The LaRouche Files, George Bush, and Irangate by Jeffrey Steinberg First of a Series Somewhere in the greater Washington, D.C. area, in a highly secured federal government facility, millions of pages of secret files are maintained on Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. According to a Nov. 7, 1989 affidavit by Vernon Thornton, a senior official of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, those files are classified as a "national security repository" and are exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act or under criminal defense discovery. Under the terms of two Presidential Executive Orders issued by Ronald Reagan, 12333 and 12356, the only person authorized to release those files and thereby expose the government's 15-year long illegal persecution of Lyndon LaRouche and the political movement he helped to found, is President George Herbert Walker Bush. - Bush Is Responsible - As the result of President Bush's refusal to act on a series of formal requests to declassify those files, Lyndon LaRouche and six political associates are presently in federal prison, and a score of others are either awaiting trial or sentencing in state courts. As President Bush is undoubtedly aware, the release of the LaRouche files would unearth a dimension of what has come to be known as the Iran-Contra Affair that has so far been kept from the American public: the revival of domestic spying and dirty tricks operations directed against American citizens on a scale that goes beyond even the notorious FBI Cointelpro program and the lesser known CIA Operation Chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. - Pieces of the Picture - Through an investigation which included a meticulous review of documents released through the Freedom of Information Act and under criminal discovery, this newspaper has assembled a profile of some of the material contained in the LaRouche national security repository. Beginning with this article, New Federalist will publish a detailed account of the reconstruction of that file. This series will show that: Beginning in January 1976, the FBI was inundated with knowingly false allegations of LaRouche links to Arab terrorism, to Communist bloc funding, espionage, and "disinformation" from a network of private agencies all linked to the international social democracy. Among the first of these false charges came from Roy Godson in a January 1976 meeting at FBI headquarters. In the spring of 1977, a convicted felon and former Nazi youth gang leader, Gordon Novel, in collusion with officials of the Trilateral Commission, accused LaRouche and wartime OSS hero Mitchell Livingston WerBell III of plotting the assassination of top officials of the Carter administration and NATO. Although an FBI investigation determined that no such plot existed, the allegations became part of the permanent "national security repository" and would form the foundation for subsequent planted lies from other sources. This pattern of false accusations of LaRouche assassination plots funded through secret offshore bank accounts provided government intelligence agencies with the broadest latitude to conduct secret operations aimed at "neutralizing" the LaRouche movement inside the United States and abroad. In the autumn of 1983, WerBell, a security adviser to LaRouche, was deployed by the White House to investigate suspected efforts by porno publisher Larry Flynt to blackmail the President in collusion with the KGB. Gordon Novel was at this time a fulltime employee of Flynt. In December 1983, while in Los Angeles investigating the Flynt-Novel blackmail operation, WerBell died under mysterious circumstances. Six years later, evidence came out that WerBell had been poisoned by Flynt bodyguards. Within weeks of WerBell's death, Gordon Novel filmed a segment of an NBC TV slander against LaRouche, repeating the discredited 1977 charges of LaRouche assassination plots against Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others. In September 1984, a trio of Midland, Texas-based mercenaries, Gary Howard, Ron Tucker, and Fred Lewis, approached CIA officials with a lurid, fabricated story that a senior LaRouche aide had approached them with an offer of $20 million if they would assemble a team of ex-CIA and Green Beret killers to assassinate top drug traffickers in South America. The phony story triggered a 14-month FBI investigation. The same trio surfaced in two subsequent anti-LaRouche "sting" operations. By Howard's own account, these efforts were coordinated with Vice President George Bush's general counsel, C. Boyden Gray. In March 1986, within days of the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, the Anti-Defamation League, in collusion with the Soviet KGB, surfaced the allegation that Lyndon LaRouche was behind the Palme killing. The Palme accusations triggered an international criminal probe, in which Swedish police joined forces with the FBI to accelerate the "Get LaRouche" effort. - The Hamerman-Walsh Letters - During October and November of 1989, a series of letters to President Bush's General Counsel C. Boyden Gray from LaRouche spokesman Warren Hamerman and from Irangate Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh met with identical rebuffs from the White House. Hamerman's letters, citing Executive Orders 12333, 12334 and 12356, petitioned the President to act on his exclusive authority to declassify the LaRouche files and thereby release critical evidence of covert operations against LaRouche "which were aimed at `neutralizing' his political influence abroad and domestically." The Walsh letters, submitted in the context of the final trial preparations for the prosecution of former CIA Costa Rica station chief Joseph Fernandez, addressed identical issues of protected government national security files. Walsh urged President Bush to order the release of documents to prevent the creation of "an enclave of high public officers free from the rule of law." In both instances, White House General Counsel C. Boyden Gray referred the matters to the office of Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, a flat rejection of the requests, since Thornburgh has no authority whatsoever to declassify the so-called national security documents. As a result, LaRouche and his associates languish in federal prison, and the indictment of Joseph Fernandez was dismissed this month by a federal judge in the same Alexandria, Va. court that railroaded LaRouche. - The Iran-Contra Overlap - The shoddy treatment afforded to both Hamerman and Walsh by the Bush White House was yet another reminder that the Iran-Contra file and the LaRouche file overlap to a very great extent. In fact, it was Walsh's office which provided the initial evidence that the Reagan era "secret government" had targeted LaRouche. In February 1988, in the midst of the criminal prosecution of LaRouche and six associates before Federal District Court Judge Robert Keeton in Boston, Walsh revealed that his office had uncovered a document in the office safe of Oliver North which revealed that North and Gen. Richard Secord were seeking "info against LaRouche." The discovery of that document led Judge Keeton to order a search of government files, including those of Vice President Bush, for other evidence of government "Get LaRouche" actions. Shortly after Keeton's order, the Boston LaRouche case ended in a mistrial, only to be revived six months later in Alexandria, Va. before a different federal judge who was committed to burying all evidence of government crimes against LaRouche. How a CIA Stringer's Lie Set Up Federal Probe of LaRouche by Jeffrey Steinberg Second of a Series On March 4, 1984, the now defunct NBC television news magazine First Camera aired a hatchet-style broadcast on then-Democratic Party presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. Among the most vile lies aired on the 20-minute segment was an interview with an unidentified man who claimed that LaRouche, back in August 1977, had authored a fantastic assassination plot. From the official NBC transcript: "He [LaRouche] proposed to assassinate, as I recall, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Joseph Luns, who was the Secretary-General of NATO; Paul Warnke, the Arms Control Agency; President Carter and David Rockefeller. And the method was to be the installation of small radio-controlled time bombs that could be detonated over the telephone lines from foreign countries 12 thousand miles away. General Mitchell WerBell generated a counterpropaganda story-cover story to completely suppress the affair." The unnamed man was Gordon Dwayne Novel, a convicted felon, who, in his youth in New Orleans, was a leader of a violent Nazi street gang, and who later worked as a stringer and a "sting man" for a variety of federal agencies, from the FBI to the CIA. Novel was deeply implicated with New Orleans FBI Division Five head Guy Bannister in gun-running for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and was part of the New Orleans circles that included Kennedy assassination suspects David Ferrie and Clay Shaw. Novel's dealings with NBC network news dated back to 1967, when he worked for former Kennedy White House spook Walter Sheridan, then posing as a producer for NBC's original news magazine, White Paper, to shut down the Kennedy assassination probe of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. In the early 1970s, Novel was arrested and convicted in Nevada of peddling illegal bugging equipment. In 1976, he was indicted on arson conspiracy charges in New Orleans. Novel's fabrication about a LaRouche-ordered assassination plot against senior officials of the Carter administration and NATO dated back to the spring of 1977, and constituted one of the very first actions in the years-long effort to frame up LaRouche and neutralize the political movement he had founded. The secret intelligence war directed against LaRouche constitutes one of the most glaring cases of illegal domestic covert operations in decades. By planting the Carter assassination hoax on federal agencies, Novel triggered a national security investigation into both LaRouche and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) wartime hero Mitchell Livingston WerBell III that provided a cover for illegal government "active measures." To this day, the government files documenting the Get LaRouche hoax and the "active measures" campaign remain under wraps, thus burying the evidence that would free LaRouche and his six co-defendants under a false cloak of "national security." It is within the constitutional power of President George Bush to release those documents. - Roots of a Plot - In the spring of 1977, official U.S. intelligence operatives warned associates of Lyndon LaRouche that the Carter-Mondale National Security Council had launched a covert operation against the U.S. Labor Party, the political party that had nominated LaRouche as its 1976 presidential candidate. The operation was code named Operation FIST and SWEEP, according to the sources, and involved financial and psychological warfare operations. The operation was launched at the personal behest of Vice President Walter Mondale, according to the intelligence channel. While no direct evidence exists proving that Gordon Novel was deployed as part of Operation FIST and SWEEP, eyewitness accounts prove that by no later than May 1977, Novel was attempting to sell his services to government and private agencies out to "Get LaRouche." Novel had been introduced to a LaRouche associate at the home of Mitchell WerBell in Powder Springs, Ga. in March of that year. Several months later, Novel traveled to New York, during which time he spent several days meeting with staff researchers from Executive Intelligence Review, a weekly news magazine founded by LaRouche associates. During that trip, Novel, by his own account, also paid a visit to then Trilateral Commission North American chairman George Franklin. Novel offered his services to the Commission to "set up LaRouche" in return for Commission aid in quashing a pending retrial on a state arson charge in Louisiana. That Novel-Franklin meeting was the origin of the LaRouche assassination plot hoax. Three months after that meeting, a WerBell aide, a former Green Beret named Larry Cooper, was sent by WerBell to Wiesbaden, West Germany to assist in protecting Lyndon LaRouche, whose name had been discovered on a Baader-Meinhof RAF assassination target list. Two other names on that list, West German banker Juergen Ponto and industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, had already been murdered, and the threat was deemed all too real. When Cooper ran up against a stone wall of non-cooperation from U.S. Embassy and consular officials in Bonn and Frankfort, despite a letter of introduction from WerBell, the Cobb County deputy sheriff turned tail and rushed back to Georgia. Looking for an excuse for his failure and abrupt return home, Cooper was apparently a ripe mark for Novel, who was looking for a viable mouthpiece to retail his already fabricated tale about LaRouche plotting the assassination of the Carter cabinet. Cooper repeated the Novel script, claiming that LaRouche had floated the hit plot in discussions in Wiesbaden. The story hit the local press in Marietta, Ga. when the sheriff's department fired Cooper for his unauthorized trip abroad. However, federal authorities had been looking into the alleged hit plot since the original story had been floated by Novel. LaRouche associates in New York City had already been interviewed, an Atlanta federal grand jury had apparently already looked into the matter, and the authorities had already concluded that there was no substance to the charges. However, reports of the original Novel claims and the subsequent Cooper regurgitations, are believed to have been retained in a "national security repository" which to this day remains classified top secret under Reagan era Executive Order 12333, and has been used to poison the waters for LaRouche and lay the groundwork for his eventual frameup and jailing. NBC First Camera's revival of already discredited LaRouche-Carter hit plot occurred over the dead body of Mitchell WerBell. WerBell died under mysterious circumstances at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles on Dec. 16, 1983. He was in California on a national security mission, probing the involvement of porno publisher Larry Flynt and Flynt's self-described "Minister of Everything" Gordon Novel, in a blackmail scheme against President Reagan involving the Soviet KGB. The effort was part of the combined Soviet and American Liberal Establishment campaign to destroy President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). WerBell's sudden death, to be detailed in a future article in this series, gave Novel the opportunity to reunite with his old NBC employers and repeddle the LaRouche assassination plot lie. Had WerBell been alive to provide corroborating evidence that Novel was lying, NBC would never have aired the segment. How a CIA Stringer's Lie Set Up Federal Probe of LaRouche by Jeffrey Steinberg Third of a Series When Gordon Novel, concealed by a blurred screen and a voice scrambler, appeared on the NBC First Camera slander broadcast against Lyndon LaRouche on March 4, 1984 to deliver his wild tale of assassination plots, it was the second time in his career that he participated in a government dirty tricks operation in collusion with the national news division of NBC TV. Back in June 1967, a younger Gordon Novel, then working for ex-FBI agent and Kennedy Justice Department grand inquisitor Walter Sheridan, played a starring role in an NBC White Paper devoted to smearing New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and destroying Garrison's efforts to unravel the conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Novel's involvement in the "Get Garrison" operation did not come as a surprise to many people in New Orleans. By the time he got past junior high school, the New Orleans-born Gordon Duane Novel (born Feb. 7, 1938) had already amassed a juvenile rap sheet that included an attempt to sabotage a freight train, the bombing of the Metaire Theater, car theft, numerous arrests for loitering, and membership in a Nazi youth gang called the Nazi Storm Troopers. - Admired Adolf Hitler - According to an affidavit filed in one of his juvenile cases by his schoolmate Mitchell Ferraro, "They [the Storm Troopers] dressed as Nazis and wore the swastika emblem on the arm or swastika arm bands ... when they were caught Novel boasted on knowing the whereabouts of Adolf Hitler, saying he was going to join him in South America, and together they would `try to conquer the world.' By age 19, according to Louisiana State Police records, Novel was suspected of running a car-theft ring that was believed to have heisted at least ten Corvettes from the New Orleans area between 1957-58. A partner in that effort, Randy Ehlinger, was the cousin of Ed Butler, a prominent local spook who apparently later brought Novel into the underworld of New Orleans intelligence activities. By his own admission, by 1959, Novel was associated with both Clay Shaw and David Ferrie--probably through his part-ownership of the Jamaican Village, a bar on the edge of the French Quarter. District Attorney Jim Garrison would indict New Orleans World Trade Mart director Shaw for the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Ferrie would die of an apparent suicide hours before he was to appear before the Garrison grand jury to discuss his intimate personal relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald and local FBI Division Five chief Guy Bannister. Many students of the JFK assassination plot believe that David Ferrie held the key to the conspiracy to kill the President. - Novel and the Bay of Pigs - According to a variety of published sources, including Novel's own accounts, by 1961, the ex-high school Storm Trooper was working on behalf of Division Five and Office of Naval Intelligence local chief Bannister on a variety of projects relating to the pending Bay of Pigs invasion. Novel and several cronies had rented a drag strip in Houma, La. and had subleased a warehouse facility at the strip to the Schlumberger Corp. of Jon and Dominique De Menil. In August 1961, Novel, David Ferrie, Ehlinger, and Layton Martens, another figure linked to the JFK assassination, were arrested for breaking into the Schlumberger warehouse and stealing weapons that had been stockpiled there. According to Novel's account and government documents excerpted in several books dealing with the JFK assassination, Novel at the time was a contract employee for a shared FBI-CIA proprietary company based out of Miami, Fla. called Double-Chex. Double-Chex was deeply involved in the training and equipping of the Bay of Pigs invasion force. - The `Get Garrison' Operation - On Feb. 1, 1967, Gordon Novel was put on the payroll of NBC White Paper, assigned to work directly under Walter Sheridan in New Orleans. During the JFK administration, Sheridan, a former FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) employee, had been the executive assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and had headed up the infamous "Get Hoffa" unit, a pioneering effort in political frameups and "stings." For reasons that are beyond the scope of this series to report, Sheridan was inserted in the NBC job to wreck the Garrison probe and ensure the continued coverup of the Kennedy assassination. Novel was initially hired to be a Sheridan mole inside the Garrison staff. This role was short-circuited on March 16, 1967, when Novel was subpoenaed to appear before the JFK grand jury to testify about his dealings with the local Cuban exile community during the early 1960s. Under apparent instructions from Sheridan, Novel flew the coop, going first to Washington, D.C., then on to Columbus, Ohio and Chicago before winding up in the CIA's backyard, McLean, Va. Sheridan was clearly flexing muscle to keep Novel from appearing before the Garrison grand jury, because in late April, Ohio Governor Rhodes, in an unusual move, refused "on technical grounds" to honor an extradition request from Louisiana for Novel's return. - Scams and Schemes - Eventually, through the efforts of Sheridan et al., Novel wrangled out of the New Orleans legal mess, only to be indicted and convicted in Reno, Nevada in 1970 of interstate transportation of illegal eavesdropping devices. Sentenced to nine months probation for the Nevada conviction, Novel next showed up in the vicinity of the Nixon White House at the peak of the Watergate crisis, peddling his "electronic expertise" to Chuck Colson. According to an Aug. 15, 1974 Jack Anderson column, Novel tried to sell Colson on the idea that he had invented a cannon capable of erasing the Oval Office tapes, then being stored in a steel vault at a federal building in Washington. In the immediate post-Watergate period, Novel claimed that he was under consideration for the job of CIA director. His stab at the DCI post was short-circuited, however, when he was arrested again on Feb. 20, 1976 in New Orleans, this time on charges that he planned to fire bomb several buildings in the downtown area. Novel had solicited an undercover Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agent to carry out the arson attack. After an initial mistrial in the arson case, Novel apparently sought refuge in the Atlanta area, using his Bay of Pigs credentials to establish contact with Mitchell Livingston WerBell III, a veteran of the World War II Office of Strategic Services, and longtime irregular warfare consultant to the Pentagon and CIA. Shortly after Jimmy Carter's inauguration in January 1977, Novel took up residence in Marietta, Ga. By some accounts, Novel was already at this time working on cutting a deal with federal agencies by spying on WerBell on behalf of the very ATF which had busted him just months earlier. It was in this context that Novel shifted his sights to Lyndon LaRouche when, in March 1977, a LaRouche associate came to visit WerBell to discuss the need to mobilize an American patriotic movement to oppose the policies of the just inaugurated Trilateral Carter regime. The Mysterious Death of Mitch WerBell by Jeffrey Steinberg Fourth in a Series In an era in which far too many U.S. military and intelligence professionals blindly followed orders without questioning the political and strategic consequences of their deeds, Mitchell Livingston WerBell III was a diamond in the rough. