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The Conspirators:
Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider
by Lt. Cmdr. Al Martin (US Navy, Ret.)
Copyright 2000, Al Martin. All Rights Reserved
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Confidential File: Alexander S. Martin……………………………………………….…3
Chapter 2 The NPO and Operation Sledgehammer……………………………………………. 14
Chapter 3 Oliver North: The Money Laundering Drug Smuggling “Patriot”……. 26
Chapter 4 “Do Nothing” Janet Reno and Iran-Contra Suppression………………..….. 42
Chapter 5 Classified Illegal Operations: Cordoba Harbor and Screw Worm ……..50
Chapter 6 The Don Austin Denver HUD Fraud Case …………………………………..….. 66
Chapter 7 Bush Family Fraud & Iran-Contra Profiteering ……………………………… 72
Chapter 8 Insider Stock Swindles for “The Cause”…………………………………………….89
Chapter 9 Corporate Fraud, Stock Fraud and Other Scams………………………………106
Chapter 10 The Tri-Lateral Investment Group – Bush Family Fraud…………………. 114
Chapter 11 Lawrence Richard Hamil: The US Government’s Con Man…………… 122
Chapter 12 US Government Narcotics Smuggling & Illicit Weapons Sales……… 136
Chapter 13 US Government Sanctioned Drug Trafficking ……………………………….. 141
Chapter 14 The Chinese Connection: US Weapons & High Tech Graft…………….. 156
Chapter 15 More Iran-Contra Stories: Both Humorous & Salient …………………… 171
Chapter 16 Chinese Money for US Weapons …………………………………………………….185
Chapter 17 US Government Narcotics Smuggling (Part 2) ……………………….… 192
Chapter 18 In Hiding Again ……………………………………………………………………………..209
Chapter 19 Corporate Fraud, Government Fraud and More Fraud……………………224
Chapter 20 The Real Story of Operation Watchtower…………………………………………234
Chapter 21 KGB & East German Activities in the US (1985-87)…………………………..240
Chapter 22 The Woman in Red (And Black)…………………………………………………………252
Chapter 23 Bush Family Corporate, Real Estate, and Bank Frauds…………………….260
Chapter 24 Iran-Contra Real Estate Fraud…………………………………………………………..277
Chapter 25 More Chinese-Military Connections…………………………………………………288
Chapter 26 ONI, CZX & Orpheus. ………………………………………………………………… 295
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- CONFIDENTIAL FILE: ALEXANDER S. MARTIN
- Born 5-19-54, Oberammergau, West Germany, Federal German Republic.
- Mixed German and American parentage.
- Returned to United States 09-Aug-1957.
- Graduated Masconoma Technical School, 16-May-1972.
- Full ROTC training then available at high school level.
- Graduated with certificates in electronics and communications equipment, as well as a
Level 05 Certificate in Russian Languages. - Subject joined the United States Navy, 19-May-1972.
- Sent to China Lakes Naval Air Station to complete basic training and for further
training in electronics and communications. - Subject MOS – 16-Sep-1972.
- At subject’s request, TDY’d 03-Oct-1972 Naval Communication Center, Saigon, South
Vietnam. - Remained in South Vietnam theater until cessation of naval and air hostilities on 27-
Aug-1973. - On 04-Sep-1973, subject again, and on request, TDY’d Subic Bay, Pacific Theater of
Operations Naval Command Center. - Discharged honorably United States Navy 19-May-1976.
- Immediately thereafter joined United States Naval Reserves, Active Status.
- Rremained United States Naval Reserves active status doing two tours.
- Transferred and relisted, inactive service United States Naval Reserves.
19-May-1984, - Subject retires United States Naval Reserves 19-May-1988 at the Reserve Officers Rank
of Lt. Commander.
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After my discharge from active naval duty service in 1976, I moved to Cuzco, Peru,
and set up a business with a childhood friend, George W. Carver III, son of then CIA
Deputy Director, George W. Carver Jr.
The business dealt in alpaca, llama, and vicuna, but was actually a cover, as a “G” for
the State Department.
My assignment at the time was to gather intelligence on Russian military operations
in Peru.
At the time, Peru was officially pro-Moscow. It was armed by Moscow and had
about 4,000 Russian army advisors in the country.
I remained in the country until September 9, 1977, the coup of Gen. Hector Bermudez
and the installation of civilian President, Fernando Terry. At that time I returned to the
United States, initially settling in Miami.
