the POWs got what they played for as instruments of a brutal war machine. But if they do that then they commit the same crime the devildoers commit. They dehumanize. Before the Africans were crammed into the holds of slave ships and their culture destroyed, before "niggers" were lynched and tortured, before Jewish "vermin" were gassed and before POWs, "Chosen by God to stay", were abandoned to torture, they were all first turned into something inhuman, evil, different, expendable. If one calls U.S. Servicemen "capitalist tools" or "baby killers" then the first step has already been taken. The compounded tragedy of the POWs is that they believed in something that was not true - and they died for it.

I didn't go to Vietnam. I had a student deferment my first year at UCLA and was 1A for the remaining three. After graduation I joined LAPD and immediately went to South Central Los Angeles. I was injured a few times. I was in two shootings. But I always went home to a warm bed and a shower. I have been homeless for a total of three years because of my opposition to CIA and I have gone hungry and been arrested but I know nothing of combat, torture or war.

In my dream I struggle as images of black slaves, Jewish shopkeepers and POWs float, merge and mingle. Images come into focus of inner city families grieving over children killed in drive-bys and Navy pilots with no toes and no eyes. I weep as I see the pilots and the inner city blacks, chained disfigured and weak, fight each other from centuries of taught and learned distrust. I scream. But no one listens. "You have been betrayed, abandoned, condemned by exactly the same people!" Their names fall from my lips, "Shackley! Secord! Armitage! Bush! - North! Singlaub! Clines! - Colby! Helms! Casey! -Kissinger! - Rockefeller! - Pepsi! - United Fruit!

My dream has no ending. I spend my time trying to make the victims see that they are natural allies, brothers and sisters - that we are all natural allies against a single enemy. I have no success.

I know the color of suffering and imprisonment, of exploitation and of grief. - It is gray. It is cold.

Mike Ruppert
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In a move reminiscent of last year's gradual release of Volume One, Volume Two of the CIA Inspector General's long awaited investigation into allegations that the Agency aided or participated in drug trafficking during the Contra war has been leaked to The New York Times.

The Times ran a summary of the 500-page report on Friday, July 17 in a move apparently timed to coincide with the assumption of duties of the CIA's new Inspector General who was confirmed by the Senate the same week.

The Times' evaluation of the report was a mixed blessing for activists concerned with exposing the CIA's well documented and decades long role in international drug smuggling. While admitting that the Agency knowingly continued to work with suspected drug traffickers over a period of years, the report categorically denies that the Agency itself ever dealt drugs or that it had ever used drug money to finance the Contra war effort. According to the Times the report also indicates that all of the Contra supporters involved in drugs were "low level"

The Times, however, did mention the prophetic investigations of the "Kerry Committee" in 1986-7 and found further reportorial honesty by recalling that Agency "allies" in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan had also been accused of drug trafficking back into the 1960s.

Congressional leaders on the issue, like Maxine Waters (D), Los Angeles, complained immediately that the report should not be leaked out in bits and pieces, but should be declassified en toto for examination by the American people.

Senator John Kerry (D), Massachusetts, whose Senate subcommittee produced a 1,400 page report tying the Contra war effort and CIA to drugs in 1987, wrote a letter to CIA Director George Tenet on July 16 asking for immediate declassification. In that letter, a copy of which was sent to From The Wilderness by Kerry's staff, Kerry states, "I have read portions of the report and know much of this information is already in the public domain. What is not, does not merit being withheld from public analysis. I therefore formally request immediate declassification of both volumes…"

All of these moves come as Britt Snider, 53, an attorney and Vietnam Vet assumes his duties as the new Inspector General at CIA. Snider, a long time friend of CIA Director Tenet, proclaimed his independence at confirmation hearings last week. Like Tenet, Snider has split his career between service in the intelligence community and Congress. He has previous service as counsel to the Church Committee in the 1970s and, until recently, has served as special counsel to DCI Tenet. Snider also has long term service, as minority counsel, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence according to reports published in the Washington Post.