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) China veteran served the CIA and Pentagon in nearly every undeclared war and covert paramilitary engagement of the post-World War II era. But, when Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976, posing a grave danger to the United States and the West, WerBell answered a different call. - A Friendship with LaRouche - Beginning in the early spring of 1977, he became publicly associated with political economist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. in an effort to establish a patriotic resistance to the Trilateral Commission-dominated regime in Washington. Throughout the Carter era, the pages of Executive Intelligence Review and New Solidarity (the predecessor to this newspaper) were frequently filled with public statements by WerBell denouncing one or another aspect of the Carter treason. When President Carter moved to withdraw American ground forces from Korea, WerBell was among a small handful of military professionals who joined with Gen. John K. Singlaub (then the commander of U.S. Armed Forces in Korea) in sounding the alarm, warning that the U.S. was abandoning the Pacific Rim to the communists. And when associates of Lyndon LaRouche published the first edition of the best-selling book "Dope, Inc.," exposing by name the key international financiers behind the worldwide drug trade, WerBell's name was featured prominently on the back cover, endorsing the authors' findings. Beyond the public collaboration, WerBell also became security adviser to LaRouche--after threats had been made to LaRouche's life by the West German the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang in August 1977. Throughout the period of the LaRouche-WerBell collaboration and friendship, which continued up until the OSS veteran's death on Dec. 16, 1983, WerBell was also frequently called upon by various national security agencies, both military and civilian, to carry out sensitive assignments. - The Flynt Probe - WerBell's last--and fatal--assignment for the government began in October 1983 with a phone call from none other than Gordon Novel. After he had tried in 1977 to set up LaRouche and WerBell for government persecution through his phony claims of assassination plots against Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others, Novel's fortunes took a nosedive. Far from escaping prosecution for a state arson charge in Louisiana, Novel wound up being prosecuted in Georgia for federal parole violations (possession of a firearm by a convicted felon), a conviction for which he blamed WerBell and LaRouche. Even at his sentencing in 1979, Novel attempted once again to win a reduction in his sentence by offering to "testify" against LaRouche. According to sources in Atlanta close to the Novel case, the ex-trolleycar Nazi was so frightened of foul play while behind bars that he sought protection from the FBI--in return for promises of unknown kinds of cooperation. Once released from prison, Novel linked up with Los Angeles-based porno publisher and offbeat radical Larry Flynt. Apart from his Hustler magazine porno empire, Flynt was also the owner of a string of left-wing pseudo-underground papers, including the Atlanta Gazette and the Los Angeles Free Press. It was on behalf of Flynt that Novel ostensibly contacted WerBell with an employment offer in the fall of 1983. Flynt was, at that time, fighting a losing battle to beat a federal contempt of court rap--a charge which related to his role in obtaining government documents for defense attorneys representing auto entrepreneur John DeLorean, who had been framed up on drug-trafficking charges through a federal "sting" operation. DeLorean was eventually acquitted by a jury. Flynt's job offer to WerBell was a phony, as WerBell himself knew at the time. The porno king had made no bones about the fact that he believed that WerBell and Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald were behind a 1978 assassination attempt that had left Flynt paralyzed from the waist down. - A Matter of National Security? - But, when WerBell checked with government officials back in Washington, he was urged to accept the Novel-Flynt job offer. It was, he was told, an urgent matter of national security. At that time, the White House was already probing Flynt's suspected role in a Soviet KGB effort to bring the Reagan administration to its knees with a sex scandal bigger than the Profumo Affair that brought down Harold MacMillan in England in 1963. Moscow's zeal to destroy Reagan was based on one event: the President's March 23, 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative speech, which Moscow read as a signal that the President had adopted LaRouche's economic and defense package in its entirety. Following the July 1983 murder of Hollywood party girl Vicky Morgan, the mistress of Reagan pal and President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) member Alfred Bloomingdale, porn king Flynt had been peddling a collection of counterfeit sex films purporting to show President Reagan, Congressman McDonald, who died in September of that year, and other Reagan political intimates engaging in lurid sexual antics with prostitutes. According to several witnesses, Flynt and Novel were desperately trying to get their hands on similar, allegedly real, dirty pictures of Vicky Morgan frolicking with Reagan intimates. Flynt held a series of secret, late-night meetings with a KGB official in Los Angeles, according to several former Flynt employees, seeking to sell his films to the Russians for a cool $5 million. Reportedly, Moscow planned to plant the films and photos through European-based press conduits, expecting that the scandal would break internationally before the White House would ever have the opportunity to prove that they were phonies. - The Last Assignment - WerBell, according to family members and close associates, was urged by "officials in Washington" to penetrate the Flynt-Novel blackmail operation and short-circuit the treasonous plot. Needless to say, the assignment was of the highest national security priority. Despite failing health, the 63-year-old warhorse accepted the risky assignment and, in early November 1983, Gordon Novel arrived at Charlie Brown Airport outside of Atlanta, Ga. to fly WerBell back to Los Angeles in Flynt's private jet. It would be the OSS hero's last patriotic mission. Within just a few days of WerBell's mysterious death in a Los Angeles hospital intsneive care unit, Gordon Novel would be sitting in front of NBC television camera once again-- resurfacing the 1977 character assassination lies against Lyndon LaRouche that had already been probed and dismissed by the FBI. THE LAROUCHE FILES by Jeffrey Steinberg Fifth in a Series Although Mitchell Livingston WerBell III's expertise in the security field was legendary, the last thing that pornographer Larry Flynt needed in the fall of 1983 was more security. Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that Flynt--and perhaps Gordon Novel--planned to have WerBell murdered and it was for that reason that WerBell was asked to join Flynt's payroll. In the January, February, and March 1984 issues of his dirty magazine Hustler, Flynt personally wrote a series of vicious attacks against President Ronald Reagan and the late Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald, who had died aboard KAL-007 when the Korean airplane was shot down by the Russians on Sept. 1, 1983. Indicative of Flynt's collusion with Moscow, his articles absolved the Soviets of any responsibility for the shooting-down of 007; instead, he blamed the incident on the White House and CIA, in a convoluted version of the events that might have made even the Kremlin's most experienced black propagandists blush. At the time of these events, Flynt's personal security was handled by his brother-in-law, a former Cleveland narcotics cop named Bill Rider. Rider in turn hired a most unusual team of bodyguards to protect the porn publisher. Three of those bodyguards--William Malony Mentzer, Alex LaMota Marti, and Robert Lowe--are currently awaiting trial in Los Angeles County on a double murder charge: the May 13, 1983 ritualistic assassination of Broadway impresario Roy Radin and the March 1984 shooting of a black Los Angeles madam named June Mincher. - `Cotton Club Killers' - The Radin case, known as the "Cotton Club Murder," involved bigtime cocaine profits laundered through Hollywood movie productions; Hollywood's once-most-powerful producer Robert Evans (who was also a jet-set intimate of Henry Kissinger); and a nationwide Satanic murder cult linked to the Manson Family and the Son of Sam killings in New York City. According to Maury Terry, author of the widely acclaimed non-fiction book "The Ultimate Evil," one of the accused Cotton Club killers, full-time Flynt bodyguard William Mentzer, was implicated by David Berkowitz (the self-confessed Son of Sam cult member) in at least one of the Son of Sam killings that terrorized New York City in 1977--as well as in the 1974 ritualistic murder of Arlis Perry at the chapel of Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Mentzer, a practicing occultist whom investigators believe to have been part-owner of a nationwide private occult club called Magick Island, was part of the Manson circle in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. At least one eyewitness has linked him to Manson Family member Shorty Shea and to coffee heiress Abigail Folger, who died at the Tate-Polanski mansion in the first of the notorious "Helter Skelter" Manson mass-murders in August 1969. Jailed killer David Berkowitz says he knew Mentzer, who has also been linked to the Genovese organized-crime family, as "Manson II." Author Terry also presents evidence linking Mentzer to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a transplanted 1960s British Satanic cult which Terry suspects was intimately involved with the Son of Sam killings. - Cocaine & Movies - In the spring of 1983, Mentzer, who is reputed to be bisexual, was deeply involved with an alleged bigtime cocaine dealer named Elaine Jacobs Greenberger, the wife of Jack Greenberger, one of the Medellin Cocaine Cartel's major southern Florida distributors (Mentzer is suspected of having murdered Jack Greenberger several years ago). Elaine Jacobs (aka Laynie Greenberger) was involved with former Paramount Pictures chief producer Robert Evans and the Long Island-based millionaire and suspected Satanist Roy Radin in attempting to finance a movie based on the 1920s Harlem nightclub, the Cotton Club. According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney, the deal went sour when Radin tried to ice Jacobs out of the package. In retaliation, Jacobs--and perhaps Evans as well--ordered Mentzer and his associates to kidnap and execute Radin. The killing occurred in a remote canyon in north Los Angeles County on the night of Friday, May 13, 1983. Radin, according to one version of the murder, was shot 13 times in the back of the head. When author Maury Terry and ex-Los Angeles FBI Special Agent Ted Gunderson searched the murder site days after county sheriffs had discovered Radin's body, they found a copy of the New Testament near the spot where Radin had been shot; it was open to a passage that referred to violent revenge. Several years before his death, Radin had been implicated in the brutal rape of a New York model, Melanie Haller, at a wild weekend drug and sex bash at his Long Island beachfront estate. According to Berkowitz, members of the Westchester County, N.Y. Son of Sam cult had serviced some of Radin's parties with cocaine. The "Cotton Club case" would remained unsolved for over five years. Mentzer and crew continued to work as bodyguards at Larry Flynt's mansion through the end of 1983. According to Los Angeles County records, for a number of months during this period, Bill Mentzer shared a house with Flynt security chief Bill Rider. - Three Murders? - For reasons still not 100% clear, in the spring of 1988, Bill Rider, now on the outs with his former brother-in-law Flynt, made a deal with the Los Angeles County Sheriff that would crack the Cotton Club case, the June Mincher murder--and, ironically, the death of Mitch WerBell. Rider was placed in the County's witness protection program, at a tax-free salary of $3,000 a month, and he turned on his former employees Mentzer, LaMota Marti, and Lowe. Donning a concealed wire, Rider held a series of reunions with Mentzer and the others in Virginia and back on the West Coast, and handed the sheriffs the necessary evidence to indict the three Flynt bodyguards and Elaine Jacobs for the Radin murder. The plot thickened more in June of 1989, when another ex-Flynt security consultant, A. Michael Pascal, testified before an evidentiary hearing that Bill Rider had boasted to him that he and Larry Flynt had murdered Mitch WerBell by slipping him a lethal dose of poison at a party at the Flynt mansion. Pascal's testimony proved insufficient to discredit Rider, the government's chief witness in the Cotton Club and Mincher murder cases. The court upheld the grand jury indictment in those cases and ordered a trial for sometime early this year. - Revenge Against WerBell? - However, the claim that Rider and Flynt had murdered WerBell had a ring of truth--especially in light of WerBell's national security assignment to probe Flynt and Gordon Novel's KGB escapades, and in light of the pair's apparently separate but overlapping revenge motives for killing the OSS war hero. A subsequent probe by this publication, which involved interviews with a dozen individuals who were in and around the Flynt entourage at the time that WerBell died, circumstantially implicates Flynt, Novel, Rider, Mentzer, and LaMota Marti in the suspicious death of Mitch WerBell. The LaRouche Files The `Get LaRouche' Task Force Is Hatched: Novel, NBC, & a Lot of Lies by Jeffrey Steinberg Sixth in a Series Mitchell Livingston WerBell III was buried with hero's honors at a church service in his home town of Marietta, Ga. just before Christmas 1983. The funeral was attended by scores of military and government officials who had served with WerBell in the wartime OSS and in the numerous undeclared covert wars of the Cold War era. Among the people who attended WerBell's wake and funeral was Gordon Novel--one of the people WerBell had gone out to California to investigate for the suspected collusion between Hustler porn publisher Larry Flynt and the KGB, against President Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative. While lack of a thorough autopsy at the time of WerBell's death makes it impossible to say with absolute certainty that the OSS veteran was murdered (as witness Michael Pascal testified under oath that he had been), other witnesses have confirmed to this newspaper that Gordon Novel was indeed at the center of a plot to circulate phony tapes supposedly showing President Reagan in compromising activities, and thereby damage the presidency. It was that plot, in fact, that Mitch WerBell went to the West Coast to investigate on behalf of officials in Washington. - The Tapes - One eyewitness to an attempted purchase of the much-sought Vicky Morgan tapes reported ironically that Larry Flynt had refused to meet with a Time magazine reporter whom Flynt thought might have seen copies of the Morgan tapes because, in the witness's words, "Flynt was paranoid about the CIA and believed that Time was heavily penetrated by the Agency.... When I went to meet with Flynt at his mansion to see the so-called Reagan tapes that he was peddling, I nearly fell off my seat when Flynt walked into his study arm in arm with Gordon f-!