While in Peru, I became acquainted with numerous CIA field agents and support
personnel, then being run out of CIA’s Lima station. These included Deputy CIA
Station Chief Eugene S. Barlow, more commonly referred to as “Buzz” Barlow, whose
claim to fame had been that he had secretly recruited Vladimiro Montesinos, a
Peruvian army officer, who then in turn developed an intelligence network that
informed on Russian Army and Soviet KGB movements within Peru.
An interesting footnote to this is that eight years later, Montesinos would become a
double agent working for the KGB. He was being run by then Assistant Deputy KGB
Director, Major Yuri Shvets, whose cover was Commercial Trade Attache for the Soviet
Embassy in Washington.
Barlow would play an important role in Iran-Contra, particularly in the post 1983
environment and would finally finish up his career as a senior FBI agent at the Tulsa
field office.
Subpoenaed before Congress in 1987, Barlow either refused to answer, or answered “I
don’t know” 117 times when asked about his Iran-Contra role.
In 1978, I met Lawrence Richard Hamil, a Department of Defense shadow player, a
hanger-on as many are, who wait for profitable covert operations.
His father was the well-known Harry J. Hamil, former senior Defense Department
policy analyst of their southern desk before his death of natural causes in 1984.
Hamil and I and others including Frank Snepp, Jack Terrell, Harry Aderholt, Landon
Thorme, Duke Rome, and a host of other players in the shadows of Washington,
became involved in a scheme in 1979 to traffic in American Express credit cards in
Argentina on behalf of the American Express Corporation.
- Iran-Contra Real Estate Fraud
I’d like to break down frauds by regions, to give the reader a better idea of how Iran-
Contra fraud, weapons trafficking and narcotics, was principally undertaken in socalled
Iran-Contra-friendly states.
We see in the 1990s that the IRS reversed a lot of these oil and gas tax shelters that
had enormous tax leverages in that there were hundreds and hundreds of limited
partnership deals.
And people had to pony up some pretty big tax money because of it.
But look at the deals that were not reversed — they had extreme leverage. That tells
you where the politics of the situation were. Of all the deals I marketed, not one was
ever reversed by the IRS.
We see deals that were reversed were often deals that had been marketed by larger
security firms that were in fact genuine deals — not a politically oriented transaction to
raise illegal covert monies.
But I marketed over 300 deals and not one of them was ever reversed later on.
Also, I wanted to mention another Iran-Contra state in terms of fraud — not only real
estate fraud, but also mining fraud — Nevada.
People have often asked me why there was so much corporate fraud concentrated in
Nevada. It’s because of the control that Bush had within the Nevada Secretary of State’s
office.
After all, the Secretary of State was a very close associate of George Bush — the
infamous Frankie Sue DelPapa. She was later investigated umpteen times in the late
1980s and early 1990s, but no charges were ever proven against her.
She was investigated for having substituted corporate records, which in fact, she did.
That’s one reason she was there. She made corporate records disappear, and she did
substitution of corporate records.
The Bush faction had such incredible control in the State of Nevada that you could
literally commit fraud with absolute impunity. When you have a sympathetic
Secretary of State who’s prepared to destroy corporate records, or alter corporate
records, or actually substitute corporate records and steal other people’s corporations,
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which DelPapa did, it’s incredible what you can get away with. And what we did get
away with.
In the Nevada series of mining property deals that we did, they were mostly
sponsored under the Glory Hole Master Limited Partnership Development, which was
actually Colorado-based, but extended deals also into Nevada.
Students of Iran-Contra would remember that the Glory Hole mining properties were
controlled in Colorado. The control was through retired CIA and FBI agents — all of
the Board of Directors, the Trustees — everybody was either retired CIA or retired FBI.
To make those deals work, it involved a lot of Republican judges. There was Judge Ed
Barnes, who was a state district judge in east Texas, Judge Barnhill in Colorado, and
Judge Nottingham in Colorado.
These judges were subsequently investigated.
None were ever indicted, but they were subsequently investigated for surreptitious
investments they made, actually paper investments they made in certain mining deals
and reaped just enormous rewards for monies that they had never actually invested —
except on paper.
Speaking of judges, this borders on another subject that we haven’t really got into and
that’s judicial involvement in Iran-Contra frauds.
The connection between U.S. Attorney’s offices and certain federal judges, and even
State Attorney General’s offices and certain state, district or circuit judges wherein Iran-
Contra sensitive criminal fraud cases would be consistently investigated by the same
parties within those state or U.S. Attorney’s offices.
These cases would consistently wind up in the jurisdiction of certain Republicanappointed
judges to make sure that the outcome was what everybody wanted to see the
outcome to be.
