How the Ingrained CIA Global Drug Connection Ensures a Neverending Nightmare

(File this under Too Much Information at Christmastime.) Were you aware that "Vito Genovese, a New York mafia leader, was installed as interpreter in the Allied Military Government office of Col. Charles Poletti, a former New York Tammany politician," and that "in 1947 William" (Wild Bill) "Donovan," who was at that time "a corporate lawyer and no longer the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), reportedly financed a May Day massacre of leftists in Sicily, organized by the recently-deported Detroit mafia figure Frank Coppola?" No? Well, I hadn't been either until reading a most illuminating essay by Peter Dale Scott recently (and you can see more here), although I had heard some scuttlebutt about a Coppola being named; the bloodiness of the connection did, however, startle me quite a bit. But that was only the iceberg tip of the amazement I felt later as I immersed myself in this account of the absolutely unbelievable connectedness of the continuing deep-seated corruption we are treated to on what seems like a daily basis now in the "Grand Old (USA) Party." As I read I kept saying to myself that this is quite a fantasy scenario, but how could this be? The most astonishing part (according to his theory) is that these people (we are informed) aren't really that smarmy at all (take that Blagojevich!) just regular people doing the business of the shadow government - you can ask Nancy or Chuck or Hillary (or even Rahmbo) about this if you're still confused (not to mention the whole BushLeagueCheneGang currently bragging about their part in it) - and they may know intimately. The other troubling thought that constantly recurs is that the same idiots who earnestly believed that invading Iraq and Afghanistan would be just another walk in the park are the extremely well-groomed successors of these original village idiots.

In areas where Communist forces have appeared strong, the United States, at least since 1945, has resorted repeatedly to supportive counterviolence from mobsters involved in the drug traffic.

And although "these arrangements were temporary and ad hoc," they became de rigueur as the progressive-socialist fervor increased in the underdeveloped world. The connection between Big Georgie (H.W.) Bush being given the most important CIA position (with no prior qualifications to justify this choice) after the helicopter-hanging ignominious end of the Vietnam War and the logical next step Iran/Contra-drug money dealings provides a clear link to the present day neverending Drug War, requiring billions in public funds, supposedly to stop the drug use that so clearly formerly paid and probably still pays for much of this shadow government's activities. (Of course, none of us reality-based lifeforms really believe this scenario, but we also believe in Santa and angels.)

Such arrangements became more centralized in 1948, after the newly created National Security Council created an Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) to carry out "subversion against hostile states" - i.e., conduct law-breaking as national policy. Thanks to OPC, the U.S. began giving significant covert support to organized drug-traffickers around the world, in the Far East, Europe, and eventually the Middle East and Latin America.

It also becomes a lot clearer why the sight of J. Edgar Hoover in a dress was not as outrageous a thought as it became clear it should have been later. But you need to read the whole story. (Emphasis marks and some editing were inserted - Ed.)

These world-wide activities became more and more interrelated. Since at least 1950 there has been a global CIA-drug connection operating more or less continuously. Especially with the passage of time, this connection has contributed to unexplained deep events and the consolidation of the global dominance mentality, at home as well as abroad. More specifically, the global drug connection is a factor underlying such unexplained deep events as the JFK assassination, the second Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, and Iran-Contra. The global drug connection is not just a lateral connection between CIA field operatives and their drug-trafficking contacts. It is more significantly a global financial complex of hot money uniting prominent business, financial and government as well as underworld figures. It maintains its own political influence by the systematic supply of illicit finances, favors and even sex to politicians around the world, including leaders of both parties in the United States. The result is a system that might be called indirect empire, one that, in its search for foreign markets and resources, is satisfied to subvert existing governance without imposing a progressive alternative. One significant organizer of the post-war global drug connection - between CIA, organized crime, and their mutual interest in drug-trafficking - was former OSS officer Paul L.E. Helliwell. Helliwell, who was head of the Special Intelligence branch of OSS in Kunming, and later an officer of OPC and the CIA, was simultaneously the owner of the Bank of Perrine in Key West, Florida, "a two-time laundromat for the Lansky mob and the CIA," and its sister Bank of Cutler Ridge. Here we shall see a number of interrelated mob-CIA money-laundering banks in the global drug connection, of which the greatest was undoubtedly the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

In case you've forgotten, BCCI was the downfall of that liberal paragon, Clark Clifford - Chairman of BCCI (and his law partner Robert Altman - President of BCCI (married to Lynda Carter "Wonder Woman")), Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter's friend and lawyer (remember him?), and many, many country-unidentified Arabs whose role in that criminality was completely obscured by the media coverage; and then they were allowed to plead ignorance of what had been going on with BCCI's Holding Company (sound familiar?) as long as they didn't run banks anymore ("Clifford and Altman have testified that they were throughout this period deceived as to BCCI's ownership of and control of First American and other BCCI entities in the United States, and ignorant of the bank's wrongdoing in any material respect" although documents available now say that their sworn testimony was contradicted by other testimony). When I tried to track down the underlying facts for my own peace of mind, it led nowhere back then (at least not in the news available to the general public), and although bits and pieces about it did slip out eventually, this essay fills in most of the gaps of what were obvious violations of U.S. securities laws by officers of the court at that time. No wonder Raygun's people thought they could do a better (criminal) job. The thought I'm most unhappily left with after reading as much of this history rend(er)ing as I can tolerate (and happy holidays to you too) is that the majority of the U.S.' world-famous puritanical, church-obsessed, self-congratulatory, largely politically apathetic population are perfectly content with an obviously semi-corrupt (at least) ongoing bipartisan government that provides them (less and less all the time though) with whatever demanded goods and services (toys) that are sufficiently goodwill-engendering/entertaining at the moment, making me wonder how quickly the coming bad times will change this public opinion (and thus the newly-built Halliburton prisons needing to be at the ready).

In this essay I shall first attempt to lay out the complex geography or network of that milieu, which I call the global drug connection, and its connections to what has been called an "alternative" or "shadow" CIA. I shall then show how this network, of banks, financial agents of influence, and the alternative CIA, contributed to the infrastructure of the Kennedy assassination and a series of other, superficially unrelated, major deep events. In this narrative, the names of individuals, their institutions, and their connections are relatively unimportant. What matters is to see that such a milieu existed; that it was on-going, well-connected, and protected; and that, with increasing independence from governmental restraint, it played a role in major deep events in the last half century.

Read more here. Suzan _________________