-ing Novel. Imagine being paranoid about the CIA and then hiring Novel to be your `Minister of Everything.' The eyewitness reported that the grainy films, which Flynt claimed were surveillance camera shots of President Reagan with a young woman, were good-quality forgeries, using an actor who could credibly pass for Ronald Reagan vintage 1975. But, he concluded, they were not the real thing. Novel, on behalf of Flynt, offered the witness $1 million if he could come up with photos or films of Vicky Morgan sexually engaged with one of the President's men. A man who was an official of the National Security Council at the time, has confirmed that the White House was indeed aware of the Flynt blackmail efforts and considered them to be a real--albeit off the wall--effort by the porn publisher to bring down the Reagan presidency. - Novel on NBC - Within weeks, if not days, of the WerBell funeral, Gordon Novel, still working for porn king Flynt, shifted targets and stepped before the NBC TV cameras to retread his 1977 lies against Lyndon LaRouche. Novel's reunion with NBC would not have been possible were WerBell still alive. Even the "National Bolshevik Corporation," with its backing from a grouping within the Reagan administration itself that opposed Reagan's SDI and especially the White House relationship with Lyndon LaRouche, could not have gone forward with the Novel lies, had WerBell still been alive to contest Novel's slanders. The fact is that by the autumn of 1983, when NBC began preparation of the slander broadcast against Lyndon LaRouche, a full-scale "Get LaRouche Task Force" had been established. Its modus operandi was classic covert operations, what is referred to in official intelligence parlance as "active measures." Formally based out of a secret unit in the National Security Council, the Get LaRouche Task Force drew heavily on nominally private agencies, including such media outlets as NBC, New Republic, Readers Digest, and the Washington Post, to churn out a series of apparently independently generated "news" stories, all painting an identical profile of Lyndon LaRouche as a dangerous man, engaged in illegal activities, including plotting terrorism against prominent public officials on behalf of hostile foreign regimes. - Active Measures - Gordon Novel's NBC script was drafted somewhere in the "active measures" department of the Get LaRouche Task Force. The fact that Novel first surfaced with the tale of LaRouche assassination plots in the spring of 1977, establishes that the Get LaRouche effort was already underway at that time. At least one of the Reagan White House staffers who was apparently involved in behind-the-scenes collusion with NBC producer Pat Lynch in the preparation of the NBC slander, had a long record of anti-LaRouche efforts. By no later than Jan. 16, 1976, Roy Godson, a Reagan-era consultant to the National Security Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), accompanied by AFL-CIO official Tom Kahn, had "voluntarily" gone to the FBI with lurid tales about Lyndon LaRouche and the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). Godson and Kahn were already involved in running covert surveillance and penetration operations against LaRouche at this time, according to a four-page FBI Memorandum dated Jan. 20, 1976, which this news service obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. - Godson, Kahn, & the FBI - The ostensible reason for the Godson-Kahn visit to FBI headquarters to discuss the NCLC was their concern that the LaRouche group was engaged in violence targeted against the labor movement. According to the FBI document, "[redacted] advised that labor officials in the Harrisburg-York, Pennsylvania area have been subjected to harassment and intimidation by NCLC members. He could not recall a specific date, however, believes that the NCLC was involved in shooting at the windows of the home of a labor leader in York, Pennsylvania." Godson or Kahn then told the FBI that they had been running a network of informants into the NCLC headquarters in New York: "Both [redacted] and [redacted] advised that [redacted] and [redacted] both of New York were individuals who had access to the NCLC office and were acquainted with NCLC members, including Lyndon LaRouche, the National Chairman of NCLC [redacted remainder of paragraph]. "He advised that [redacted], for some time, furnished him with confidential information regarding NCLC, however, recently `went off the deep end,' however, [redacted] avoided from elaborating on this. When [redacted] was asked if he meant [redacted] was now an NCLC member, his indirect answer indicated no." The four-page FBI memo went on to catalogue Godson and Kahn's claims of LaRouche and NCLC financing from the government of Iraq and from the world communist movement: "[redacted] also offered the opinion that the Soviet Union, directly or indirectly, was financing the operations of NCLC, however, had no way of corroborating such a statement." In closing, Godson and Kahn offered to provide the FBI with memoranda from their ongoing infiltration and surveillance efforts: "[redacted] advised that [redacted] furnished him with memoranda that he would make available at a later date." - Who Is `Redacted'? - Who were the Godson-Kahn snitches? One of the two was certainly a New York City League for Industrial Democracy (LID) hanger-on named Ted Kershensweig (aka Ted Roberts), who would occasionally visit the NCLC offices on West 29th Street in Manhattan to pass on gossip about the efforts of the AFL-CIO and LID to shut down the NCLC's organizing within the labor movement. Among the tidbits that Roberts reported were embarrassing homosexual antics by Tom Kahn, who was then the assistant to AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Lane Kirkland. Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that the second so-called informant was Dennis King, who was then working for the Anti-Defamation League's Rabbi Maurice Davis. `Get LaRouche' Task Force: Henry Kissinger Weighs In THE LAROUCHE FILES by Jeffrey Steinberg Seventh in a Series By no later than the visit by Roy Godson and Tom Kahn to FBI headquarters in January 1976, private circles linked to the American branch of the international Social Democracy were intent on framing up Lyndon LaRouche via a railroad prosecution. The early efforts were principally housed in such Social Democratic agencies as the League for Industrial Democracy, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the United Auto Workers and AFL-CIO bureaucracies, and obscure front groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Group Research and Homefront. Among the other early "Get LaRouche" advocates was Tufts University Fletcher School of Diplomacy professor Uri Ra'anan, a close collaborator of Roy Godson who was at that time also sponsoring the careers of Israeli-Soviet spy Jonathan Jay Pollard and ADL Fact Finding Division operative Mira Boland. Shortly after the January 1976 Godson-Kahn FBI visit, Ra'anan filed his own complaint that the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), which LaRouche had founded, had threatened a terrorist invasion of a television studio in Boston where Ra'anan was being interviewed. Despite evidence of a campaign to impose a nationwide FBI crackdown on the NCLC through scores of phony complaints and allegations manufactured by ADL, LID, and related groups, only a few scraps of paper have been released by the FBI cataloguing these anti-LaRouche efforts. Were President Bush or FBI Director William Sessions to order full declassification of those early "Get LaRouche" files, it would become clear that Cointelpro, the FBI's illegal domestic covert program of the 1960s and '70s, never ended; it merely crawled under a blanket labeled "national security." - Penetrating Reagan's Circle - By 1982, several of the early "Get LaRouche" warriors had managed to land themselves positions on the fringe of the Reagan administration: Roy Godson, now passing himself off as an "expert" on Soviet disinformation techniques as the director of a Georgetown University-based study group bearing the highfallutin name Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, landed a string of consulting contracts with the National Security Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Ironically, Godson and Israeli-Soviet spy recruiter Uri Ra'anan at one point apparently landed a joint contract to analyze U.S. intelligence's handling of postwar Soviet defectors. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house! Carl Gershman, a former researcher for the ADL and president of the moribund League for Industrial Democracy, wound up as the chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the principal "legit" funding conduit for what came to be known during the course of the Iran/Contra investigation as "The Enterprise." Gershman took anti-LaRouche scribbler Dennis King under his wing during this period, making him the editor of New America, the occasional newspaper of the Social Democrats USA, and apparently helping him get funding for a book-length slander against LaRouche from such Project Democracy conduits as the Smith Richardson Foundation and LID. - Kissinger's Special Role - By Aug. 1, 1982, one of LaRouche's oldest enemies, Henry A. Kissinger, had jumped into the "Get LaRouche" frenzy building up within the Reagan-Bush White House staff. According to a handful of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act in February 1985, Kissinger buttonholed FBI Director William Webster in July 1982, during the elites' annual romp among the redwoods at Bohemian Grove, Calif. to demand that the FBI nail LaRouche. According to the few documents released, Kissinger's initial plea to destroy LaRouche fell on deaf ears at the Justice Department and FBI, with the sole exceptions of Webster and Deputy FBI Director Oliver "Buck" Revell (himself a player in The Enterprise). Kissinger's claims that LaRouche and associates were "harassing" him, did not, in the judgment of senior DOJ attorneys, constitute grounds for the government to step in. Henry was politely told to keep his private vendettas to himself and leave the government out of it. In November 1982, Kissinger took a second stab at drawing the federal government into his private war. This time, Kissinger's attorneys clearly had been clued in on how to frame the complaint in such a way as to trigger extraordinary police-state provisions in an obscure Presidential Executive Order signed by Ronald Reagan on Dec. 4, 1981. Executive Order 12333 gave the FBI and other federal agencies broad latitude for conducting "neutralization" efforts against groups and individuals suspected of involvement in international terrorism, international drug trafficking, or espionage. From Kissinger's letter to FBI chieftain Webster, written Nov. 25, 1982: "This conduct [on the part of LaRouche] raises two additional problems. The first is of an intelligence nature. We may be witnessing here not normal radical political acts, but a systematic disinformation campaign supported by some foreign intelligence service. How else is one to explain the simultaneous appearance in widely different parts of the world of preposterous accusations amounting to American collusion in assassinations clearly the work of far left organizations, such as the Red Brigades, whose targets have in fact included Americans? Who finances this network of organizations, newsletters and newspapers? "Second, the personal harassment is clearly increasing both in the United States and overseas. My concern is heightened by the reported history of violence by the LaRouche people against their perceived enemies and opponents. "I therefore request an investigation to ascertain whether the foregoing activities violate federal law. I further request that steps be taken to assure the safety of my family and myself. "I would hope these measures will not be delayed until a significantly more harmful and damaging event occurs." - Enter PFIAB - Kissinger next moved to bolster his own complaints by orchestrating inquiries by several of his closest cronies, who happened to be members of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In another of the handful of documents from the voluminous "Get LaRouche" file which were revealed under FOIA, Webster wrote to his deputy Oliver "Buck" Revell on Jan. 12, 1983: "At the PFIAB meeting today, David Abshire raised the activities of the U.S. Labor Party and Lyndon LaRouche. He noted that he and a number of other Americans in public life had been the subject of repeated harassment by LaRouche and wondered whether the FBI had a basis for investigating these activities under the guidelines or otherwise. A number of the members present, including Edward Bennett Williams, raised the question of the sources of funding for these U.S. Labor Party activities. In view of the large amounts obviously being expended worldwide, the question was raised whether the U.S. Labor Party might be funded by hostile intelligence agencies." Five days later, an official criminal investigation was opened by the FBI. For years, through a string of federal and state frame-up trials and FOIA suits, the federal government persistently denied that there had ever been a "Get LaRouche" program instituted under EO 12333. Finally, in late 1989, under discovery orders from a federal judge, the FBI acknowledged that there were an undisclosed number of documents exempted from release under EO 12333. Even then, senior Bureau officials attempted to continue the Big Lie that there was no secret neutralization campaign, claiming instead that the 12333 file was merely a "national security repository." THE LAROUCHE FILES Liberal Establishment Sets Out To Kill SDI--And One of Its Principal Authors by Jeffrey Steinberg Eighth in a Series {In part 7 of this series, I traced Henry Kissinger's debut as a fulltime member of the `Get LaRouche Task Force,' and examined how Kissinger, then-FBI Director William Webster, and Kissinger's buddies on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, expanded the anti-LaRouche campaign begun years earlier by such as Roy Godson, Tom Kahn, and Carl Gershman.} Ronald Reagan will probably go down in history as the President who had the courage and foresight to champion the Strategic Defense Initiative, and thus end the era of thermonuclear blackmail. Yet, from the moment that President Reagan announced the SDI, in a nationwide television broadcast on March 23, 1983, he came under savage attack. Naturally, that attack came in part from the Soviet Union. But the main force of the onslaught came from the Liberal Establishment here in the United States, from people like McGeorge Bundy and the circles around Henry A. Kissinger. A particularly vicious fifth column attack was launched by "moles" inside the Reagan administration, particularly within the White House staff. According to one former senior White House official, the section of the President's March 23 address that announced the Strategic Defense Initiative had been written by National Security Adviser Judge William Clark. As with all major presidential speeches during the Reagan era, a group of five senior White House officials reviewed and rewrote the draft speech. According to several accounts, James Baker III, then the White House Chief of Staff, removed the SDI paragraphs from the speech just 24 hours before it was to be delivered. In a break of White House protocol that does him great credit, Judge Clark went directly to the President, whom Clark knew to be enthusiastic about the SDI, and got him to reinsert the paragraphs. By the time Baker and other White House opponents of the SDI got word that the SDI section had been reinserted in the final speech, it was too late to prevent Reagan from delivering it on national TV. - The LaRouche Factor - Within moments of the President's March 23 address, many people around the world recognized that Reagan had adopted in large measure the proposal that had been presented for years by Lyndon LaRouche. Nowhere was that fact understood more clearly than among the Bundy-Kissinger circles, the Democratic National Committee, and the "moles" in the White House, all of whom had for years been assuring such Soviet officials as U.S.-Canada Institute director Georgii Arbatov that President Reagan was "under control" and would never initiate the SDI. Between early 1982 and the President's address in March 1983, Lyndon LaRouche had been involved in a sensitive national security assignment on behalf of the Reagan National Security Council, then headed by Judge Clark. According to testimony given in federal and state courts in Virginia and New York in 1988 and 1989, elements of that assignment remain classified to this day. In effect, LaRouche carried out a back-channel diplomatic dialogue with several senior Soviet diplomats, posted at the Russian embassy in Washington and at the United Nations mission in New York. The purpose of these discussions was to gauge Moscow's receptivity to the SDI plan, and to ensure that the initiative was properly presented to the Russians, so as to avoid any misunderstanding that might lead to disastrous strategic conflict. Although the Soviets had real reasons, at the time, for rejecting Reagan's offer of joint research and deployment of an SDI defensive shield against nuclear warheads, it cannot be ruled out that Moscow's cold reaction to the plan was based on promises made to the Soviets, by powerful liberal forces in the U.S., that the American Liberal Establishment would throttle the SDI in the cradle. One of the concrete demonstrations of this Liberal Establishment commitment to sink the SDI, was the crushing of LaRouche and his political movement, and the destruction of all the relationships with American military and intelligence institutions which LaRouche had built up before and during the Reagan presidency. By the time that President Reagan was announcing the SDI as U.S. policy, the seed crystal of the "Get LaRouche Task Force" had already been planted, by an unrelenting seven-month-long effort by Henry Kissinger, FBI Director William Webster, and Kissinger's cronies on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board: David Abshire, Edward Bennett Williams, and Leo Cherne. - PFIAB Under Reagan - According to eyewitness accounts, the PFIAB discussion of Jan. 12, 1983, which led to the opening of an FBI criminal probe of LaRouche on Jan. 17, took place, so to speak, "in the closet." Several members of PFIAB were not unfriendly to LaRouche and some of his policies, especially his advocacy of a crash strategic defense program. Thus, a rump discussion was convened outside the formal PFIAB session to take up the "LaRouche Question" with William Webster. Present were David Abshire, the chairman of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies; the late Washington fixer and longtime CIA associate Edward Bennett Williams; and Leo Cherne. An old friend of William Casey (who was at that time CIA Director), Cherne was described by one former colleague as a bridge between the international Social Democracy and Wall Street. Cherne was the resident "economist" at PFIAB. He was already involved in anti-LaRouche efforts centered around LaRouche's August 1982 "Operation Juarez" proposal for restructuring the international monetary system as a solution to the debt crisis. After Mexico's near-default, in 1982, on billions of dollars of debt to the major U.S. commercial banks, Cherne had been put in charge of a PFIAB task force to develop "creative payment plans" for recalcitrant debtors--putting the muscle of the U.S. government and intelligence establishment behind the commercial banks' debt collection efforts. For Cherne and his friend Henry Kissinger, LaRouche's "Operation Juarez" proposal, submitted to Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo after the two men met in Mexico City in July 1982, had defined the American political economist as Wall Street's "public enemy number one." As the result of painstaking investigation by this news service, the precise location within the Reagan-Bush White House of the Get LaRouche Task Force can be identified. The Get LaRouche effort, as a well as a number of other sleazy covert operations that would be exposed, in part, during the Iran/Contra probes, was housed in an innocuous-sounding White House staff program called Public Diplomacy. The Public Diplomacy project had been established during Judge Clark's tenure as National Security Adviser, as part of an effort to draw upon the private sector, particularly the media, to enhance the Reagan administration's image by presenting the administration's policy views in a straightforward fashion, minus the liberal media's distortions. This was the idea "in theory," as spelled out in a series of White House memos passed between Judge Clark and NSC staffer Walter Raymond during the fall and winter of 1982. Apparently unbeknownst to Judge Clarke, he had a "Donald Segretti" in his operation, who would use the Public Diplomacy cover to run a nasty covert operations shop targeted against domestic "enemies"--real and imagined--of the Reagan administration. This fellow was Walter Raymond. It would be from Walter Raymond's Public Diplomacy office at the NSC that many of the "neutralization" efforts against LaRouche would be run--in tandem with William Webster and Oliver Revell's FBI. Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that Raymond solicited the aid of a Wall Street investment banker and self-styled literary spook named John Train to organize a press smear campaign against LaRouche. The purpose of the exercise: to break all LaRouche ties to the Reagan administration, and to the military and intelligence institutions that had sided with LaRouche in his call for a crash SDI program. In April 1983, when Reagan's SDI policy was only a few weeks old, John Train assembled a score of journalists, spooks, and LaRouche watchers for a planning session at his Upper East Side townhouse in Manhattan. The meeting, according to several eyewitness accounts, mapped out a total "black propaganda" assault against LaRouche--who was at that time running for President. Gov't Ran Black Propaganda Onslaught Against LaRouche Campaign by Jeffrey Steinberg Ninth in a Series According to documents released as part of the congressional Irangate probe, Vice President George Bush was designated as the "top spook" in the Reagan administration through a little known interagency unit called the Special Situations Group (SSG). SSG in turn coordinated Reagan administration covert policy on Central America through a working group called the Crisis Pre-Planning Group (CPPG). In the summer of 1982, Vice President Bush brought a senior CIA operations officer, Donald Gregg, into his office as special adviser on national security and intelligence matters. After a long career at CIA, which included a lengthy tour of Vietnam, Gregg, a longtime intimate of Theodore G. Shackley, onetime chief of CIA operations, had been brought into the National Security Council under Jimmy Carter as the principal liaison between the White House and the official intelligence agencies. - The CIA's Walter Raymond - When Gregg moved up to the Vice President's suite in 1982, he handpicked a successor at the NSC--another career CIA man named Walter Raymond. According to one former CIA colleague, Raymond had started out in the intelligence division of the Agency, but had quickly reached a career dead-end as the result of a mediocre performance. Things changed for Raymond when he managed to transfer in the late 1950s to the Operations Directorate, where he became involved in a clandestine unit then headed by Cord Meyer which was responsible for case-officering overseas front groups that were either created by or heavily financed and influenced by the CIA. During a lengthy posting in London, according to an ex-senior Agency official, Raymond in all likelihood came in contact with both Joseph Godson and John Train. At the time of Raymond's European adventures, Godson, the father of Roy Godson, was the head of a front group called the Labor Committee for Trans-Atlantic Understanding, a joint effort of the CIA and the International Affairs Department of the AFL-CIO, which maintained channels to European labor and socialist circles. Wall Street literati John Train was a founding editor of Paris Review, a flagship publication of the Agency's Cold War "cultural freedom" efforts. Both projects involved the use of European Marxists-turned-social democrats against communist propaganda and recruiting efforts on the continent and in England. By the time Raymond showed up at the White House in the summer of 1982, he fancied himself as a specialist in black propaganda operations, utilizing journalists and news outlets whose links to the government were secret. Thus, it is not surprising that the paper trail leading from Raymond's desk up to his boss, then-National Security Adviser William Clark, focused on a plan to utilize private media and tax exempt foundations to propagandize for the Reagan administration's efforts to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Raymond knew that both Judge Clark and President Reagan felt strongly about the Contra support effort. Focusing his proposal for a White House black propaganda program on Contra support was a path of least resistance for obtaining permission to create a covert unit that would have its own secret agenda. According to a smattering of documents released by the congressional Irangate probe and a number of eyewitness accounts, one top agenda item would be a vicious black propaganda program directed against the 1984 presidential campaign of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Were the details of that campaign to become the subject of a criminal probe, Walter Raymond would be up the river for a long time. So far, not a single shred of paper cataloguing Raymond's role in the Get LaRouche operations has been made public through either Freedom of Information Act releases or criminal discovery in the dozen federal and state prosecutions of Lyndon LaRouche and associates. - Private Sector Diplomacy - Despite this coverup, investigators for this news service have established a chronology based on eyewitness accounts and the review of the file of Reagan era White House communique@aas made public by Congress. At the beginning of 1983, simultaneous to the opening of the formal FBI probe into LaRouche triggered by Henry Kissinger and his cronies on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), Raymond was placed in charge of a Public Diplomacy effort, aimed at mustering public support for the Reagan administration's pro-Contra stance. As part of that effort, a Private Sector Steering Committee was established to help raise funds and generate favorable news coverage of the Contras. The term "private sector" was a misnomer. Both of the co-chairs, Leo Cherne and Roy Godson, were working for the government at the time. Cherne was the vice chairman of PFIAB. Godson was a paid consultant to both the NSC and to PFIAB. Both men, as previously documented, were already major players in the Kissinger-inspired "Get LaRouche" Task Force. Godson and Cherne drew in a number of private tax-exempt foundations to aid in the Public Diplomacy effort. Richard Mellon-Scaife of the Pittsburgh Mellon family, the scion of several neo-conservative family foundations already funding a string of intelligence community-sponsored programs (including Godson's own Consortium for the Study of Intelligence), became a major player in the effort. For years, Roy Godson had been operating out of Pittsburgh as an employee of the local World Affairs Council, which was a hip pocket operation of the Mellon-Scaifes. Only through high-level intervention did the Godson/Mellon-Scaife team escape the fate of Carl "Spitz" Channell and other Irangate figures who violated federal tax laws. - The Get LaRouche Session - Other so-called private sector tax-exempt funds drawn into the Raymond-Cherne-Godson scheme included the Smith Richardson Foundation of North Carolina and the Olin Foundation. In April 1983, just a month after the private sector steering committee had gone operational, John Train convened the "Get LaRouche" session at his Upper East Side Manhattan brownstone office. In addition to Train himself, participants included Dennis King, a longtime Godson snitch whose anti-LaRouche efforts can be documented back to 1976; Michael Hudson, a conman who would emerge as a key prosecution witness in several "Get LaRouche" prosecutions; Sol Sanders, a Business Week editor and social democratic intimate of Cherne and Godson; Patricia Lynch, a producer for NBC's now-defunct First Camera news magazine, who would launch the Get LaRouche black propaganda assault with a March 1984 smear piece on the presidential candidate. According to one eyewitness account, there were "two government people" present at the Train event. Their names are not known. All told, over twenty people were assembled by Train. From among the participants in the April 1983 planning session would come a string of vile slanders, aimed not merely at besmirching LaRouche's name among the electorate choosing a 1984 Democratic Party presidential candidate. The slanders would be tailored to give maximum opportunity for the zealous prosecutors at the FBI and Department of Justice who had been tasked in January 1983 to "Get LaRouche." The propaganda fuel that would drive the Get LaRouche railroad was fully in place, housed in the very same Old Executive Office Building which Lyndon LaRouche had frequently visited in helping the Reagan administration to launch the historic Strategic Defense Initiative. The FBI's `October Offensive': The 1984 Onslaught Against LaRouche THE LAROUCHE FILES by Jeffrey Steinberg Tenth in a Series {The last article in the series reviewed the 1982-83 planning process, including the pivotal 1983 meeting at John Train's New York townhouse, in which the Get LaRouche Task Force planned its propaganda campaign to blacken LaRouche's name, and that of his political movement--at just the same time that the FBI and Justice Department were preparing the political prosecutions with which they hoped to finish off the LaRouche movement.} In June 1984, three months after NBC-TV's First Camera slander had launched Project Democracy's "Public Diplomacy" campaign to sink Lyndon LaRouche and the political movement he founded, a U.S. intelligence community source provided a memorandum to associates of the Democratic presidential candidate warning that the FBI and other federal agencies planned an "October Offensive" aimed at framing LaRouche and others on phony criminal charges. Right on cue, in late October 1984, days before the presidential election, the Boston FBI office contacted the New Jersey bank which was handling the Independent Democrats for LaRouche (IDL) campaign account and convinced the bank to freeze all the campaign's funds. As a result of the extraordinary action, a scheduled half-hour nationwide TV campaign address by LaRouche could not be paid for and was blocked from the air. Days later, the New York bank accounts of a publishing company run by associates of LaRouche were also frozen. An aspect of the Boston FBI action was a series of Boston-area NBC-TV news spots that purported to detail illegal campaign fundraising practices by IDL fundraisers in Boston. NBC's "special relationship" with the FBI was only one aspect of the media-government collusion in what that government-generated memo had warned would be the "October Offensive." - New Republic Lets Fly - In the midst of the Boston FBI-NBC intervention to block LaRouche's election eve broadcast, and launch what would be a grand jury probe that lasted nearly two years, New Republic magazine issued a press release to accompany a pre-publication copy of the cover story of its Nov. 19, 1984 edition, titled "The LaRouche Connection." Nominally written by Dennis King and Ronald Radosh, the New Republic story provided a road map to Lyndon LaRouche's contacts with senior officials of the Reagan administration, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon. New Republic's cover advertised the essential point of the 11,000-word piece: "Since 1981 the leaders of a lunatic movement have conferred repeatedly with top administration officials. Their aims: to win respectability and to influence Reagan's Star Wars plan. They succeeded." Even before the New Republic pre-publication copies were sent out, associates of LaRouche had received calls from several of the senior administration officials, reporting that they had been called by King and Radosh and been asked questions of a highly sensitive nature. Some of those questions reflected information that was not known even to LaRouche and his colleagues, but only to government officials with access to secret intelligence. LaRouche associates later learned that a number of people had been contacted who were never in direct contact with LaRouche representatives, but had been involved on the government end of sensitive joint efforts. In short, the King-Radosh piece was based in large part on information that had been provided by officials of the Reagan administration who were rabid opponents of the LaRouche connection. Several former officials have identified Roy Godson, Walter Raymond, Michael Ledeen, and Kenneth DeGraffenreid, all at the time working for the National Security Council, as the likely sources. - Iran-Contra Angle - The New Republic piece coincided with the launching of the Project Democracy covert aid program to the Nicaraguan Contras. Right around that time, Ronald Radosh, a onetime critic of the Reagan administration, was shuttled into Central America courtesy of a Public Diplomacy conduit: PRODEMCA (Project Democracy--Central America). Radosh came back a true believer in the administration's Contra policy. His co-author, Dennis King, was already swilling at the public trough. By his own accounts, King's Get LaRouche efforts were underwritten by the Smith Richardson Foundation, the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), and the Stern Fund. By the time the New Republic piece appeared, LID's executive director, Arch Puddington, whom King acknowledges in his 1989 booklength expansion of the New Republic article, had gone to work for the State Department's U.S. Information Agency, the chief propaganda arm of the Iran-Contra program. Smith Richardson was a thin cover for the social democratic wing of the U.S. intelligence community. By the end of the Reagan era, the board of the Foundation included Reagan's United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick; Reagan's first National Security Adviser, Richard Allen; and Herbert Rowen, head of the Reagan CIA's National Intelligence Estimates Board. The purpose of the New Republic piece was to up the pressure on an already-weakened Reagan administration to sever its LaRouche ties. Ironically, the impetus for the onslaught was coming from within the administration itself--from the collection of "moles" who were out to turn the Reagan presidency (and especially the Reagan SDI policy) on its head. - Propaganda Deluge - In rapid succession, after the New Republic propaganda assault, a series of similar major media blasts were fired off, now spiced with information illegally leaked from the ongoing federal grand jury room in Boston, where U.S. Attorney William Weld was running a judicial witchhunt aimed at putting LaRouche "on trial--not on television" by the 1988 elections. In January 1985, the Washington Post devoted 12,000 words to three front-page blasts at LaRouche. The author, John Mintz, would be cited by Dennis King in his 1989 book as one of his close collaborators in the Get LaRouche effort. Dennis King and Pat Lynch, producer of the NBC First Camera slander, co-authored an article on the columns page of the Wall Street Journal the following year. The article, like Mintz's continuing coverage in the Washington Post, focused on information coming directly from the Boston U.S. Attorney's office and the grand jury room. Eugene Methvyn, a senior editor of Reader's Digest, wrote a pulp version of the earlier King material in late 1985. Methvyn returned to an original theme of the Get LaRouche crowd: fantastic allegations of secret underground terrorist cells. While the propaganda offensive of 1984-85 was aimed at crippling the electoral impact of the LaRouche movement and building a climate for the FBI's full-speed-ahead frame-up effort, the genies at the Get LaRouche task force had not given up on the idea of hanging the "terrorist" albatross around LaRouche's neck--no matter how absurd such an effort might be. Even as the propaganda mills were cranking out lies and distortions, other clandestine efforts were also underway, aimed at "stinging" LaRouche and his associates in a string of ludicrous violent plots. The LaRouche Files Did LaRouche Libel Trial Judge Get `Courtesy Briefing' from Intelligence Agencies? by Jeffrey Steinberg Eleventh in a Series In October 1984, on the eve of the LaRouche libel trial against NBC and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith stemming from the March 4, 1984 First Camera broadcast slandering Lyndon LaRouche, the presiding judge in that case, Federal District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia James Cacheris, was, according to several accounts at the time, provided with ex-parte material intended to strongly prejudice him against the plaintiff. While no direct evidence ever surfaced confirming those source reports of attempted judge-tampering, circumstantial evidence does suggest that such an effort took place, and that the focus of the effort was a new, revived version of the Gordon Novel phony allegations of Lyndon LaRouche plotting terrorist actions against his "political enemies." Since the hard core of the NBC libel was the Novel charge that LaRouche and the late Mitchell Livingston WerBell III had plotted the assassinations of half the Carter cabinet and the secretary general of NATO, it was natural that the effort to save NBC and the ADL from an otherwise near-certain guilty verdict on libel would center around a new scare story painting LaRouche in the identical light as the earlier Novel fabrications--as a would-be assassin and threat to national security who had to be thwarted even at the expense of denying him a just hearing in court. As preposterous as the charges of assassination plotting were, a team of longtime, government-paid con men were brought in on a covert effort at exactly that point in time to cast then-presidential candidate LaRouche in precisely that light. The government-linked scheme to once again pad the FBI files with phony allegations against LaRouche and his political movement began with a real act of violence thousands of miles away from the Alexandria, Va. courthouse where the NBC trial was about to begin. In that real incident, a close associate of LaRouche was the target of the violence. - A Drug-related Kidnapping - On July 20, 1984, a close associate of Lyndon LaRouche and leading anti-drug activist in Bogota, Colombia named Patricia Londono was kidnapped by affiliates of a gnostic church linked to the Colombian cocaine cartel. Patricia and her husband Max Londono had been key figures in the founding of a Colombian anti-drug coalition that had been waging a public campaign for a serious hemispheric anti-drug effort. Just weeks before his assassination at the hands of the Medellin Cartel, Colombia's heroic Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla had written a personal letter to the Colombian Anti-Drug Coalition praising their efforts and pledging to provide them with security assistance to ensure that their work could continue. The diasppearance of Patricia Londono triggered an international political mobilization, demanding her release, and spotlighting the Colombian "citizens above suspicion" who were the leading front men for the cocaine traffickers. After ten days of intensive effort, Patricia Londono was freed and was hospitalized in Cali, her home town, to recuperate from the ordeal, and prepare to travel to the United States where she would be temporarily safer. To secure her hospital recuperation and her travel to the States, a LaRouche security adviser, Jeffrey Steinberg, arranged for a team of security guards to travel from the U.S. to Cali. Just before the team left for Colombia, one of the hired guards, a former Air Force security officer named Bob McWilliams, introduced Steinberg to another former military man with years of Green