You’ll see there were plea bargains in these cases.
In cases where the designated fall guy didn’t like the idea of being the designated fall
guy and wanted to put on some sort of so-called CIA Defense (which of course has
much broader implications than just the CIA), you will see that the people who tried to
do that didn’t fare so well.
They received very long prison sentences, and often the judges (it’s particularly true
in Miami) would close their courtrooms to the media when there was an uncooperative
designated scapegoat.
They would either close the courtrooms or attempt to close the courtrooms.
This finally stopped in 1988 when there were increasing howls from the Democrats
on the Hill and increasing media agitation about this consistent use of “National
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Security” in Iran-Contra sensitive fraud cases to keep out the media.
Frankly, the practice was politically untenable after 1988.
In the Nevada properties, there had to be at least the semblance of reality, particularly
in the mining deals. All of the mining deals I marketed in Nevada, including the
Helena Mining deal and the Cosmos Development deal — it was similar to the oil and
gas frauds.
In other words, the oil and gas frauds were based on old beat-out limestone pumpers
that pumped one barrel a day perhaps and had been pumping a barrel a day for fifty
years.
Give them a shot of acid every ninety days, and they’ll pump fifty gallons of water
and one gallon of oil a day.
But you just do manipulation of the logs and meters.
You make that one barrel a day appear like three hundred.
The mining deals were mostly the same way. In Nevada, all of the mining deals that
I marketed — the gold, silver, platinum mining deals — were all what’s known as open
pit leach mines. And they did, in fact, produce precious metals, but nowhere near the
production we were actually claiming in these deals.
Let’s put it that way. People familiar with mining would know that in leach mining
you have to move an incredible quantity of earth. You have to build these enormous
pools, which almost look like swimming pools. Then there’s the acid and solution and
electrolytic zinc rods which attract the metals from the sands.
But frankly, to make a leach mine profitable, it has to be an incredibly large
operation. Anybody with any brains who visited these sites would have known that
there wasn’t anywhere near the amount of metals coming out of these mines that what
we claimed.
Thanks to our Nevada friends in the Bureau of Natural Resources in Nevada, which
was very solidly Republican controlled, we could easily manipulate it to make it
appear that much more was coming out of these mines than there actually was.
The final Iran-Contra note I wanted to make about Nevada was the egregious swindle
that George Bush Sr. himself instituted in concert with Frankie Sue DelPapa on that
Cosmos Development deal.
The scenario in question later became known as the Peruvian Gold Certificate
Swindle, where DelPapa actually substituted corporate records.
Bush had formed a corporation with a very similar sounding name. This was so
commonly done — mimic corporations with similar sounding names.
You simply substitute the records and it was an out-and-out swindle of the Durham
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family. This is the scenario that the famous California conspiracy theorist, E.E Eckert,
got involved in.
Of course, he pounded away on this conspiracy for years in that little rag sheet he
printed, The Contact.
And he actually presented a pretty good case of it. We’re talking about a man and his
staff of about three guys who spent years investigating this fraud. And they did have it
put together awfully well.
But it was such an egregious fraud, an out-and-out theft by George Bush.
What Eckert did was to connect this fraud to ever larger frauds. He connected this
gold certificate fraud into big money, tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in bank
loans at Banque Paribas, Credit Lyonnais, Union Bank of Switzerland.
This is also part of the National Bank of Greece swindle that was instituted by Prime
Minister Papandreou and George Bush together.
As a matter of fact, Bush’s attorney, C. Boynton Grey, flew to Athens.
You would see his travel records to the same places all the time — to Paris, Zurich and
Athens.
Eckert did a good job of pointing out who he met with — the President of the National
Bank of Greece, for instance.
This wound up being an enormous swindle in the end and this is what is called the
Grade One Swindles in Iran-Contra. These are the swindles that nobody is ever going
to want to look at because it gets far too close to the way everything works and what it’s
really all about.
Eckert for a long time tried to get the major media interested in it.
And they would bite. ABC bit a couple of times on it. As long as the fraud could be
contained, to say, “Well, it’s just a small $75 million fraud, and Bush was connected to
it.”
But the minute Eckert was able to show that this was up in the clouds . This is one of
the frauds in the clouds that makes the world go around, that ultimately were to
involve Daiwa Bank and Sumitomo Bank.
It’s an interesting example.
They had hired me at one time as a consultant to provide some further information
for them, which I did.
They needed some connecting pieces of the puzzle.