The recent developments on the drug issue, Snider's background, and the contents of Volume Two are not, in themselves indices of

how the CIA drug story will unfold. Maxine Waters, appearing in a live radio interview with this writer on July 20, urged that: public pressure be brought to bear via letters sent directly to the President asking for immediate declassification of Volume Two; that Volume Two be reconciled with the findings of the Kerry Committee; and that the Department of Justice release its findings..

Still uncertain is the timing and advance notice for the inevitable hearings surrounding Volume Two. Sources in the Senate Intelligence Committee told From The Wilderness that hearings on the Senate side were unlikely but that they felt the report would be declassified. A receptionist at the House Intelligence Committee stated, "Oh yes, we know we have to do something, but nothing is scheduled right now"

The last hearings in the House, which took place on March 16, were held without advance notice and were a major embarrassment for CIA.

This writer, expressing his concerns on KPFK, added that additional pressure needed to be focused on the House Intelligence Committee on two points: advance public notice for hearings and the conflict of interest surrounding J. Porter Goss, Chairman of the Committee who is a retired covert operative from CIA.

If the mechanism for release and hearings surrounding Volume Two operates the same way as for Volume One, we should expect surprise hearings soon, probably immediately after the month long Congressional summer recess which begins August 3.

Did the CIA order the use of Sarin gas to kill American defectors in Southeast Asia? The answer to that question opens a black hole of ugly truths about U.S. foreign policy and covert operations. Those truths all lead to a central reality, which is that covert and paramilitary operations, as conducted by the U.S. Government, do not exist without drug trafficking. Equally tragic is the fact that drugs are a main reason why POWs didn’t come home. The irony on the tragedy is that drugs were also used to fund several sabotaged covert missions to rescue them.

The recent CNN reports on Operation Tailwind (referenced in the last issue of From The Wilderness), their retraction and the object lessons made of CNN Producer April Oliver and Peter Arnett point to much uglier and deeper truths about CIA covert operations than the fact that CIA used nerve gas to kill defectors and deserters in Southeast Asia. As From The Wilderness will show, there is a high probability that Sarin gas was used not only against defectors, but unwilling prisoners of war whom the government had decided would be a major embarrassment if they came home alive. Testimony and evidence exists to show that Sarin was in Laos at the time and that it was used at or near known POW camps in Laos. If true, those facts would shed a whole new light on the CNN stories.

Those stories, flawed in their presentation, not only hinted at an ongoing feud between elements of the Navy and CIA, but came dangerously close to far more devastating truths about the CIA's involvement in the abandonment and murder of US servicemen left behind after Vietnam. Those truths undeniably lead back to the drug trade, the Central Intelligence Agency and the covert operatives who have destroyed American democracy.

How does one tie the convoluted pieces together in a coherent manner? And, doing that, how does one stomach wanton betrayal of loyal Americans and values which are the foundation of any government's legitimacy? A government derives its right to exist from its mandate to protect its own people, especially those who risk life to serve it. What legitimacy then, does a government have which betrays and then sentences to death those who stood in the font lines of its exercise of power?

First, let's address the issue of whether or not CIA, MACV-SOG and elements in the Pentagon wanted POW's dead or, at minimum, to ensure that they never came home?

Many of the ugliest truths about deliberate U.S. abandonment or ordered extermination of POWs are extremely well documented in Monika Jensen-Stevenson's 1990 bestseller, Kiss The Boys Goodbye (Dutton). Stevenson, a former Emmy award winning Producer for CBS News' 60 Minutes, produced mountains of eyewitness statements, documents, and even admissions from Ronald Reagan and other White House officials as well as from intelligence experts in the Pentagon and the National Security Council showing that: the U.S. knowingly left POWs behind in Southeast Asia in 1973; the U.S. government sabotaged at least a half dozen rescue attempts with high probabilities for success; and that, the U.S. government ordered covert operatives to "liquidate" live POW's if sighted.

On Pages 318-323, Stevenson described a failed 1981 POW rescue mission involving the perennial "covert source" (and often hard to fathom) Scott Barnes who wrote a book about the mission entitled BOHICA (Bend Over Here It Comes Again). After passing

polygraph and truth serum exams Barnes recounted how he had been issued atropine (nerve gas antidote) injectors as a prelude to entering areas in Laos where POW camps were known to exist. He also states that, once in the region, he was ordered to "liquidate the merchandise." "Merchandise" was the code word for POWs. (NOTE: Atropine was issued to U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf war to counter anticipated Sarin attacks by Iraq).