Beret experience in South America named Fred Lewis. Although Lewis was interviewed for possible participation in the rescue mission to Colombia, he was not brought along. Several weeks after the successful transport of Mrs. Londono to the Washington area, Lewis recontacted Steinberg, proposing that the LaRouche associate and Executive Intelligence Review Counterintelligence Director come to visit him in Texas and meet two of his close associates, Gary Howard and Ron Tucker. According to Lewis, the trio were engaged in sensitive investigative work targeting illegal arms shipments to Iran and other hostile nations and were anxious to have their exploits publicized. Steinberg checked with government contacts on the three Dallas-based self-described bounty hunters. One response came back to Steinberg in the form of a request: the three Texans were indeed involved in "sensitive" investigations, some of which may have involved the compromising of sanctioned U.S. government covert operations such as the arming of the UNITA resistance movement in Angola. Steinberg was asked to meet with the trio to get more details on their activities. A several-hour, uneventful meeting took place between Steinberg and the three Texans at a Dallas airport hotel in early September 1984. The outcome of the meeting, however, was anything but uneventful. It would take several years for the details of what occurred beginning in the autumn of 1984 to surface; and the full story is yet to be told. - A $20 Million Swiss Account - Part of the story has been reconstructed from Central Intelligence Agency and FBI documents that were released either under the Freedom of Information Act or through criminal discovery in a federal prosecution of Lyndon LaRouche and a half dozen associates in Boston in 1987. After 92 days, the case ended in a mistrial when evidence of extensive government misconduct, involving the three Texans, Lewis, Howard, and Tucker, Lt. Col. Oliver North, then-Vice President George Bush's general counsel C. Boyden Gray, and others, delayed the proceedings until a number of jurors had to be excused. A Sept. 26, 1984 memorandum from the CIA's Director of Security to the head of the FBI's Criminal Investigations Division provides a very different version of the Steinberg meeting with Fred Lewis in Washington, D.C. in early August, and the subsequent meeting in Dallas: "On 20 September 1984 a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, Mr. [redacted] telephonically advised a current employee that one Jeffrey Steinberg is allegedly attempting to recruit personnel to assassinate unnamed persons in Bolivia and Colombia. Steinberg is reportedly attempting to recruit Cuban nationals who worked for CIA as well as CIA retirees and active duty personnel with a paramilitary background. [Redacted] advised that Steinberg has attempted to contact CIA employees in [redacted]. Steinberg is reported to have twenty million dollars at his disposal." An Oct. 2, 1984 CIA Memorandum For The Record elaborated: "[Redacted] source has been in contact with an individual who has stated that a Jeffrey Steinberg is in Northern Virginia attempting to recruit retired Agency and military personnel to kill drug dealers in Colombia and Bolivia.... [His] source's contact was informed by Steinberg that he, Steinberg, had $20 million in a Swiss account and one-half million in a U.S. account to finance the mission. Initial information available to the FBI relative to Steinberg is that he was involved with the Jewish Defense League and is a friend of Lyndon LaRouche." Subsequently released government documents confirmed that the redacted names in the CIA memos referred in most instances to either Howard, Lewis or Tucker. The $150-a-day-plus-expenses bodyguard mission to Colombia had suddenly become a global assassination scheme involving Swiss bank accounts, Cuban exiles, CIA paramilitary veterans, etc.--all the makings of a bestselling Robert Ludlum spy novel. No such novel ever materialized. Instead, an all-too-willing FBI, already pumped up by the likes of Henry Kissinger and his cronies on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board into a Get LaRouche frenzy, seized upon the Howard, Lewis, Tucker lies and proceeded to launch a fifteen-month worldwide "investigation" into the alleged plot. After thousands of manhours and millions of dollars in resources went down the drain, the FBI was finally forced to admit in November 1985 that not a shred of evidence had been uncovered that could corroborate any of the details contained in the original CIA-FBI communiques. However, under the pretext of the ongoing investigation, the FBI and other elements in the Get LaRouche Task Force would plow a wide field of operations aimed at framing up LaRouche and some of his associates. From the standpoint of the Alexandria federal libel case, LaRouche vs. NBC et al., a clue into the alleged judge tampering also emerges. Within days of the FBI being informed of the $20 million hit plot (sic), the Alexandria Field Office was placed in charge of the probe. Alexandria is a very small FBI outpost (in fact, several years later, the office was shut down altogether and merged into the larger Washington, D.C. Field Office despite thorny jurisdictional complications). The federal district court is likewise small. Was Judge Cacheris provided with a "courtesy briefing" on the newest allegations of mayhem by LaRouche and his associates on the eve of the libel trial? THE SAKHAROV PLOT AND THE LAROUCHE FRAMEUP by Jeffrey Steinberg Twelfth in a Series In March 1988, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, Irangate Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh informed attorneys for Lyndon LaRouche that his office was in possession of a document obtained from the National Security Council safe of Lt. Col. Oliver North that contained references to the Democratic Party presidential candidate, then on trial in Boston on manufactured charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice. After reviewing the still classified government document, the presiding judge in the Boston trial, Robert Keeton, ruled that the one-paragraph memorandum was exculpatory evidence and should be released to the defense attorneys representing LaRouche, six co-defendants and four corporations. The memorandum, dated May 5, 1986, was a secret communique, transmitted by fax from Gen. Richard Secord (USAF-ret.) to North. It said: 051625Z May 86. Our source reports that terrorists plan to use airfield near Texas border. Strip is at intersection of Marfa vor 280 radial and Hudspeth vor 168 radial. Lewis has met with FBI and other agency reps and is apparently meeting again today. Our man here claims Lewis has collected info against Larouche -- let's see how polygraph goes. Rgds, Dick. BT Assistant U.S. Attorney John Markham confirmed to LaRouche defense team counsel that "Lewis" was Frederick Lewis, the retired Green Beret sergeant major who had been implicated in 1984 in setting the FBI loose on a fifteen-month wild goose chase seeking proof that one of the Boston defendants, Jeffrey Steinberg, had sought to hire CIA and Pentagon assassins to take out the Colombian and Bolivian cocaine cartels. Markham also told the defense attorneys that "our man here" was FBI Deputy Director Oliver Revell, a figure later deeply implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal as an active member of the North-William Casey interagency task force. FBI officials would later attempt to backtrack on Markham's naming of Revell, going so far as to threaten to prosecute Assistant U.S. Attorney Markham on charges of leaking government secrets. From the very outset of the Boston trial, defense attorneys had labeled the indictment of LaRouche and his associates as a political witchhunt hatched by Henry Kissinger and his PFIAB cronies, but willingly executed by the North White House "secret team" because of LaRouche's public opposition to the Reagan administration's use of drug trafficking networks to help overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. When Judge Keeton saw that the suppressed government document proved that there was a foundation in fact for the LaRouche charges of government selective and vindictive prosecution, he ordered the government to produce other documents relating to the Howard, Lewis, and Tucker affair. Several days later, AUSA Markham delivered a most unusual document to LaRouche defense team lawyer Michael Reilly. The document, on plain white paper, consisted of eight paragraphs taken from a several-page FBI memorandum and pasted together. LaRouche's attorneys never learned whether the paragraphs were inserted in proper order. The full, letterhead memorandum from which the paragraphs were selected, was never released. What the memo said, however, blew the case against LaRouche and the others skyhigh. It revealed that in October 1984--immediately after Lewis, Gary Howard, and Ron Tucker had peddled the phony allegations of assassination plots by Steinberg to both the FBI and the CIA--both agencies had met with the trio at the office of their attorney, R. Keith Adkinson, in Washington, D.C. and had asked the Texas bounty hunters to spy on the LaRouche organization. In an interview with the Washington Post published on Sunday, March 27, 1988, Gary Howard acknowledged the government request for the infiltration effort. "Howard said the agency [FBI] failed to follow a prearranged plan to use Adkinson as the liaison to give the go-ahead for the infiltration. Instead, he said, the bureau repeatedly contacted him directly. In what Howard said is a tape of a telephone conversation with a Dallas FBI agent, a voice asks Howard if he is `still willing to reinstitute the contacts that you had made before' with the LaRouche group." The Dallas FBI field office was identified during the Congressional Iran-Contra hearings and subsequent House Judiciary Committee hearings into FBI illegal spying on the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador (CSPES) as a command post for "active measures" against opponents of the Contra policy. - The Sakharov Bait - At precisely the time that Howard, Lewis and Tucker were meeting with FBI and CIA officials to discuss the spy job against LaRouche, the Texans were also entering into another wild scheme--with apparent government blessings. According to the same Washington Post story, Howard acknowledges that in October 1984, he received a $20,000 cash payment from two relatives of the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov and his wife Yelena Bonner, relatives who were living in the Boston area. Efrem Yankelovich and Semyonov were steered to Gary Howard by a Russian emigre private investigator and friend of Keith Adkinson. The two Russians paid the Texans to put together a "mission impossible" team to rescue Sakharov and Bonner from their internal exile in Gorky in the heart of the Soviet Union. Did Howard, Lewis, and Tucker ever intend to try the loony rescue mission? It is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the Russians were steered to Lyndon LaRouche in pursuit of $2 million to finance the escape plot. In late 1984, Yankelovich and Semyonov visited LaRouche in Leesburg, Va. to seek assistance in freeing the Sakharovs from the gulag. At the Virginia meeting, LaRouche cautioned the two Sakharov relatives against being snared into a scam, voiced deep skepticism that any such rescue mission could be successfully undertaken, and offered to help the Russians determine whether they were dealing with criminals out to steal their money. It was in response to this word of caution that the two Russians apparently went to the Boston FBI and reported their dealings with Howard and company. The Boston FBI briefly opened a white collar crime case probing the $20,000 payment, according to information released during the course of the LaRouche Boston trial. Eventually, in early 1985, Gary Howard placed a phone call to a LaRouche associate who had participated in the discussions with Yankelovich and Semyonov. It was only at that point that LaRouche and company discovered that the soldiers of fortune who were going to rescue Sakharov and Bonner were the already known Howard, Lewis, and Tucker. In a final communication, LaRouche warned the two Russians that they were in the grip of a trio of professional bunko artists. Was the Sakharov rescue affair just simply a con-job, in which Howard and his associates unfortunately ran afoul of LaRouche? It is very unlikely. What is far more likely is that Howard, Lewis, and Tucker were involved in an effort to infiltrate and entrap LaRouche. What's more, the scheme to solicit several million dollars from LaRouche was totally consistent with the earlier lie conjured up by Howard et al. about Swiss bank accounts stuffed with millions of dollars to finance secret covert projects. Years later, when the federal government was engaged in a breakneck effort to frame up and jail LaRouche, repeated efforts were made through grand jury interrogations, subpoenas of bank records, etc. to find the mythical Swiss accounts. Perhaps the most damning evidence that Uncle Sam was fully behind every step taken by Howard and crew is the fact that in May 1986, according to documents released in the Boston LaRouche case (including the eight-paragraph cut-and-paste memo), Howard, Lewis and Tucker were being again interviewed by the FBI--this time under polygraph--to provide "info against LaRouche." By Howard's accounts to the Washington Post and other papers, he and his cohorts were by that time working directly for Vice President George Bush--reporting to his general counsel, C. Boyden Gray. TEXAS CON-MEN PIONEERED SECRET PARALLEL OPS by Jeffrey Steinberg 12th in a Series An undated, unsigned, unmarked FBI memorandum released to attorneys for Lyndon LaRouche during the course of the 1988 Boston federal trial of the four-time presidential candidate and a half-dozen of his associates shows that the federal government had enjoyed a great deal of experience with three Texas based con-men and sometime government bounty hunters--Gary Howard, Fred Lewis, and Ron Tucker. It was these three who apparently were the source for a CIA communication to the FBI reporting information that "one Jeffrey Steinberg is allegedly attempting to recruit personnel to assassinate unnamed persons in Bolivia and Colombia.... Steinberg is reported to have twenty million dollars at his disposal." According to the FBI memorandum: "On May 1, 1986, Lewis and two of his associates, identified as Ron Tucker and Gary S. Howard, were interviewed by FBI Agents from the San Antonio and El Paso field offices. Lewis advised that he is presently employed by Rhyolite Management Systems, Limited, in Dallas, Texas, and that in the interest of national security, his employer allows him to assist four or five other individuals in the fight against terrorism... Lewis, Howard and Tucker indicated they have a very high level source in the Federal Government who advises them regularly concerning cooperation or the lack thereof between Lewis and his associates and the Federal Government... "During December 1984, the FBI attempted to interview Lewis concerning his contacts with LaRouche. However, Lewis advised that all inquiries directed to him should be directed through his attorney pursuant to an alleged agreement his people made through the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the FBI.... When asked about their possible ties to LaRouche, they claimed they had previously been requested by the FBI and CIA to penetrate the LaRouche organization.... "FBIHQ indices also indicate that during late 1984, Tucker and Howard approached supporters and family members of Soviet dissidents Elena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov and alleged they could free Bonner and Sakharov for $2,000,000. No further information was available concerning this matter. "It is the opinion of San Antonio that Lewis, Howard and Tucker will sell information to any and all United States agencies who will pay for such information. Once they have provided the information, they will then attempt to sell it to other agencies." The highly unusual FBI document, a patchwork of selected excerpts from a several-page letterhead document that apparently remains classified to this day, is an incredible piece of understatement. By May 1, 1986 when the FBI field agents met with the three Texans, the Bureau had expended millions of dollars, thousands of hours of investigative time and enormous other resources chasing down phony allegations from the trio against an associate of Lyndon LaRouche involving Swiss bank accounts, CIA and Green Beret hit squads bumping off South American dope kingpins, and other phantasms. After fifteen months of intensive effort, the Bureau shut down the probe and acknowledged that not a single shred of the trio's information had proven true. The FBI was not, however, totally disappointed by their wild goose chase. It provided the pretext, under Executive Order 12333 and other Reagan era intelligence guidelines, to pry into every aspect of the LaRouche political movement and was an invaluable tool in the frame-up of their target. This will be covered in the next article in this series. For now it is sufficient to note one curious aspect of the Peregrine saga that may shed some further light on the Howard, Lewis, Tucker involvement in the "Get LaRouche Strike Force." According to the Knight-Ridder article by Frank Greve, Matthew Purdy and Mark Fazlollah, "The company [Peregrine] officials said in interviews that they also won clearance from Pentagon officials for vigilante-style schemes to nab and kill drug smugglers in Peru, Honduras, Belize and the Caribbean." By the fall of 1984, Peregrine was out of business and Howard and Tucker were persona non grata around U.S. Customs headquarters. But their expertise as sting men still apparently carried weight with the FBI and CIA--and it was an easy transition for the two Texans to slightly re-write their earlier "nab and kill drug smugglers" story and sell the script back to Uncle Sam--this time attributing the plot to LaRouche and friends. Get LaRouche Conmen Targeted Pentagon in Sting by Jeffrey Steinberg 13th in a Series In June 1988, the Washington Post published a damning expose@aa by Mark Hosenball of government "sting" operations gone awry. The article focused principally on the nefarious activities of Gary Howard and Ron Tucker, two Texas bounty hunters who were pivotal figures in the federal government's Get LaRouche strike force. - The Perfect Scam - If Hosenball's account is accurate, Howard and Tucker ran a sophisticated con game on at least one federal government agency, the U.S. Customs Service, while at the same time pocketing $40 million in Iranian government money earmarked for the purchase of sophisticated American military hardware. Among the targets of the Howard-Tucker team, in addition to political economist Lyndon LaRouche, were some of the Pentagon's most well known irregular warriors, including one retired Green Beret major who was America's on-the-ground agent in Teheran during the unsuccessful 1980 hostage rescue mission. According to Hosenball, the Howard-Tucker con game worked as follows: "In essence, Customs officials say in interviews that Howard and Tucker took advantage of their status as government informers to create a cover for what was a perfect scam. With official approval, the two Texans were able to set up illegal arms deals and persuade targets of their `stings' to produce cash up front to pay for the purported merchandise. Once the funds arrived, the informants turned the targets in to the government and pocketed at