But this is a very interesting fraud that an entire book could be written about. It’s a
fraud that starts out with a $50,000 investment by George Bush. Ultimately it grows
into a $2 or $3 billion international bank fraud.
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How? By simply rehypothecating loans and/or borrowing ever greater amounts of
money, using proceeds to pay back the old loans, or in some cases to partially pay them
back, which was more common.
Then the corporate entity would go bankrupt. Credit Lyonnais was one of the very
few banks to ever admit that it lost money, that it had in fact lost about $68 million on
this fraud.
Of course, they would have no comment when they were asked about George Bush’s
involvement with this fraud.
But Eckert knew and the Financial Times London knew that Bush’s signature was on
loan papers at Credit Lyonnais.
You may remember this famous scenario. FT London revealed that Credit Lyonnais
had a fire in their reserve document storage facility in Paris and (wouldn’t you know
it?) there were three or four file cabinets that got burned up, including all of the Bush
documents.
I had wanted to discuss Colorado to some degree because it tends to be
misunderstood in terms of Iran- Contra fraud. When a student of Iran- Contra hears
Colorado, they instantly think of HUD because Colorado was the center for HUD fraud
in the west.
That’s how Colorado tends to be looked at, but what is always less looked at is the
huge amount of securities fraud that was run out of Denver.
Denver, after all, was really the chief place for Iran-Contra- instigated securities fraud
because so many penny brokerage firms were located in Denver. They had by 1985
much common ownership through the National Brokerage Group, which at that time
was run by the infamous Dick Brenneke.
National Brokerage Group had equity interests in Blinder Robinson, for instance,
which was the largest penny house in the country. But they also controlled many
smaller firms — Butcher & Singer, Trotter & Company, Marco Island Securities, Atlantis
Securities. We could go on and on.
You would see that it was these small broker/dealers — the same fourteen
broker/dealers — that appeared on the pink sheets for all of the public penny deals that
I marketed.
Their officers, principals, directors, trustees and boards of advisors consisted of
individuals such as Oliver North, Richard Secord, Jeb, Neil or George Bush Jr. Or
people like Colonel Robert Steele, Colonel James LeBlonde, Colonel Dutton, famous
Iran-Contra names in the securities part of Iran-Contra fraud where many names can be
pieced together with the actual commission of fraud.
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If we group Iran-Contra fraud into the subtexts of real estate, banking, insurance,
securities, mining, aircraft brokerage fraud, charitable foundation fraud, and so forth,
we find that securities fraud has been the least investigated to this day.
Documents are significantly harder to get out of the SEC than many other federal
agencies because, for such a long time into the post- Iran- Contra coverup, the
Republican party had such control at the SEC that they were able to deny access to
documents for a very long time.
Documents to which they could not deny access could very quickly wind up in a
court case in which a Republican-sympathetic judge would place them under seal.
Therefore, documents were either unavailable or under seal.
The media will quickly lose interest because of the time, effort and resources that had
to be devoted in any thorough investigation of Iran- Contra securities fraud.
This is an area that I thought should be further explored.
Who is going to explore it? I don’t know because it would be cumbersome, tedious
and difficult, although the documents vis-a-vis Iran- Contra securities fraud, are usually
more easy to obtain because criminal cases and civil cases involving the SEC regarding
these brokerage firms and the penny deals they proffered are more readily available
today than they were before.
I’ll preface this by saying that many had thought that the securities fraud aspect of
overall Iran-Contra fraud was rather minor.
It wasn’t as minor as people thought. As serious students of Iran- Contra know, the
SEC did a very comprehensive review in 1992, in the waning days of the Bush
Administration to try to quantify Iran- Contra securities fraud.
After going through all of its field office and regional office records, the SEC was
surprised to learn that their own estimate was that public shareholder losses (the
ultimate bag holders, the public) amounted to some $3 billion through Iran- Contra
fraudulent penny stock deals.
I don’t mean to imply that any of these were legitimate because they weren’t.
However, to get back to Colorado, we see the chain of holding of these various security
groups.
National Brokerage was, of course, a division of MDC Holding Group.
MDC was controlled by none other than the famed Republican player in Denver,
Leonard Millman and his associate, Steve Mizel and former ambassador to
Switzerland, Phillip Winn.
Their corporate counsel, by the way, was Norman Brownstein.
Brownstein had been a former CIA counsel. And although Brownstein did mostly
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criminal work, he was corporate counsel in Denver in the securities and real estate
deals. They all have Iran-Contra connections.
Students of Iran-Contra would remember how Brownstein became involved in
representing people in many Iran-Contra/CIA sensitive narcotics cases.