If Barnes' statement was not enough, his return from the mission was immediately followed by the alleged violent suicide of Army chemical warfare and Sarin gas expert General Bobby Robinson. Local police doubted the suicide findings of the military.

What's more, Robinson was known to have been involved in moving Sarin supplies into the region at the time. Stevenson confirmed this. Sources postulated a cover story to Stevenson that Robinson had been planting Sarin gas to blame the Soviets for its use and thus motivate Congress to increase chemical warfare budgets. Such operations are not unusual in covert operations and are hardly grounds for a suicide. As one source put it to me. "It's much more likely that Robinson could have exposed the use of his Sarin to kill Americans and he had to be killed - especially if he found out what his precious chemical agents were used for."

Several covert warfare veterans have told me that they absolutely believe that Sarin was used under CIA orders against U.S. personnel using deep cover operatives planted in the "Studies and Observation Group" which had reverted to Pentagon control after a 1968 turf battle.

The turf battle may have put SOG back under nominal Pentagon control but it did not stop members of the shadow government and CIA from infiltrating to protect the deepest of dirty secrets. The OSS faction in CIA has no trouble "sheep dipping" people into the Pentagon or any other U.S. Government agency.

Much of the CNN story fell because the Pentagon found no records of Sarin use. Experts like Special Forces Captain John McCarthy, who ran covert ops for CIA while in Special Forces, were quick to point out that the records would all be at Langley and not at the DoD. A CNN electronic bulletin board with more than 2,500 angry responses from veterans pointing out flaws in the retractions was removed on July 16.

The can of worms was getting legs that wouldn't go away. It was starting to walk off into cyberspace.

How big was the POW problem? Informed sources place the number of American POW's not returned, in spite of Henry Kissinger's outright lies to the contrary, at near 2,500. Add to that the large number of defectors and deserters remaining in the region and the way these men sometimes became intermingled and we see the first part of the reasons for betrayal. McCarthy told From The Wilderness that in 1968 there were known to be some 3,000 deserters living in the Saigon suburb of Cholon alone. Estimates for the whole of Southeast Asia, including Thailand and Laos rose as high as 8,000 according to other sources. Numbers that high would again have brought the legitimacy of the government, and the military into question.

With the signing of the Paris Peace Accords Richard Nixon, in a secret agreement, promised the Vietnamese government some $4 billion in aid to guarantee the return of POW's left behind. This was after Kissinger's announcement that there were no more POW's left in Asia. With Watergate and the collapse of the Nixon Administration the money was never exchanged and the POW's went from desperate cause to a major potential embarrassment. So goes the cover story. (Cont. on Page 4)

The best way to explain the connection with drug trafficking is to show the correlation in people and organizations between the two issues.

The names of some of those who have been connected to CIA drug trafficking by a multitude of sources are: Ted Shackley (CIA Station Chief in Laos and later Saigon), Tom Clines (Shackley's deputy), Richard Secord (Air Force/CIA liaison to Shackley after flying many missions as a fighter pilot), General Heinie Aderholt (Chief Air Operations strategist for CIA's undeclared war in Laos), Richard Armitage (former Navy officer and covert operations specialist charged with removing key materiel from Vietnam in 1975), Erich von Marbod (Defense Department), John Singlaub, William Casey, William Colby and Oliver North. Other key figures who turn up throwing monkey wrenches into POW rescue efforts who have not been connected to drugs but who turn up in key positions during Iran-Contra or the Bush Administration are Richard Allen (Reagan National Security Adviser who helped write the Paris Peace Accords), Colin Powell (Joint Chiefs Chairman and National Security Adviser to George Bush) and Col. Richard Childress, a National Security Council staffer under Ronald Reagan.

Key institutions connected to CIA drug trafficking include the Nugan-Hand bank, Hawaii investment firm BBRDW (Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dilingham and Wong) and last but not least, the CIA itself.