least part of the cash. "The scheme, as alleged, was a kind of Iran-Contra affair in miniature. Two small-time cops persuaded the government to sanction complex undercover operations that generated large commissions for the lawmen, which they say were plowed back into other undercover operations. It was a Texas version of Oliver North's `stand-alone, off-the-shelf, self-financing' covert operations." - Dr. Doom - The specific "sting" operation cited by Hosenball involved a British arms merchant dubbed "Dr. Doom." Ian Smalley, the target, had been involved in selling arms to both sides in the Persian Gulf war. In 1982, at the direction of U.S. Customs officials, Howard and Tucker set up a security consulting firm, Peregrine International, along with Special Forces Major (ret.) Richard Meadows, and made contact with Smalley by claiming that they could provide U.S. government arms, including tanks and rocket launchers, for sale to Iran. An emissary of Smalley's, accompanied by Howard and Tucker, visited a U.S. Army munitions storage site where he was shown a number of tanks that would be provided as part of the sale. The price tag of the deal was over one billion dollars. Ultimately, the deal went sour, and Customs officials in Texas arrested Smalley on illegal gun possession charges that were later expanded to include conspiracy charges relating to the arms deal. - Unbelievable - When the Smalley case went to trial in a federal court in Houston in February 1983, the British arms trafficker was acquitted by a jury. Gary Howard's testimony, upon which the entire government case hung, was considered so unbelievable that the jury foreman later told the press, "I think the government owes him [Smalley] an apology. I was outraged when I heard the evidence." One key piece of evidence that apparently enraged all the jurors was Howard's admission, on cross-examination, that he and his partner Ron Tucker figured to make $100 million in bounty for delivering Smalley's head on a platter to the feds. The financial dimensions of the scam are extraordinary, considering the following: Smalley claims, and Howard and Tucker's attorney has apparently confirmed, that the British middleman paid the Texans $1.1 million in expense money during the early phases of the deal. Howard and Tucker claim they plowed that money back into the sting. The Iranian government, before it got cold feet and cancelled the deal, transferred $40 million into an escrow account once the Iranians had been provided with the serial numbers of the tanks they were to receive. They claim they never recovered the funds. Smalley says that he never got his hands on that money. Howard and Tucker are mum. In the spring of 1987, having been dumped by the U.S. Customs Service after the Smalley fiasco, Howard and Tucker filed a $100 million suit in the U.S. Court of Claims in Washington, D.C. demanding their share of the original $1 billion price tag on the sting. According to affidavits and other court papers in the public record of Civil Case No. 386-87C, the Texans had been promised that they would receive 10% of the face value of the items seized plus expenses for their role in "Houston III." By their accounts, the contract with Customs specifically stated that if conspiracy charges were brought as the result of a failure on the part of the government to seize the funds or weapons, they would still be entitled to their share. The case is still pending before the court, and sources close to the case say that there are heated negotiations now ongoing for an out-of-court settlement. WHAT'S THE STORY, GEORGE? by Jeffrey Steinberg 14th in a Series In a seven-page affidavit written by Gary Howard on Oct. 22, 1987 in opposition to a government motion to have his $100 million suit against the U.S. Customs Service for breach of contract dismissed, the Texas-based bounty hunter and would-be government "spook" presented a fascinating list of witnesses he intended to depose before the case would go to trial. The suit, filed in the spring of 1987 by Howard and his longtime partner Ron Tucker, charged that the federal government had failed to pay them over $100 million in bounty plus expenses for their role in a U.S. Customs Service "sting" operation dubbed Houston III. The operation targeted a British arms merchant, Ian Smalley, who was attempting to procure American government arms for both Iran and Iraq in the Gulf War. The sting flopped in 1982, $40 million in Iranian money apparently disappeared from the face of the earth, and a February 1983 prosecution of Smalley on low-level illegal arms possession and conspiracy charges ended in an acquittal when jurors became incensed at the big ticket payoff that Howard and Tucker were to have received for delivering Smalley's head on a platter. The list of prospective witnesses, along with other statements made to the press by Howard and Tucker, as well as government documents released in the course of the winter 1987-spring 1988 federal trial of Lyndon LaRouche and a half dozen associates in Boston, strongly suggests that while the U.S. Customs Service may have been double-crossed by the bounty hunters, Vice President George Bush may have been a secret patron of the duo and a witting player in their sting-gone-awry. Of the 23 proposed witnesses listed in the Howard affidavit, at least three were at the time intimate associates of Bush. Donald Gregg was the national security adviser to the Vice President. A former career CIA covert operator with strong ties to Theodore G. Shackley, the ex-Deputy Director of Operations, Gregg was subsequently appointed by President Bush as the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea. He has been described as the Bush administration's "Pro-Consul for the Pacific Rim." Back in 1982-83 as the Smalley sting was playing out, Gregg was working behind-the-scenes on placing some of his longtime CIA secret operations cronies into key positions directing the Nicaraguan Contra program. General Sam Wilson (USA-ret.), the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Deputy Director of the CIA. Wilson was one of a core group of ex-intelligence executives who ran George Bush's unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign. He reportedly remains close to Bush today. Wilson, according to other documents filed in the Howard-Tucker suit, was instrumental in introducing the Texans to Major Richard Meadows, a Special Forces veteran who was the lone American infiltrated into Teheran to gather intelligence on the status of the American embassy hostages during the ill-fated 1980 Desert One rescue mission. As the result of Meadows' introduction to Howard and Tucker, the trio jointly set up Peregrine International, a private security firm in Texas that may have been the prototype for the later "off the reservation" covert operations programs of General Richard Secord and Lt. Colonel Oliver North. According to one version of events at Peregrine, Meadows himself may have been a target of the bounty hunters, who were also working on behalf of the FBI's Deputy Director Oliver Revell, a member of the Ollie North interagency team, who was out to deep-six any Pentagon operators who might cross swords with the secret government of the CIA's William Casey and North. At a certain point in the middle of 1982, Meadows had a falling out with Howard and Tucker and left Peregrine. To this day, Wilson, Meadows, and other special operations professionals who were lured into the Peregrine project refuse to discuss the internal details of how the operation came together and quickly fell apart. The role of Vice President George Bush in the affair is a matter shrouded in mystery to this day. C. Boyden Gray, Bush's general counsel as Vice President and now President; Gray was reportedly one of the people whom Bush used to maintain his "hands-on" involvement in the Iran-Contra business. Washington Post reporter John Harris wrote on March 27, 1988 that Gary Howard and Ron Tucker had open access to Gray. Harris reported that Howard had told him of meetings with Gray in May 1986 to discuss "Mexico." In fact, according to a document seized by Irangate Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh from the National Security Council safe of Lt. Col. North, Howard, Tucker and a third associate, Frederick Lewis, had met with White House officials to offer up "information against LaRouche." Another "coincidental" Bush link to the two Texans that several sources say explains their easy access to Gray centers around George Bush's home town of Midland, Texas. At the time of their Get LaRouche escapades, Howard, Lewis and Tucker were employed as deputy sheriffs in the Midland, Texas Sheriff's Department, headed by Gary Painter, a flamboyant character who boasted of an extensive intelligence operation all along the Texas-Mexican border. Painter teamed up with Howard, Lewis, and Tucker in the summer of 1988 in a locally run sting operation aimed at catching a Portuguese businessman trying to buy arms for the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was a deja vu of the failed Smalley case, complete with an embarrassed ABC-TV camera crew hiding in a warehouse to film the bust live. Sheriff Painter got to be interviewed on the Ted Koppel Nightline show and things were going great guns--until a judge ordered the Portuguese businessman released on bail. According to local press accounts, Sheriff Painter owed his election to George Bush. Local GOP county officials had another candidate in mind for the sheriff's post until word came down from the Republican National Headquarters that a certain powerful GOP figure then residing in Washington, D.C. wanted Painter to get the nomination. Sheriff Gary Painter's 1984 election and his immediate hiring of Howard, Lewis, and Tucker as his deputies may have been part of George Bush's own "off-the-shelf" secret program. The activities of the trio certainly were not restricted to the Texas Panhandle. Throughout 1986, Howard, Lewis, and Tucker were apparently globe-trotting in an effort to gather up material that could be sold to senior administration officials to help frame up LaRouche, who had earned the ire of some Reagan-Bush higher-ups for his harsh criticism of the administration's Contra policy and the continuing exposes in Executive Intelligence Review of the U.S.-Israeli secret arms deals with the Khomeini regime in Teheran. According to one London source, Howard and Tucker showed up there in March 1986 saying that they were prepared to pay up to $50,000 for damaging information about LaRouche that could lead to federal prosecutions in the United States. The duo claimed they were working as part of a secret White House task force and that they were reporting directly to Gray. Was the Howard-Tucker offer just one more pile of B.S. coming from a pair of well-heeled con men? Unlikely. Judge Robert Keeton was so impressed with the Howard-Lewis-Tucker reference in a May 6, 1986 Secord-to-North memo plucked from the Marine lieutenant colonel's Old Executive Office Building safe that he ordered a thorough search of all federal intelligence and law enforcement agency files for any further references to the trio's Get LaRouche escapades. Judge Keeton extended that order to include all the files of Vice President George Bush. Within a matter of weeks of the Bush files order coming down, the LaRouche trial in Boston came to a screeching halt through a mistrial. To this day, an airtight lid remains on the government's secret files on LaRouche. In his current capacity as President of the United States, George Bush is authorized under law to declassify and release all the documents in the government's possession dealing with the secret war to Get LaRouche. He has so far refused. Postscript: In late 1988, a group of British arms merchants were put on trial in London on charges that they were conspiring to sell arms to Khomeini's Iran in violation of a British embargo. One of the chief witnesses at the trial was Gary Howard, whom one of the defendants, Michael Aspen, described as his "official liaison" to the Reagan-Bush White House in the arms-to-Khomeini project. "The whole deal was sanctioned from Washington," the defendants claimed--through none other than Gary Howard. The `LaRouche Files' ADL Got its `Get LaRouche' Job Through New York Times by Jeffrey Steinberg 5th in a series It came from so far out of left field that only a handful of the most senior intelligence operators in New York City, London, Moscow, and East Berlin were privy to the reasons behind its appearance. But there it was, larger than life: a 3,000-plus word diatribe against the tiny National Caucus of Labor Committees, appearing on the front page of the Liberal Establishment's house organ, the Sunday New York Times, on Jan. 20, 1974. Up until that Sunday Times piece, which labeled the NCLC a "bizarre cult," the political-philosophical association founded in the mid-1960s by Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and a handful of collaborators, most of them university-based, had gained notoriety among the New Left, and had earned the deep hatred of such Establishment figures as McGeorge Bundy, Sidney Hook, and United Auto Workers president Leonard Woodcock, but had never been given prominence in the mass media. Just a few weeks before the Times headlines exploded against LaRouche, a prominent NCLC member had been drugged by British intelligence operatives and dropped onto a plane bound to JFK Airport from London. Several months earlier, another West German-based NCLC leader had been treated to a similar chemical jolt by officials of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Putting together the pieces of the two operations, LaRouche had concluded that there was an unholy collusion between East bloc and Western intelligence services and that he and his associates had now been placed in the target zone by that alliance of strange bedfellows. LaRouche made those conclusions public in a series of widely distributed press statements and at an extraordinary press conference at the New York Statler Hilton Hotel in January 1974. The press conference took place just days before the Sunday New York Times smear, which was written by spook reporters Paul Montgomery and Howard Blum. Years later, William Colby, who was CIA Director when the twin drugging incidents took place, would confirm to Lyndon LaRouche in a closed-door meeting that both the CIA and the KGB, anxious to find out what (and who) made Lyndon LaRouche tick, had run the pranks. - Enter the ADL - Within days after the New York Sunday Times piece, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which is anything but anti-defamation, was on the LaRouche case, preparing to activate one of its notorious dirty tricks efforts. The ADL's response to the Times article is documented in a brief letterhead memorandum dated Jan. 24, 1974, from Melvin I. Cooperman, the director of the Long Island Regional Office, to Justin Finger, the head of the ADL's Civil Rights Division. The memorandum dealing with "Subject: National Caucus of Labor Committees," states: "You have, no doubt, seen the lengthy story in last Sunday's Times on subject group. Last Thursday, I got a call from Dr. Mark Friedman (via Henry Pohli) of the Sloan-Kettering Institute. Friedman lives on Long Island and also works at the Nassau County Medical Center (across the street from this office) and will be coming up to see me this week. His daughter is involved with NCLC (see attached material supplied by Friedman to Finger and fact-finding people only) and he has been in touch with other parents of young people in the organization. He wants help from ADL, the specifics of which will be spelled out after our interview. Perhaps a session with a group of the parents from the Metropolitan Area may be of use later." Copies of the memorandum were forwarded to ADL officials Irwin Suall, Jerome Bakst, Mort Kass, Ted Freedman, and Robert Kohler. - Dick Thornburgh, Too - It may be the case that the ADL had already launched its decades-long campaign of slander, extortion, and similar criminal misdoing against LaRouche and the NCLC at the time of that memorandum. Ongoing civil and criminal cases may very well turn up evidence of an even earlier date for ADL pivotal involvement in the "Get LaRouche" campaign. At minimum, by no later than January 1974--four years before the League published its first word of bile slandering LaRouche as an "anti-Semite," ADL officials were planning and activating a harassment campaign directed against relatives of NCLC members. By the autumn of 1975, another document would appear, this time in the files of then-Assistant U.S. Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division, Richard Thornburgh, revealing that the ADL was involved on an even more active operational level in "Get LaRouche" efforts. On Sept. 23, 1975, Thornburgh transmitted a memorandum with attachments to FBI Director Clarence Kelley. The attachments included a confidential letter from UAW General Counsel Steven Schlossberg to Attorney General Edward Levy, in which Schlossberg referred to his "continuing interest" in the NCLC and provided a packet of "relevant information" about the NCLC. According to material obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and made available to this author, Schlossberg's letter was accompanied by an undated memorandum by Charles Baker, a UAW-financed "researcher" who ran a Socialist International front organization called the Institute for American Democracy and published a newsletter called Homefront. The April 1975 issue of Homefront was devoted exclusively to an attack against Lyndon LaRouche and the NCLC which drew heavily upon the Montgomery-Blum New York Times slander of January 1974 and a subsequent piece by the Times pair in early 1975 reporting on the kidnaping of a former NCLC member, Gail Roeschman, by an ADL-linked so-called "deprogrammer" named Ted Patrick. - The Baker Memo - The Baker memo, forwarded by Schlossberg to the Justice Department and the FBI, retailed the Big Lie that the NCLC was a potential terrorist organization. It also explicitly proposed a campaign of physical harassment and interference in NCLC activities--and cited the ADL as an important agency to draw more deeply into the effort. From the Baker memo: "If the NCLC brain trust concluded that a strategic assassination would redirect the flow of world events, it would not be the first zealot organization to arrive at such a conclusion or to implement it. While cadres hint at the existence of an assassination list, I have no solid evidence that one actually has been drawn up. If, as I expect, the NCLC's financial troubles increase, it has the potential for engaging in bank robberies, etc., as has the Symbionese Liberation Army, but there is no evidence that it has done so. A number of strategically placed NCLC watchers share my concern over the potential for evolving into a terrorist gang. If it does, it will be following the same path used by Students for a Democratic Society in spawning the Weatherman Faction. However, at the peak of their terrorist activity, the Weathermen probably had no more than 75 hard-core members. If--a big if--IF the NCLC does evolve into an armed, terrorist, group, it will be substantially larger than the Weathermen and the leadership considerably more resourceful. The Anti-Defamation League has produced a fact sheet on the NCLC, paralleling the HOMEFRONT report of April '75, but is not carrying out an in-depth observation. While parents of NCLC members do trade information, and an organization of parents is possible, they do not appear likely to sustain a serious monitoring operation.... Should we promote more local