You can point some of these Colorado deals to the naysayers.
It is good ammunition to counter the Iran-Contra naysayers.
Some would like to say Iran-Contra is long over. There are no entrails. There are no
further connections.
Read my lips.
Iran-Contra is not over. It’s as alive as it ever was.
The same people, the same banks, the same firms. It’s as much alive as ever.
And you can demonstrate this by looking at the people that were involved in deals in
the 1983-86 timeframe.
Look at the same people today. They continue to be in the news.
In Colorado this is very true. There’s the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver, the Norton
and Griffin affair vis-a-vis Federal District Judge Zita Weinshank, their active covering
up of certain HUD cases, and the involuntary scapegoats, such as Don Austin.
The relationships are still cozy to this day. When Norton is forced out of the U.S.
Attorney’s office and ultimately the U.S. Attorney is forced out, a Democratic
appointee, Henry Solano, comes in.
Although he’s a Democrat, Solano then starts to do the same political control feature
that had been done before.
Solano owes his political patronage to Congressman Henry Gonzalez.
He’s the one that originally got him the appointment, under the understanding (and I
got this directly from Gonzalez’s investigator, Dennis Caine) that Solano was going to
be more forthcoming with documents that Gonzalez wanted — Iran-Contra-sensitive
banking and security fraud documents that Gonzalez’s committee was interested in.
Then Solano completely pulled the rug out from under Gonzalez.
There really isn’t anything that Gonzalez could say or do because it was sort of a,
shall we say, off-the-cuff type of deal to begin with.
I can tell you Gonzalez was really pissed off about what Solano did to him.
HUD Secretary Federico Pena did exactly the same thing.
Pena really got his position because of Gonzalez. And this is the little Mexican
Democratic cabal that these guys are now.
Pena wouldn’t give him any HUD documents.
But to get back to Norton — Norton acts as a control feature within the U.S. Attorney’s
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office in Denver pursuant to HUD prosecutions.
This is all under the guise of Iran-Contra coverup. And then his wife Gail Norton
becomes Attorney General of the State of Colorado and acts in exactly the same
capacity for cases that are getting kicked out from the federal jurisdiction to the state
jurisdiction.
Recently Gail Norton resigned under pressure from her position as Attorney General
of the State of Colorado and became a senior partner in Norman Brownstein’s law firm
with the infamous Phillip Bronner, another former CIA counsel.
We could go on with the story. It just shows you how cozy the relationships continue
to this day, and that Iran-Contra activity is still both extant and the ensuing coverup is
still extant.
One of the last frauds I wanted to mention — speaking of Dick Brenneke — are
crossover frauds.
That is where Iran-Contra Frauds cross over into Iraqgate Frauds and/or weapons
schemes and/or narcotics.
Brenneke started the infamous Wa-Chang Trading Group of Albany, Oregon, which
is well known to any Iran-Contra and Iraqgate students.
It later became known as the Zirconium Diversion Deal, wherein the principle was to
help Iraq surreptitiously build up its nuclear weapons program.
We have to examine who is on the Board of Directors and Advisors of that deal. That
will give you an enormous clue of just who in the United States Government wanted to
see Iraq helped in building its nuclear weapons program in 1986-1987.
- More Chinese-Military Connections
The concept of the Chinese Government contributing large amounts of political
monies to both parties in this country is nothing new.
When we say “Chinese Government,” of course, we are referring to the PRC or
People’s Republic of China.
I was involved in a very similar scheme in 1985 to launder money for the Republican
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National Committee. That became known as the CARICOM deal, and very little was
said about it at the time. It’s strange. One reason why there wasn’t a lot of interest in
the media at the time is because it was regarded in 1985 as being old news.
But these connections had actually existed since the mid-1970s and the entire notion
of illicit Chinese money going into U.S. political coffers was, in fact, nothing new.
The scheme really had never changed, and the reasons behind it have never changed.
The Chinese are giving this money for two reasons: 1) to buy political access, and
more importantly, 2) to buy weapons and technology access.
What is happening today and what has happened in recent months is absolutely no
different than what has happened in the past.
I would like to take this time to explain some of the people who are involved.
We have heard on the major media, principally the Fox Network, which is on the
cutting edge of these Chinese revelations, all kinds of names being thrown out to the
American people — General Ho, Colonel Liu. But they’re just names.
There was never any effort to tell the people who these individuals are. And I
thought I would take this time to explain it.
Gen. Ho is Lt. Gen. Ho, Chief of the North American Desk of the Chinese Ministry of
State Security, Foreign External Operations Branch.