How do these connect to the POW's?

As Station Chief in Laos Ted Shackley ran the single largest covert operation in CIA's history, a war financed almost in its entirety on the proceeds of heroin. That war was fought almost exclusively by Hmong tribesmen and a Laotian rebel Army under the command of General Vang Pao, an opium warlord who derived his entire budget from heroin. Legion are the stories of CIA's involvement in drug trafficking to fund that war but one anecdote is telling. Former Air America pilot Bucky Blair, who flew supply missions to CIA's Site 85 in Laos, sitting on a remote mountain top, told me that when he flew in to make his drops he could "see the poppy fields stretching out for miles in all directions." Site 85 was overrun in 1968 and eleven live Americans were captured. Imagine what they might have told under the intense torture of Pathet Lao or North Vietnamese interrogators and how that could have been used as propaganda against an America already disintegrating under the war? Imagine what they might have told other POWs they met as they were moved from camp to camp?

Imagine the damage that might have been done in 1985-6 as some of the most intense rescue efforts were being mounted and as stories of CIA drug trafficking in Central America were starting to circulate in the press and Congress?

Did Air America brief Blair on the opium? "I was briefed one time and told that we were moving small amounts of opium for legitimate pharmaceutical uses," he answered. The world's supply of pharmaceutical heroin is less than five percent of total world production. Shackley's CIA pilots could have supplied the world for a year in about a month. This does not take into account the brave testimony of other Air America pilots like Tosh Plumley and Bo Abbott who have spoken out directly about Air America's direct transport of opium in vast quantities over a period of years.

Shackley, and his deputy Clines, turn up heavily again in Iran-Contra connected to Richard Secord and Ollie North. A former CIA officer told me in 1995 that Ollie North was leasing office space for his 1995 Senate run from Shackley's company, Research Associates International, in Rosslyn, Virginia.

Estimates of live POWs taken in the undeclared (illegal) war in Laos from POW researchers, families and military sources rise as high as 600 according to Stevenson.

In the Reagan Administration, Richard Armitage as an Assistant Secretary of Defense was the Pentagon's highest ranking official in charge of covert warfare, arms shipments and POW affairs. Colin Powell, in 1995, referred to Armitage as his white son. Armitage was linked directly to CIA drug trafficking by, among others, the POW's champion, Ross Perot.

John Singlaub, who was quoted in the Sarin gas stories as saying he would have placed a high priority on killing POW's and defectors because they might have compromised military secrets, commanded MACV-SOG during Vietnam and would have had knowledge of SOG operations targeting Americans. He was also a major player in Iran-Contra, dispersing weapons purchased with drug money and engaging in fund raising activities intended to divert attention away from the NSC and Oliver North. I am saving North for last.

The documentation for the involvement of Richard Secord, in Iran-Contra is voluminous and his role in CIA operations in Laos is equally clear as documented by letters from POW family members requesting that Secord be queried about Site 85. Drugs were central to both wars.

General Heinie Aderholt is a mixed bag. While undeniably involved in Laos and as a low-profile operator in Iran-Contra, (connected to the illegal take-over of Bob Fletcher's Florida toy company to establish a front for arms shipments), Aderholt chose to oppose the official line and fight for missing POW's. He confirmed secret intelligence reports revealing the existence of live and obtainable POWs in the region to families and the press.

Bill Colby and Bill Casey need little clarification except to say the Bill Casey was DCI when many of the most intense rescue efforts came into being - and failed. And Colby, who ran the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, was DCI from 1973-6 and on the Board of Directors of the Nugan-Hand Bank.

The Nugan-Hand Bank and its successor firm BBRDW were high rolling investment-banking operations, both of which laundered covert drug profits for CIA. Some of those monies were allocated to POW rescue operations by military elements who refused to abandon their comrades. It is also well documented, however, that millions of dollars were collected by scam artists connected to these firms from hopeful POW families and supporters for rescues, which never took place. That money bought nice vacation homes and went to other unworthy causes.