countervailing activity? (It is my judgment that frustrating local efforts helps burn off the energies of both the members and the organization and that helps reduce its potential.) "...In short, I think a meeting of those most concerned with this phenomenon to review what is known and to decide what should be done about it would be most helpful, and it seems to me that a good time for such a meeting is NOW." Whether such a meeting ever took place is not known. What is clear is that the ADL and an interesting crew of League fellow travelers did take up Baker's call. A BRITISH ISRAELI AGENT TARGETS LAROUCHE by Jeffrey Steinberg Part 16 in a continuing series The spring 1975 communique between United Auto Workers (UAW) general counsel Steven Schlossberg and then-Deputy Attorney General Richard Thornburgh containing the proposal by Charles Baker to launch a joint private sector/government "Get LaRouche" campaign appears to have triggered a flurry of activity. In response to Baker's complaint that insufficient resources were being thrown into the "Get LaRouche" fight, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith almost immediately issued its very first broadside slander attack against the U.S. Labor Party chairman. The ADL smear took the form of a white paper branding LaRouche an "extremist." The document was prepared by the League's Fact Finding Division. It is interesting to note that the formulation that would later dominate the ADL's "Big Lie" campaign against LaRouche--namely, that LaRouche was "anti-Semitic"--was missing entirely from the attack. Nevertheless, the ADL had clearly signaled to the FBI/Justice Department and to its Social Democratic allies that the ADL had enthusiastically thrown its weight behind the "Get LaRouche" effort. The seriousness with which the clarion call had been answered was evident by the first weeks of 1976, when a leading British-Israeli spy (a man who had been identified in court records as a controller of ADL foreign espionage programs on behalf of Israel dating back to at least 1960) went to the FBI to demand Lyndon LaRouche's scalp. According to an FBI document released under the Freedom of Information Act, on Jan. 7, 1976, the Bureau's Boston office was contacted by Professor Uri Ra'anan, then a teacher at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University. The FBI document refers to an attached memorandum written by Dr. Ra'anan, the contents of which still remain classified. "RA'ANAN advised that on the evening of December 28, 1975, he participated in a television panel program in Boston, during the course of which the events described in the attached letter occurred. "He stated that he had sent the attached letter to TOM KAHN, inasmuch as he had ascertained from his friends and associates in the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), including LANE KIRKLAND, the National Secretary Treasurer, that the AFL-CIO leadership has had past experience with similar problems relating to the NCLC." Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that the still-classified Ra'anan memo to the Bureau contained allegations that LaRouche and the U.S. Labor Party had ties to hostile foreign intelligence agencies and that the LaRouche movement represented a possible terrorist threat to the United States in general, and to Ra'anan and his friends in particular. It was ironic that the Tufts professor was making accusations of foreign intelligence links about LaRouche and his associates. According to documents released during the course of a series of federal civil suits in 1967, Uri Ra'anan was an Israeli government spy throughout the 1960s--specifically working at one point as a Mossad liaison officer to an espionage unit operating out of the headquarters of B'nai B'rith. A decade after Ra'anan's correspondence with the Bureau about LaRouche, while Ra'anan was still serving on the faculty of a very special unit of the Fletcher School, Ra'anan would also be publicly exposed as the initial recruiter of convicted Israeli-Soviet spy Jonathan Jay Pollard. Ra'anan would also be identified as the "handler" of one of the leading "Get LaRouche" operatives on the ADL staff, Mira Lansky Boland. - British Intelligence Pedigree - Born Heinz Felix Frischwasser somewhere in Central Europe in 1926, the future Israeli spy managed to escape to England in 1939. Brief biographical references to his parents' links to the Austrian socialist Otto Bauer suggest that the Frischwassers may have been part of a Communist International circle in Vienna, circles which at that time included British-Soviet spy Kim Philby. Whatever his connections in London, they were fairly high level. Frischwasser landed at Oxford University, studying under some of the senior Middle East specialists of British Intelligence, including Sir Reginald Coupland, B.H. Sumner, and Frederick William Dampier Deakin. All three were top British wartime spies, who used their positions at Oxford as screening and recruiting posts for His Majesty's Secret Services. Frischwasser's Oxford thesis dealt with the role of Zionism in furthering Britain's balance-of-power diplomacy. Sometime in the early 1950s, Frischwasser emigrated to Israel, taking the name Uri Ra'anan. Within a short period of time, he was apparently picked up by Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, and shipped to the United States under diplomatic cover. By 1960, Ra'anan was the Director of Information at the Israeli Consulate in New York City. One of his key assignments was the establishment of a secret spy unit under the cover of the International Affairs Division of the B'nai B'rith. Much detail about Ra'anan's role as an Israeli spy against the United States came out in the course of a 1967 lawsuit filed by a former B'nai B'rith employee, who was fired after 20 years with the group for refusing to cooperate with Ra'anan's espionage program. According to papers available in the Federal District Court of Washington, D.C. under {Joftes v. Rabbi Jay Kaufman} (CA 3271-67 District of Columbia), beginning in the summer of 1960, Ra'anan, in cooperation with then-B'nai B'rith president Philip Klutznick (also a vice chairman of the Anti-Defamation League), and B'nai B'rith (and ADL) general counsel Arnold Forster, set up a Mossad unit disguised as a B'nai B'rith service bureau aiding American Jewish travelers to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. According to the court records, the purpose of the unit was to enable the Mossad to debrief American Jews traveling abroad and to recruit them as possible Israeli spies. Some of the information gathered through the secret unit, which was headed by a Mossad operative named Avis Schulman, would be passed on to the CIA, ostensibly as intelligence "voluntarily" gathered by B'nai B'rith. The information would often be "colored" to tilt U.S. policy in a direction favorable to Israeli state interests--even when Israeli interests were in conflict with those of the United States. The B'nai B'rith spy program was a dry run for Ra'anan's later efforts, in league with Mossad veteran Rafael ("Dirty Rafi") Eytan and the LAKAM unit that ran Jonathan Jay Pollard. Circumstantial evidence indicates that the secret B'nai B'rith spy unit still exists today. It is perhaps not coincidental that the first immediate liaison officer to Ra'anan inside the B'nai B'rith was Dr. William Korey, who for years directed the ADL's Washington, D.C. office. In December 1982, a leading protegee of Ra'anan, Mira Lansky, would be installed as the Washington, D.C. Fact Finding director of the ADL, working with another Oxford-trained social democrat, Irwin Suall, and with Ra'anan's old crony Arnold Forster. Lansky's principal assignment at ADL would be as the League's action officer in the "Get LaRouche Strike Force." - From Mossad to CIA? - Shortly after Saul Joftes filed his series of lawsuits, hoping to reverse his firing from B'nai B'rith, which he charged had been punishment for warning Klutznick that the Mossad spy program was a violation of a string of U.S. criminal statutes, Uri Ra'anan left his post with the Israeli government and assumed a new identity, for at least the second time in his life. As a political science and international relations professor at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University, Ra'anan became a very important recruiting officer for U.S. intelligence. By no later than 1973, Ra'anan was chairing the Security Studies Program at Fletcher, an elite training curriculum tailored for bright graduate students planning careers in either the foreign service or the CIA. By the time he landed that post, Ra'anan had managed to have his curriculum vitae cleansed of any references to his decade of service with the Mossad. Between 1973 and the late 1980s, when he fled the Fletcher program to safer waters at Boston University in the wake of the Pollard spy arrest, thousands of students were funneled through the Security Studies Program at Fletcher into sensitive posts in the U.S. government and key private-sector agencies. If two of Ra'anan's proteges in the class of 1978 are any indication of the damage done by this British-Israeli spy, then the impact of Ra'anan's dirty work may have been to decimate America's intelligence capabilities. One '78 alumnus was Jonathan Jay Pollard, whose spy work for Israel and the Soviet Union has been described by former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger as one of the most devastating blows to American national security in the postwar period. Also class of '78 was Mira Lansky, whose illegal actions as part of the Get LaRouche Strike Force have only begun to surface. Before being sent into the ADL in late 1982, Lansky had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. ROY GODSON, THE ADL AND THE GET LAROUCHE STRIKE FORCE The LaRouche Files by Jeffrey Steinberg Part 17 in a series According to FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a known Israeli spy who ran an illegal secret intelligence shop out of the headquarters of the B'nai B'rith, was responsible for deploying top officials of the American labor movement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation against Lyndon LaRouche during the early weeks of 1976. Professor Uri Ra'anan, whose later claim to infamy would be his pivotal role in the recruitment of convicted traitor Jonathan Jay Pollard to Israel's LEKEM espionage unit, boasted to FBI officials in December 1975 that he had incited AFL-CIO official Tom Kahn and social democratic academic Roy Godson to go to the Bureau with a series of preposterously false allegations of criminal activities on the part of LaRouche and the U.S. Labor Party. The FBI file memorandum reporting on Professor Ra'anan's contact with the Bureau's Boston field office was dated Jan. 9, 1976. Exactly one week later, on Jan. 16, Tom Kahn, the executive assistant to AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Lane Kirkland, and Roy Godson appeared at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. - At the FBI - The contents of the meeting are described in a heavily redacted Jan. 20, 1976 FBI memorandum, which states, in part: "[Redacted] and [redacted] then asked general questions regarding the finances of the NCLC and [redacted] opined that NCLC is getting its finances from Iraq. He advised that is speculation, however, [redacted] is aware LaRouche spent a great deal of time in Iraq last year and supposedly returned with a sizeable amount of money. [Redacted] also commented that `New Solidarity' newspaper, the official publication of NCLC, has been consistently favorable in its articles dealing with Iraq, and have been critical of issues the Iraq Government has been critical of. [Redacted] also offered the opinion that the Soviet Union, directly or indirectly, was financing the operations of NCLC, however, had no way of corroborating such a statement. [Redacted] noted that LaRouche recently returned from a trip to Eastern and Western Europe. [Redacted] advised that it was his understanding, from information he has received in the past, that the Italian and French Communist Parties have been favorable to the NCLC and vice versa, however, the French Communist Party supposedly has recently become `cool' toward LaRouche and NCLC because of the latter's recent violence-prone activities. [Redacted] was of the opinion that the Soviet Union is not in favor of the recent tactics taken by the NCLC, and believes the Soviets directed the French to `pull in their horns' in regard to their relations with NCLC." The FBI memorandum went on to report that Godson and Kahn offered to provide the FBI with ongoing information on the NCLC, based on the fact that the two Ra'anan colleagues had infiltrated two agents into the NCLC orbit. - Was It Dennis King? - Subsequent investigations strongly indicated that one of the two agent-infiltrators was Dennis King, a former Columbia University Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member who had once editorially called for the extermination of Israel in the PLP's newspaper. King would later emerge as a close collaborator of Godson's in the "Get LaRouche" Strike Force. The Godson-Kahn get-together with the Bureau was a rather curious event. Lyndon LaRouche's April 1975 visit to Baghdad, Iraq had been widely reported in the NCLC's own newspaper, as had a series of LaRouche meetings with senior representatives of the Israeli government. It was well known that the meetings dealt with LaRouche's proposal for a Middle East Peace and Development Plan--a proposal whose critical features would be adopted a decade later by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres, by the Vatican, and, most recently by the European Community. It was also well known among Third World diplomatic circles that then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had personally intervened in the autumn of 1975 to block a scheduled briefing by LaRouche on his peace plan to a group of Arab and African ambassadors in Paris. Everything else that Godson and Kahn "opined" in their get-together with the FBI--including Iraqi funding of the LaRouche political movement, Soviet links, "violence-prone" tactics, etc.--was pure disinformation. As even the FBI memorandum noted, not one shred of evidence was presented by the Ra'anan messengers to substantiate their Big Lie allegations. Nevertheless, as late as September 1982, five years after FBI Director Clarence Kelley formally closed the Bureau's decade-long probe of the NCLC, FBI internal security chief James Nolan, writing in response to a complaint by Henry Kissinger, would mouth the identical, still-unsubstantiated "opinion" about the NCLC being funded and steered by the Soviet Union. - Operation Kwarterbak - After the initial Godson-Kahn and Ra'anan forays in 1976, the FBI had opened an international counterintelligence probe of the allegations of Soviet and Iraqi links. One facet of that probe, code-named KWARTERBAK, was estimated to have cost the American taxpayer several million dollars, not even to mention the wasted allocation of FBI manpower on several continents. The 1976-77 FBI probe of LaRouche and the NCLC, instigated by known British-Israeli spy Uri Ra'anan and funneled through nominally American social democratic circles, would be the model for the 1982 Kissinger-led Get LaRouche onslaught. In the 1982 rerun, Kissinger would be out of government--but Roy Godson would be a fixture at the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House, serving as a staff consultant to the National Security Council and to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. As readers of this series will recall, it would be PFIAB members Edward Bennett Williams, David Abshire, and Leo Cherne who would "officially" task FBI Director William Webster to open an official investigation of the LaRouche political movement. On what basis? The same nonsensical Ra'anan-Godson-manufactured charges of Soviet and terrorist links. - The Train Townhouse Session - According to testimony in Roanoke, Va. in 1990 by former senior NSC official Richard Morris, Roy Godson, along with two other NSC staffers, Walter Raymond and Kenneth deGraffenreid, had aggressively tried to cut off all contacts between the Reagan administration and Lyndon LaRouche. According to other testimony in the same Roanoke case by ADL Fact Finding Division Washington representative Mira Lansky Boland, Godson also attended an April 1983 meeting at the midtown Manhattan townhouse of John Train, where Dennis King delivered a disinformation diatribe against LaRouche which formed the basis for a series of slander articles and TV broadcasts during the 1984 presidential campaign. Not coincidentally, Mira Lansky Boland was herself a classmate of Jonathan Jay Pollard, studying under Uri Ra'anan at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy in Boston. Ra'anan helped place Lansky in a job at the CIA before she joined the ADL staff. The Train meeting was held under the auspices of Walter Raymond's Public Diplomacy unit at the NSC, a propaganda arm of The Enterprise apparatus of North-Secord and the Iran-Contra hooligans. Lansky Boland attended the Train session on behalf of the ADL. - Stopping the SDI - Although Godson, Raymond, Train et al. claimed to be in the vanguard of the "Reagan Revolution," it is telling that the "Get LaRouche" planning session, attended by Godson during his official tenure at the NSC and PFIAB staffs, occurred just weeks after President Reagan announced, on March 23, 1983, his Strategic Defense Initiative, an adoption of a proposal by Lyndon LaRouche. According to eyewitness accounts, one of the issues discussed at the Train session was how to block LaRouche's full SDI proposal from being implemented by the Reagan administration. ROY GODSON: PROFILE OF A LAROUCHE HATER by Jeffrey Steinberg Part 18 in a series According to FBI records released under the Freedom of Information Act, on Jan. 16, 1976, Roy Godson and Tom Kahn, both then officials of the AFL-CIO, paid a visit to the Bureau's headquarters in Washington, D.C. to deliver their spiel about the "dangerous," "potential terrorist" and "Soviet agent" Lyndon LaRouche. The Godson-Kahn voluntary information was long on unsubstantiated opinions and devoid of a single bit of fact, as even the FBI special agent writing the notes of the briefing session had to admit. In fact, beyond reporting widely publicized information that Lyndon LaRouche had at the time recently traveled to Baghdad, Iraq to discuss his proposals for a Middle East Peace and Development Plan (which LaRouche also discussed at length with senior Israeli government officials, including Abba Eban), the only "fact" that Godson and Kahn offered up was that they had deployed two infiltrators into the periphery of the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) in New York City. One of those would-be infiltrators was Dennis King, who would surface in 1979 as the Anti-Defamation League's leading paid poison pen against LaRouche and his political movement. The goal of the Godson-Kahn walk-in was to bolster demands already put before the Bureau by British-trained Mossad officer Uri Ra'anan, namely, that the U.S. government shut down the LaRouche political movement. Godson's pilgrimage on behalf of Israeli spy master Ra'anan was not the first experience the Georgetown labor history professor had fronting for Mossad interests. - Godson and the J4 Scheme - According to author Robert Friedman, in 1967 Godson and Robert Brown had served as the university chapter presidents of a short-lived outfit called the July Fourth Movement. J4 was setup by Rabbi Meir Kahane and Joseph Churba as a pro-war countergang to the Students for