His equivalent, for instance, in the KGB would have been Lt. Gen. Alexander Karpov,
Chief of the North American Desk of the KGB.
His American equivalent would be the operational chief of any large country desk or
continent desk. It is no small position, certainly.
We have also heard much about his daughter, who was consistently referred to as
Miss Ho. Her actual name is actually Yu-Fen Ho, meaning “beautiful flower.” She has
been intimately connected with passing money to Al Gore. She is married to Col. Liu.
His full name is Col. Lang Liu.
Of course, what I don’t like about the way these revelations come out is that there’s no
context for who these people are.
Col. Liu is married to Gen. Ho’s daughter.
Col. Liu is also Gen. Ho’s adjutant at the Ministry of State Security.
Col. Liu’s immediate subordinate is Lt. Col. Lan Chin. Chin’s immediate subordinate
(he travels with him in the United States) is Major Wei Pong.
Lan Chin (more commonly referred to in the United States by those who know him,
including myself, as Lanny Chin) operates under the cover of being a Chinese arms
dealer, when in fact he is an officer of the Ministry of State Security.
This is known by the CIA and it has been admitted by the CIA — they know he is an
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officer of the Ministry of State Security.
And yet he is not required to be registered as a foreign intelligence officer in the
United States with the Central Intelligence Agency, and thus faces no traveling
restrictions whatsoever. He moves very freely in the United States under his own name.
In recent months, of course, he was in Huntsville, Alabama. He has a very high
security clearance with the Department of Defense which allows him access to secure
facilities of the Department of Defense, particularly in the realm of high technology,
especially military technology involving thermonuclear and energy discharge weapons.
Of course, this is not all that unusual. There is nothing new about foreign intelligence
officers operating in the United States. Many have not been required to be registered
with the CIA — as is required by law.
In the past, all foreign intelligence service officers operating covertly in the United
States, who have not been registered, have always been involved in something the
United States (at the very least) tacitly approves of.
Therefore, that is why they’re not registered and given such freedom of movement.
It’s actually to facilitate their illegal transactions in the United States, which in the past
have always been done and are presently being done with at least the acquiescence of
the US Government.
For instance, it became obvious in the series of meetings in Huntsville, Alabama
recently.
One reason Dinerstein became involved in it was that it became obvious what Chin’s
function was in terms of being a liaison officer between the CIA and the Ministry of
State Security and other foreign intelligence services.
This explains Chin’s meetings in Huntsville, Alabama. Sitting next to him at dinners,
for instance, were agents of other governments — Yoram Ettinger, for instance.
Although originally Ettinger was an American citizen, he gave up his citizenship,
went to Israel, and became an Israeli citizen.
Subsequently he became a member of the Israeli Knesset and a member of the Israeli
Armed Services Committee.
He subsequently left the Knesset under some cloud of suspicion for his Iran-Contra
involvement, amid allegations of CIA-sponsored money laundering and arms
trafficking, along with his partner, Eddy Singer.
But Ettinger is now acting in the capacity he once acted in before in the 1980s,
essentially as a de facto state arms merchant for the Israeli government.
Also attending this meeting were representatives of the Russian Federal Security
Service and the West German Federal Security Service.
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The principal person there who was representing West German interests in a series of
weapons transactions that we have previously discussed, wherein China acts as the
principal front, was Rupert Von Braun.
He is the son of the great General Von Braun.
And General Von Braun is, was, and still is Chairman of Braun Industries in
Germany.
You see their products advertised on American television. He was also for many
years on the Board of Advisors to the Siemens Electronics Group. He represented
Semens military operations here in the United States for many years.
Interestingly enough, he owned the Frankfurter Algemein newspaper, which is the
second largest newspaper in Germany.
You may remember General Von Braun’s name, if you’ve ever seen the movie about
the famous West German whistle blower, Gunther Waltrop. The part was played by
Jurgen Prochnow.
Von Braun’s name was featured prominently in that movie in terms of what he did to
whistle blowers who attempted to expose Siemens, Univac and other German
corporations, and their longstanding relationship with the CIA and US Department of
Defense regarding their shipping weapons components from the United States, as well
as Germany, to certain third-party countries, principally Israel, Iraq and Iran.
To illustrate how far back some of these connections go — General Hasso Von Braun is
the nephew (and namesake) of his very famous uncle, Lt. Gen. Graf Hasso Von
Manteufel.
Manteufel, of course, escaped the Nuremberg Trials due to the personal intervention
of “Wild” Bill Donovan, Chief of the OSS and later the first Director of Central
Intelligence.