If we examine the rescue side of the POW issue we come across men like retired Green Beret Lt. Colonel Bo Gritz, Ross Perot and the ubiquitous Oliver North. Gritz undertook two missions into Southeast Asia, both of which were connected in one way or another to the Army's highly secret Intelligence Support Activity (ISA). In Bo's book, Called To Serve (Lazarus, 1991) he talks about a period of time in 1979-80 when he was undercover at Hughes aircraft in Culver City as preparation for his first mission. So, coincidentally, was Oliver North - a fact which Bo neglected to mention. I think I know why. A retired Hughes executive phoned me in 1997 and described the office shared by Gritz and North as having a large picture of a Bengal Tiger on the wall with the caption, "If you can't sleep with the tigers, stay out of the den." He also stated, "You could see them out jogging together every day."

The ISA, which ran Gritz's mission, was created by Army General Richard Stillwell. It has been repeatedly linked to drug smuggling by sources including the daughter of Col. Albert Carone who served as Oliver North's bagman and bill-payer during the

eighties. Records left behind after Carone's death in 1990 and eyewitness statements clearly indicate that Carone handled both drugs and drug money for CIA, North and the NSC. Carone's personal phone book contains the home (Cont. Page 5)

addresses and telephone numbers of William Casey, Gambino crime boss Pauly Castellano and Stillwell. Further hard evidence, in the form of CIA and DIA cable traffic linking to drugs, ISA and DIA operations surfaces in Gary Webb's Dark Alliance (Seven Stories, 1998). These cables and law enforcement records tie Scott Weekly to the drug operations of Norwin Menses, Danillo Blandon and Ricky Ross. Weekly, a firearms master, is Gritz's self-described best friend and went on POW missions to Southeast Asia with Gritz. Coincidentally again, Weekly is an Annapolis classmate of Ollie North.

I have met Bo Gritz twice through my close friend, Mrs. Francis Gary (Sue) Powers. That Bo was, and remains, irrevocably committed to the cause of the POWs cannot be disputed. That Bo brought back utterly damning videotaped interviews with opium warlord Khun Sa in which Khun Sa described the roles of Shackley, Armitage, Clines, and the CIA in heroin trafficking also cannot be disputed. That Bo was a leader in exposing CIA's long standing proprietorship of the international drug trade also is beyond question. But these revelations, taken as a whole, leave wide open the likelihood that, with or without Gritz's knowledge, his own efforts to rescue POWs, as sponsored by elements of the Pentagon, were funded by drug profits. In 1980 the official U.S. Government policy was that cocaine was less harmful than marijuana.

[NOTE: I omit here, discussion of Gritz's alleged white supremacist or racist views because I have never heard him speak or seen him write such views. I will say that if Bo believes in or advocates white supremacy or racism in any form I disagree with him wholeheartedly - [see Editorial in this issue].

Then there is Ross Perot. No man in American history has been more closely linked to the cause of the POW's and their families than the Texas billionaire. In late 1986, after funding one rescue mission and spending years as a thorn in the side of the Reagan Administration as he battled national security roadblocks and the outright deception which ultimately condemned the POW's to death, Ross Perot backed six-foot-four Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage into a corner and confronted him with not only the evidence of Armitage's lying about POW's but his direct involvement in Vietnamese gambling and CIA drug trafficking. After going to then Vice President George Bush, and being summarily dismissed, Perot's efforts leaked to the Boston Globe and TIME Magazine. Armitage then lost his almost certain appointment as Secretary of defense under President George Bush.

I have spoken to Perot twice and I served as the L.A. County Press Spokesman for his '92 campaign. While I, like many, was crushed by his conduct in pulling out of the race, I have absolutely no doubt that Ross Perot is absolutely unbending in his belief that illegal drugs cannot be used to serve a good purpose - anywhere, at any time.

That leaves us with Ollie.