a Democratic Society. Kahane and Churba, according to Friedman's account in a recently published unauthorized biography of the Jewish Defense League founder, had pitched the idea of a pro-Vietnam War student front to Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, the former leading American communists who had sided with Bukharin against Stalin in the power struggle after Lenin's death, and had fallen from grace in Moscow--only to take refuge in the American labor movement and later in the CIA. Lovestone and Brown funneled AFL seed money into the project, probably fully aware that Kahane and Churba were already on the Mossad payroll. To secure their interests, they had installed Brown's son Robert and Roy Godson, son of Joseph, another ex-Red turned labor bureaucrat and ersatz CIA agent, as the student leaders (and apparently the only other members) of the J4. Although the July Fourth scheme flopped, it would serve as the basis for, later, the Jewish Defense League countergang and the CAUSA front for the Unification Church. Roy Godson was only a graduate student at Columbia University, but he had already been steered into the orbit of dirty intelligence games by the time he put his name to an ad in the New York Herald Tribune seeking members for the J4 in the autumn of 1967. It is unlikely that Godson, Jr. would ever really contemplate the ultimate source of control over his activities henceforth; whether it be KGB headquarters in Moscow; Mossad's offices in Tel Aviv; some dirty crawl space at the CIA in Langley; or MI-6 in London. As even his most fervent backers would admit, it was just because he was his father's son, that the mediocre academic was a player in the wilderness of mirrors. It was as simple as that. - Dear Old Dad - Joseph Godson, a German-Polish emigre to the United States, became an early associate of Jay Lovestone, the founder of the Communist Party USA, who was ostensibly purged from the party with the Bukharinite faction in 1929, but allegedly remained a Soviet Comintern (Communist International) agent in socialist clothing until at least 1938. Joe Godson and the other Lovestoneites founded a series of front groups including the International Rescue Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee as organs of what came to be known as the Trust, the most sophisticated overseas Soviet intelligence apparatus, which operated in league with prominent American and British financier networks seeking collaboration with the Soviet regime. The leading banking houses of Morgan and Mellon put significant funds into those Trust projects, including the Lovestoneite efforts. Beginning in 1950, as an outgrowth of the Lovestone-Irving Brown penetration of the U.S. intelligence community, which began during the Second World War with their active involvement in the CIA's forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Joe Godson went to work for the U.S. State Department as a labor attache@aa at a number of key foreign embassies, including Ottawa (1950-55) and London (1956-59). After serving as the consul general in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in the early 1960s and as a senior labor adviser to the State Department's Bureau of European Affairs, Godson ended his government career as the consul general in Edinburgh, Scotland. On retirement, Joe Godson remained in London, founding an outpost of Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and creating a Lovestone international front called the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTAU). - Mossad Tie-In - Joe Godson's second wife, Ruth, was apparently an Israeli intelligence official of some standing, serving as the personal secretary to the Israeli ambassador in London. Her suspected Mossad ties were reportedly a big negative for stepson Roy, who reportedly flunked his security clearances for a post as CIA congressional liaison during the early Reagan days. Although eventually cleared to assume a string of posts with the National Security Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the aura of suspicion still surrounded Godson, Jr. and served to track him into a very specific and very nasty corner of the international intelligence community. Perhaps one of the earliest indications that Roy was on a career track defined by dad's own career, was his first "grown-up" job following the July Fourth Movement adventure, as a staff functionary for the Mellon family's Pittsburgh apparatus. In 1967, Godson left Columbia for a teaching post at Carnegie-Mellon University and a second job as program director for the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council, a local Mellon family outpost of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and the London Royal Institute for International Affairs. - And ... Uri Ra'anan - Godson's "rabbi" during this weening period was R. Daniel McMichael, an aide de camp to Richard Mellon Scaife and a member of the board of directors of the Security Studies Program at the Fletcher School in Boston, headed by none other than Mossad officer Uri Ra'anan. Under McMichael's direction and Mellon Scaife financial largesse, Godson, Jr. was sent around the world doing an oral history of the Lovestoneite movement and gathering "credentials" as a "labor studies" expert. On the eve of his visit to the FBI headquarters to launch his involvement in the 15-year Get LaRouche effort, Godson was plopped onto the faculty of Georgetown University as a labor historian and installed as head of a little-known AFL-CIO "youth" front group called Frontlash. In 1975, he became a member of the original British Fabian Society front in America, the League for Industrial Democracy (LID)--also known as Chatham House. And to add the Mossad's stamp of approval to Godson's future mischief, he was simultaneously made a director of the American Histadrut Cultural Exchange Institute. Secret Government Files Would Show LaRouche Is Innocent It is now certain that U.S. government files contain massive amounts of classified information showing that Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and his associates are victims of a government frameup. Were President George Bush to release these suppressed documents, they would prove that LaRouche and his associates are innocent of all charges against them. In the first case brought against them in Boston, the release of even small bits of such secret information resulted in a mistrial. In the second case brought against them in Alexandria, Virginia, it was the court's suppression of all such evidence that made convictions possible. After LaRouche and associates were jailed on Jan. 27, 1989, the FBI released a small portion of 4,700 pages of mostly classified documents they had admittedly withheld. These showed extensive efforts by the FBI and other agencies to discredit LaRouche, and indicated attempts to frame up LaRouche and his friends on spurious charges. Prosecutors had strenuously denied the existence of any secret files on LaRouche and associates, and ridiculed the defense for this contention throughout both trials. But, in July 1989, after LaRouche and friends had been imprisoned for six months, it was disclosed that a secret file on LaRouche existed, which "was compiled ... pursuant to Executive Order 12333." E.O. 12333 authorizes covert intelligence operations, and provided the "legal" underpinnings for the "secret government" whose existence was partially revealed in the Iran-Contra affair. Classified government information has been at the heart of both the Iran-Contra cases and the LaRouche cases. Yet, the response of the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as the courts, to this fact has been radically different in the two cases. In the Iran-Contra cases, although the classified documents were disclosed to the defendants, the Bush administration refused to declassify certain critical material for the public trials. This resulted in the dismissal of counts (Oliver North) and of one entire indictment (Joseph Fernandez). In the two LaRouche trials, the government tried to withhold all classified documents, succeeded in withholding almost all, and never allowed the defendants or their attorneys to see the documents they did admit to exist. Instead, when the judge, acting under the Classified Information Procedures Act, ruled certain documents relevant to the defense case, the government (under CIPA) submitted "substitute admissions," of which the defense had no means to judge the validity. - The Fernandez Case - In the case of Joseph Fernandez, former CIA station chief in Costa Rica, the defense identified 3,500 pages of classified documents it needed for trial. Judge Claude Hilton ruled that there were two categories he deemed relevant--the existence of certain CIA stations and facilities in Latin America, and details of U.S. programs in Costa Rica--which the government refused to declassify. In that light, on Nov. 24, 1989, Judge Hilton decided it was impossible for Fernandez to receive a fair trial, and dismissed the entire indictment. In his unsuccessful appeal to President Bush, Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh pointed out that law enforcement objectives were being sacrificed to maintain the "deniability" of certain intelligence agency activities, and that this involved the precise government conflict of interest which the Special Prosecutor statute was designed to prevent. A similar conflict of interest arose in the LaRouche case. However, no dismissal occurred. Instead, the rights of LaRouche and his co-defendants to a fair trial were sacrificed, to maintain the "deniability" of covert government operations. - The Boston Case - Lyndon LaRouche was indicted on one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice by a federal grand jury in Boston in June 1987. Starting in October 1986, a number of other individuals and corporations had already been indicted on the same and related charges. On Aug. 21, 1987, attorneys for LaRouche and his co-defendants gave formal notice under CIPA of their intention to use certain information at trial that might be classified. It indentified certain channels of communication and discussion between the defendants and the CIA, and a number of activities undertaken at the request of the U.S. government. This included "back-channel" discussions with Soviet representatives concerning the Strategic Defense Initiative. It also included information about anti-LaRouche operations conducted by the FBI and other sections of the intelligence community such as financial disruption operations and slanders of LaRouche. The defendants also made extensive discovery requests for exculpatory material in government files, that is, information tending to show the defendants innocent. Specifically cited were harassment activities carried out under E.O. 12333. The administration's response was two-fold, aimed at maintaining the "deniability" of intelligence operations involving LaRouche or against LaRouche. 1) Prosecutors forwarded the defendants' CIPA proffer to the CIA for review. On the eve of trial, the CIA advised prosecutors that no classified information was involved--with the exception of a "briefing book" submitted by the defendants, which had been prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies and provided to LaRouche; the document concerned LaRouche's proposals on the SDI. At the last minute, a messenger burst into the courtroom to inform the judge that the CIA had just called to say that the briefing book was not classified. The prosecution team breathed a visible sigh of relief since it meant the trial could proceed. 2) Prosecutors simultaneously ridiculed, as an "Orwellian fantasy," the defendants' assertions about their intelligence agency contacts, and about government harassment of the defendants and covert operations conducted under E.O. 12333. Nevertheless, Judge Keeton did order limited amounts of discovery of exculpatory evidence. The prosecutors agreed to an "all-agency" search for documents pertaining to the defendants. Time and again as the trial proceeded, documents would surface from a government agency, which would then assert that no further documents existed--only to have new documents appear a few weeks later. This was a particular pattern with the CIA. It became a frequent occurrence for the FBI or CIA (and once the NSA) to send a courier to the Boston courtroom with a locked briefcase full of classified documents. These would then be examined for "relevance" by Judge Keeton, who almost invariably pronounced them "not relevant" to the defense. Defense attorneys and their clients, those who could best discern the possible relevance of the documents, were never allowed to see them! This is in marked contrast to the Fernandez case, for example. The first real break in the government's facade of "deniability" came on March 7, 1988, when one of the defendants obtained a declassified document found in Lt. Col. Oliver North's office safe. The telex, from Gen. Richard Secord to Lt. Col. North, contained the passage: "Our man here says Lewis has collected info against LaRouche." The North-Secord memo was not provided in discovery to the LaRouche defendants, but was obtained by them independently through a Freedom of Information Act request to the office of Irangate Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. Prosecutors then located a second document from the FBI. The fight over declassification of this document almost led to the chief prosecutor's withdrawal from the case. When the FBI refused to declassify the document, lead prosecutor John Markham announced in court that he had a "conflict of interest" with his client--the U.S. government. His case was out the window if the document wasn't declassified. The government finally declassified. The document referred to FBI contacts with a trio of freelance soldiers of fortune (Lewis, Howard, and Tucker), saying, "They claimed that they had previously been requested by the FBI and CIA to penetrate the LaRouche organization." This revelation was particularly explosive because the LaRouche defendants' contention had been that intelligence agencies had been infiltrating and disrupting their operations to set them up for prosecution. The trial proceedings were suspended as Judge Keeton ordered the FBI and CIA to search for other exculpatory documents pertaining to Lewis, Howard, Tucker, and other individuals. Then on March 10, 1988, Judge Keeton further ordered a search of the files of Vice President George Bush and various government agencies. (Bush had a direct supervisory role over the secret committees which oversaw the covert operations in which North and others were involved.) LaRouche and his co-defendants had asserted that North's operations were intended to silence them due to their opposition to the Contra policy. The prosecutors reported that the search did not turn up any additional "relevant" documents, and succeeded in persuading Judge Keeton to narrow the scope of the search, preventing further disclosures on the Lewis-Howard-Tucker matter. - Witness an FBI Informant - But meanwhile, another bombshell exploded. After 55 days of trial, the prosecution disclosed documents revealing that one of its witnesses, Ryan Quade Emerson, who had attempted to "plant" evidence in a defendant's notebook, was a paid FBI informant! The government's failure to disclose this was ruled a clear violation of the obligation to provide exculpatory evidence to the defendants. Much of the information about Emerson which the government had been hiding was classified, and the dispute over these classified documents almost resulted in the dismissal of the case. By the end of March, the trial was in a state of constant disruption because of hearings on government misconduct and classified information. On March 31, Judge Keeton ruled that various documents in the Emerson file were relevant and potentially exculpatory and should be disclosed to the defense. The FBI still refused to declassify. Judge Keeton ruled on April 6 that five more files contained exculpatory evidence and should be disclosed. Prosecutor Markham was directed by the FBI to submit a set of sanitized "admissions" in lieu of disclosing the classified files. On April 11, Judge Keeton rejected the prosecution's second attempt at fashioning proposed admissions to substitute for the seven FBI files. However, on April 15, Keeton accepted the government's final proposal, saying that these gave the defendants sufficient information without declassifying the documents. The "admissions" stipulated that Emerson had been an FBI informant for many years, on both criminal and national security matters, that he had been paid and subsidized by the FBI in his journalistic endeavors, and that he was regarded as an "opportunist" by some of his FBI control agents. The government and Emerson both denied that he had any other connections to the intelligence community--although he had represented himself to the defendants as an emissary from various officials in the intelligence community, including, most notably, NSC head John Poindexter. Ultimately, Keeton did rule that there had been "serious" misconduct by the government, which he termed "institutional and systemic prosecutorial misconduct," in violating their obligations to provide exculpatory evidence to the defendants. But in holding that the misconduct was "institutional," Keeton let the individual prosecutors off the hook. Even though most of the disputes over classified documents and government misconduct took place outside the presence of the Boston jury, the jurors had gotten enough of a whiff. After the mistrial, they said they would have acquitted LaRouche and all defendants on all counts. Said one, "There was too much question of government misconduct...." - The Alexandria Railroad - It was clear that LaRouche and his co-defendants were likely to win in any retrial. So, the "Get LaRouche" Task Force conspired to transfer the LaRouche case to the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. Chief Judge Albert V. Bryan, Jr. sat on the super-secret special court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (the "FISA court"). Bryan could be presumed intimately familiar with covert intelligence operations, including those directed against LaRouche. LaRouche and his six co-defendants had only three weeks to prepare pretrial motions. They were still able to file 28 pretrial motions, including a detailed, 62-page Motion for Disclosure of Exculpatory Evidence, containing 181 specific requests, and a separate notice under CIPA, saying the defendants "reasonably expect to cause the disclosure of classified information in connection with this case." At a Nov. 10, 1988 hearing, defense attorney Daniel Alcorn told the court that this case "is different than any other CIPA case," because "the defendants are not former government agents or current government agents who were given access to classified information while in the employ of the government," but rather, "they have been investigated by classified means." That afternoon, Judge Bryan denied every defense motion, including all motions for exculpatory evidence and classified information, and went even further, granting a government motion in limine, which, in combination with his denial of access to all government classified files on LaRouche, prevented the defendants from presenting evidence of government harassment and "dirty tricks." During the trial, Nov. 21-Dec. 15, 1988, the issue of classified information could not even arise. With such suppression of evidence, plus a rigged jury to boot, it was no surprise that LaRouche and his six co-defendants were convicted after a trial lasting less than four weeks.