Manteufel became a very important agent for the OSS and the interim capacity they
played until the formation of the CIA in 1947,
Manteufel became an important asset for them in Germany because of his connections
in East Prussia, Ludendorf and what subsequently became East Germany.
Another representative who also met with Lan Chin, a person who was seen in Chin’s
company in Huntsville, was Marcel Dessault, Jr. Of course, we know who his father
was — the founder and longtime Chairman of Dessault Industries in France.
Dessault is the major military contractor in France. They make the famed Mirage jet
fighters, and the equally renown Exocet missiles.
It is interesting to note here the further duplicity of the United States vis-a-vis the
French and Chinese governments, when the United States conveniently turned a blind
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eye to a transaction between Dessault Industries and the Chinese People’s Army,
wherein a quantity of Exocet missiles were shipped from France through the United
States directly to China.
Afterwards the Chinese People’s Army began to manufacture a cheap knock-off
version of the Exocet, which recently showed up in the 1999 Paris Arms Show.
The Chinese designation of the missile is the Swan II which costs about a tenth of
what the Exocet does.
It is being marketed by the Chinese government’s chief foreign marketing
representative who is none other than Sarkis Signalian.
I know it sounds like I’m digressing from what is being called “The Chinese
Connection” but I’m really not.
In all fairness, the Chinese connection must be looked at globally and as to how it
relates to other nations — not just the United States.
A fuller revelation would take more time but would illustrate just how old these
relationships are, how cozy these relationships are, and just how meaningless “nonproliferation
laws” are, and how meaningless the U.S. customs and export laws are
when it comes to a State-acquiesced policy of what the United States actually wants to
see done to maintain tensions in certain parts of the world.
And this is the whole key — the purposeful maintenance of global tension.
The average reader may not understand this concept, but I think the more
sophisticated reader would understand that it is in certain parties’ best interest — within
the CIA, the Department of Defense, the defense industry, and their political allies on
both sides of the aisles in Washington.
It is in everyone’s best financial interest within this little circle that tensions be
maintained in certain parts of the world and that certain proliferation of weapons be
allowed to exist.
This isn’t the Nixon-Kissingeresque policy of the 1970s anymore when this started in
order to maintain supposed balances of power between sub-spheres of influence.
It isn’t done that way. And nobody cares about that anymore.
The world is changed. It’s just all a matter of money now. And that very simply is
what it comes down to.
There is no higher state policy that can justify this anymore.
It’s just a matter of greed and money.
When we get down into the lower rung of this so-called “Chinese Connection” into
what I would call the “bag men,” these are names that we’ve all been saturated with —
Johnny Chung and Charlie Trie, etc.
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These men are consistently portrayed in the United States media as being small
businessmen or restauranteurs, which always strikes me funny.
Nobody in the media ever bothers to find out who these guys really were or are, or
what even their real names are.
For instance, I have not heard on any news broadcast anywhere that Johnny Chung is
a former officer in the People’s Army.
I have not heard anywhere that Trie, actually more interestingly, is Vietnamese.
Charlie Trie is billed as a nickel-and-dime Little Rock restauranteur, but his real name
is Trang Qua Trie. He’s a former captain of the Communist North Vietnamese army
during the war. His father, Trang Wa Trie, was a general in the North Vietnamese
army.
As a matter of fact, during the war, Trie acted in a liaison capacity with the People’s
Army, pursuant to the supplication of Chinese weapons for the North Vietnamese
during the war.
And yet, Charlie Trie gets billed as a “little restauranteur.”
I have consistently said this to Fox News, which is on the cutting edge of this, and
Matt Drudge in particular, that some effort should be made to actually investigate who
in the hell these people are and how they’re all connected to each other in the past.
If somebody would do that, it would be much easier to put together a broader picture
of this Chinese Connection — how long it’s been going on, how many people are
involved, and approximately what weapons systems and technologies have been
transferred because of it.
How much money has been brought into the United States and gone into U.S.
political coffers?
The first step in ascertaining this is to find out who this cast of characters is — who
they were in the past, how they interrelate, and their connections to people in the
present.
It’s like we say “Iran-Contra.”
“Iran-Contra” activity continues to go on today. In some cases, it’s the very same
names and faces. In other cases, it’s a newer, younger generation of names and faces.
But the narcotics, weapons and fraud aspects still continue to this day.
The same facilities are used now that were used then. It is no different with the
Chinese Connection.
As always, it’s the little things that get overlooked.