During the Contra years Oliver North contracted with a small British Security firm, KMS, run by a former SAS Major named David Walker, to carry out commando raids against the Sandinistas. AP, the Washington Post and Congressional hearings all brought out the fact that Walker's company conducted a few marginally successful attacks and provided some air logistic support to the Contras. What was not reported was that North, according to sources I have found in the last three months, was using KMS to train mercenaries for a POW rescue mission inside the Soviet Union. That operation was funded with drugs and the payments were made in London, at the St. George Hotel and through channel island banks by Albert Carone. Sources in Britain and former members of U.S. Army Special Forces described to me how North's

plan, which involved training of mercenaries in Morocco and the Ivory Coast, neared success as, "his people got close enough to touch" the skilled electronics warfare officers who had been shipped to Russia for money by Vietnam during the war. But, inexplicably, they never came out. The British source added that North, if he had succeeded, "would have become President of the United States."

The Sherlock Holmes cliché says, "Once you have eliminated the impossible, the improbable, no matter how unlikely, is the answer." The POWs remain, as unrequited ghosts, an embarrassment of astronomical dimension to the U.S. government. Any reporter asking a POW who, what, where, when and how would inevitably pull the covers on some of the U.S.'s dirtiest secrets. But more than that the question needs to be asked, "Did abandoning the POWs serve a purpose in U.S. foreign policy?" The answer is yes.

In 1993 a former Green Beret officer told me, at the point of tears, of how he had been ordered in 1968-9 to rendezvous with Russian Spetnatz commandos in the central highlands of Vietnam. There, under direct orders from the CIA, he exchanged millions of dollars in hard U.S. currency for Russian diamonds. This was at the height of the Vietnam War. Russia's economy (its ability to support North Vietnam) was on the brink of collapse. The hard U.S. currency salvaged Russia's ability to buy needed imports on world markets.

Bobby Garwood, the heroic Marine who remains the only POW ever to return alive, told debriefers at DIA of the amazement the North Vietnamese, struggling with a stone age economy, had at his ability to assemble a simple gasoline generator and the power of a light bulb. He stayed alive because he could fix American things.

Ted Shackley, in his book The Third Option lays out detailed blueprints for the survival of the military-security-industrial state by means of perpetuation of "low intensity" insurgent wars in which it might be necessary to arm both sides of a conflict to keep the military skills sharp and the war machine going. The fact that major U.S. industrialists armed and financed every enemy from Adolph Hitler, to Ho Chi Minh, to Sadam Hussein is well documented and beyond the scope of this article.

Covert operations in Southeast Asia continued unabated after the fall of Saigon in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. They were all financed by heroin, which remains the largest source of capital in the region. Vietnam is now emerging in a world capitalist economy as a consumer and provider of services. Is it coincidental that Henry Kissinger's associate and later Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger was on the first secret mission to explore rapprochement with Vietnam? Is it a coincidence that Col. Richard Childress, who stonewalled POW families for so long, became a Southeast Asian investment consultant in 1990? Is it a coincidence that President George Bush dispatched Richard Armitage to the former Soviet Union as a special economic adviser or that almost immediately after his arrival there was an explosion of drug use in Russia?

I think that the POWs were commodities who, as one CIA source put it to Stevenson, were "Chosen by God to stay" as a form of plausibly deniable economic assistance to enemies we needed to keep in place until other pieces of a larger plan were complete. That phase of the plan was complete in 1990 when Litton Chairman Roy Ash's prediction of one world under state capitalism would come into being. The Soviet Union was dead and Vietnam

was on its way to becoming a trading partner. Ash made that prediction in 1972. (Cont. Page 6)

So why kill them? If covert operatives could get close enough to kill POWs then men like Gritz or Jerry Daniels or Ross Perot could get close enough to rescue them. Deserters, enjoying freedom of movement, could have surfaced at any time with POW information. And that would have upset The Plan and revealed the U.S. government to be as morally bankrupt as the Third Reich.

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It was almost a year ago that I got a call from my good friend Cele Castillo. He had some amazing news about military assistance to Mexico. Cele told me that President Clinton had approved the second part of a shipment of 73 Bell UH-1 (Huey) helicopters to the Mexican military for the purpose of fighting drugs. I was floored when Cele advised me that the American placed in charge of delivering the UH-1s to Mexico was none other than Felix Rodriguez. For those unfamiliar with Rodriguez, he is the same man who ran one of two CIA and NSC hangars at Ilopango airfield during the Contra war. The other hangar was operated by Oliver North. It was from those hangars that Cele documented tons of cocaine being flown into the U.S. - with direct protection and authorization from the Reagan White House and the C.I.A.