- The fact that Charlie Trie’s restaurant in Little Rock is actually in the Worthen Bank
Building.
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- The fact that Bill Clinton and Charlie Trie have eaten at his restaurant together with
Johnny Chung many times. - The fact that Trie, Chung, Clinton and James Riady, Jr. have all eaten dinner before
at Trie’s restaurant in Little Rock.
If you continue connecting the dots higher and higher, it is these little things that give
you much better clues as to the reasons behind what is going on today, and how some
of the connections are made.
This so-called Chinese Connection Scandal will grow into a major scandal. There are
many more revelations to come.
We are not to the point where somebody has come to me and asked me to piece it all
together on a six by nine foot chart for use in a court room.
But that will come.
Somebody will come to me eventually, particularly when this scandal gets to the
point that the designated bag of scapegoats start to get indicted and prosecuted.
It reminds me of the six by nine foot graph I did for Noriega’s counsels in 1989.
We are already getting to what I call the “silly stage” in these scandals. They all have
their own life, and we’re now at the “silly stage.” The bumbling stage.
Some of it’s actually humorous. For instance, when the FBI had Chung and Trie
under surveillance and they saw them walking out of the National Bank of China’s
agency office in Washington with briefcases that they could hardly carry.
FBI Director Louis Freeh was subsequently asked why the FBI didn’t stop these guys
to find out what was in the attache cases that they were taking out of the bank.
And Freeh said, “Oh, well. We didn’t have any probable cause because we weren’t
certain what might be in the attache cases that they had just come out of the bank with.”
And Matt Drudge immediately responded by saying, “Well, Mr. Director, don’t you
mean that you didn’t want to know what was in the briefcases?”
This embarrassed Freeh.
But this is the silly stage.
We’ll get past this, and there will be more revelations to come. Anyway, this was only
meant to explain who some of these characters were, and some of the humorous and
salient revelations that have occurred so far.
In the future I will do a fuller revelation. I have pulled up, as it were, all my Chinese
files, which admittedly are scant.
I really didn’t have many dealings with them in the 1980s. But I do, as always, have
the ability to find out more.
I can’t do a fuller revelation until such times as I am engaged either individually, in
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concert with Steve Dinerstein or in concert with others to mount a more thorough
investigation, at which time I will probably connect the dots even more.
Certainly, the revelations yet to come in this so-called Chinese Connection Scandal
will tend to broaden the scandal out as these scandals tend to get broadened out. In the
new series of revelations that are coming, we’ll begin to connect the Chinese to the
Israelis to the Germans to the Russians in terms of arms shipping, who the ultimate
recipients are, and how the United States seems to turn a blind eye to all of this.
This will come and there will be a fuller definition and a broadening of the scandal.
The Chinese Connection will not be looked at so narrowly as it is now. And maybe at
some point, the American people will begin to get the idea of just how big of a cabal
this deal actually is — how things work, what happens, and what are the motives
behind it.
That is certainly, I believe, the direction that this thing is going. I’m aware of some of
the revelations yet to come. And I think this is a good and healthy thing, so that the
people can see for themselves just how deep and old these conspiracies are.
- ONI, CZX and Orpheus
I wanted to mention the awesome power of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
When I have been interviewed for newspaper or magazine articles on Iran-Contra,
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people have always asked me, ”Where does the real power lay?”
And of course, everyone’s first answer would be the CIA, the DIA, the NSA.
And I would always say no. The real power is in the ONI. It always has been. They
virtually have god-like power.
Their mechanism to control liability is absolutely unparalleled.
And this has been a subject which has not been discussed much in Iran-Contra.
Certainly pieces have been written on ONI’s involvement in Iran-Contra, particularly in
the area of weapons and narcotics trafficking.
There have been 4,500 articles written about Iran-Contra in all publications from the
Frankfurter Algemeine to the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun. But there have only been six
articles that go into any detail in terms of ONI’s involvement in Iran-Contra.
I would like to discuss that, although it is diverging a little bit.
Most of the ONI operations are in the west — and always have been. It is generally
well known that they control their air facilities out of Medley, Oregon in that little air
strip that used to be called “Mena of the West.”
ONI’s principal controlled cut-out was Evergreen Airlines.
One of the very few people to stay on Evergreen Airlines in an investigative capacity
was Major Gary Atel, United States Army Major, Retired, who has testified before
congressional committees investigating Iran-Contra.
I know Gary very well. I’ve bought information from him in the past, and he has
purchased information from me.
He has a continuing civil action on behalf of the United States people against the
now-bankrupt Evergreen Airlines, which is very revealing.