Rodriguez, I already knew from years of research, had been a covert operative as far back as the Bay of Pigs and was an adviser on the Bolivian mission which killed Che Guevara. Felix is reported to be wearing Che's watch to this day and he has left his CIA footprints in every CIA covert operation since. Drugs were always close by.

To make matters worse I was told that the Washington end of the contact was being coordinated by retired CIA Deputy Director Ted Shackley who had financed a whole war in Laos on heroin (see related story on POW's in this issue).

Cele advised that the helicopters were being staged in Belize (formerly British Honduras) which lies at the very southeast border of Mexico. I knew that Belize is not a drug producing country because it is almost all at sea level. Opium and coca grow in the mountains at 5,000 feet or more. Staging anti-drug helicopters in Belize did not make sense. A look at the map gave me my answer. Chiapas, the Mexican state teetering on the brink of revolution, populated by a dirt-poor indigenous people was within flying distance of Belize.

I did some checking. A former CIA source in Washington and another in the southeast U.S. confirmed that Felix had the contract. In the history of covert operations of the CIA, wherever Felix and Shackley go, the "counterinsurgency" war is sure to follow. The helicopters were not going to be used for drugs. They were going to crush the Zapatista rebels.

I wrote a short news story to that effect and it was put up on the web page of the Crack The CIA Coalition. As I continued to check the back-story, Bill Davis, a co-founder of the Cristic Institute told me that Carl Jenkins, CIA Director of Covert Operations during Iran-Contra, had operated a helicopter maintenance company in Belize for the Agency in the eighties.

About ten days later Cele called me and told me that he had heard from a Colonel "M", who was commanding the U.S. Mil Group to Belize, that Felix Rodriguez had threatened to kill me. According to Cele, Felix found the web posting and went ballistic.

"Felix was so mad," said Cele, "That "M" said he was going to come to L.A. and visit you."

I felt complimented. It’s not often you get to know when a punch lands in a tender area in this business.

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In the months since, we have seen a series of brutal massacres in Chiapas which have been reminiscent of the CIA sponsored death squads of the eighties. Slowly, reporting from independent media has been curtailed and the Mexican Government has progressively restricted the travel of outsiders into the region. Foreign citizens, including American missionaries and students have been expelled.

On March 19, 1998 The Los Angeles Times, in a story on how the U.S. was harming the Mexican drug fight announced that it had been discovered that the 73 Hueys were useless when operating at altitudes where poppies grow and that the drug missions were severely hampered because the drug growing regions were so far inland and remote that getting spare parts was difficult.

Duh!

A central issue, which makes Mexico different from any other country in Latin America, is that the Mexican people, for good reason, will not tolerate American troops on their soil. The memory of U.S. troops in Mexico City in 1846 with the corresponding loss of a third of a continent is still fresh in the Mexican psyche.

Since U.S. personnel are the only ones trained to service the Hueys (and helicopters are voracious consumers of maintenance and spare parts) and Belize is the closest country to southern Mexico (and Chiapas), the staging of U.S. helicopters and CIA personnel in a very friendly environment serves the dual purpose of appeasing Mexican sensitivities while assisting Mexico in brutally suppressing the Zapatista revolt.

What’s more, the proximity to drug trafficking routes and the carte blanche routinely enjoyed by CIA virtually guarantees enough money and access to expand the operation.

In his book The Third Option, Ted Shackley talks about a point in time when revolts and the counter insurgency operations designed to suppress them grow so large that they can no longer be plausibly denied. At that point they are shifted back into the realm of overt military operations as the conflict grows.

On July 15, The Los Angeles Times ran a story with the headline, "U.S. BOLSTERING MEXICAN MILITARY, REPORT SAYS." In that story the Times revealed how a study by the Center for International Policy (CIP) in Washington had documented that in 1997 Mexico had become the number one Latin American nation with military personnel undergoing training at The School of The Americas at Fort Benning, Ga.. Mexico had risen to number 3 (after Colombia and Peru) as a purchaser of U.S. Military equipment and was number 2 overall as a recipient of anti-drug aid.

I went to CIP's web site and started poking around. I found something else that was interesting. Under grants labeled EDA for Excess Defense Articles it is possible for the military to give away weapons and materiel which are deemed surplus. What is deceptive here is that a four thousand dollar item, (e.g. an anti-tank

rocket), can be devalued to several hundred dollars. The CIP report shows that, for all of Latin America, Mexico is far and away the largest recipient of this surplus giveaway, having received 1997 aid totaling $3.023 (Cont. Page 7)

million in devalued equipment. The second largest EDA recipient was Argentina with $460,000.

Connecting the dots here requires very little ink. From Vietnam to Central America, to South America to Angola to Mexico the progression of CIA's wars has always been the same. As Ted Shackley so precisely describes, the wars of insurgency grow through phases until outright commitment of military personnel is achieved as a matter of overt foreign policy. In CIA's case it will probably also mean the clandestine arming of the Zapatistas as well. For they are so isolated and remote, so cut off from the outside world that only the logistical prowess of CIA could get them the weapons and supplies necessary to continue a revolt which will also perpetuate the need for U.S. aid to the Mexicans and make Mexico increasingly dependent on U.S. guidance. Thus Mexico too will become a victim again.

Mexico is playing its part well. At the edge of revolution and fearful that a spark from Chiapas could ignite the whole country the Mexican Army is clamping down on Chiapas in ways which are unimaginable.

Consider the observation of CSUN professor Evangeline Ordaz and two CSUN students who just came back from Chiapas. Their trip was reported in the L.A. Times on July 13. The story stated, in part, "Chiapas is a war zone… Rape is common. Shootings are common. In recent months, several dozen foreign visitors have been expelled…

" 'It has never been so tense as it is now,' said Ordaz who has regularly visited Chiapas in the four years since a Zapatista led uprising left about 150 dead and began the current standoff…

"'Just driving down the road we saw 39 or 40 military vehicles full of troops,' Ordaz said. 'When you are there you can really see how hard the Mexican government is working to silence these people.'

"Flores and Gudino both said the military presence was overwhelming. On a visit to the Indian village of Acteal, where 45 Zapatista sympathizers - mostly women and children - were massacred by masked men in December, the sadness on the people's faces left an unforgettable impression."

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Here are two letters you can write for less than a dollar.

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Mr. William J. Clinton

President of the United States

The White House

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Volume Two of the Central Intelligence Agency's Inspector General report on Allegations of drug trafficking during the Contra war is still classified and in the hands of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses.

Recently, portions of that report have been leaked to the New York Times.

Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Congress promised the American people a full report on investigations into these charges. Surprise hearings in the House in March produced

disturbing revelations that CIA had agreed with the Department of Justice not to report drug trafficking by its agents.

I request that you direct the DCI to immediately declassify Volume Two and make its contents available to the American people to the fullest extent possible. I further request that you urge the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to hold open hearings, with testimony from relevant witnesses and enough advance publicity, so that the American people may judge for themselves the truth of the allegations. As President you are in a position to exercise true moral leadership on this critical and festering issue.

Sincerely,

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The Honorable Newt Gingrich

Speaker of The House of Representatives

2428 Rayburn House Office Bldg.

Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Mr. Speaker:

It has come to my attention that hearings are imminent in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence concerning Volume Two of the CIA Inspector general's report on allegations of Agency involvement in drug trafficking.

In light of the fact that the Chairman of that Committee, J. Porter Goss (R), FL., is a retired covert operative of the CIA and held hearings on Volume One in a manner which gave no advance notice to the public or the press, and in light of the fact that the last hearings produced evidence showing CIA complicity in drug trafficking, I am hereby requesting that you remove Mr. Goss as Chairman for hearings on Volume Two on grounds of conflict of interest.

It is bad enough having CIA investigate itself on these horrendous charges. But to have a retired CIA officer investigate CIA's investigation of CIA is an insult to American integrity and morals.

Sincerely,

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