After Germany had declared war on the US, multiple large companies were found to still be doing business with the Germans, some even going so far as to greatly aid their war effort by providing strategic war materials.
When these companies’ efforts were discovered, Alan Dulles, a high ranking CIA official, stepped in and came to the defence of these companies as he was the legal counsel for Brown Brothers Harriman and a senior partner to Sullivan & Cromwell, heavily involved within the accused organisations.
Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen (supposedly including key members of Brown Brothers Harriman and Sullivan & Cromwell) were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with Butler as its leader, and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to stop him from going to war against Germany. In 1934, Butler testified before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormack-Dickstein Committee") on these claims.
After they had been caught attempting to mount a military cue against Franklin Roosevelt, they came into the Roosevelt administration during the war and took high positions in the state department and defence department and in the newly created office of strategic services to utilize their talents in the war, on behalf of the American administration, to act as a peace offering, so they could retain their positions within the American government.
However, using their new strategic positions they facilitated the escape from Europe of the major ranking officials in the Nazi government, as well as high ranking S.S military officials and brought them to South America, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay and they established a base of operations for the Fourth Reich of which they would continue functioning from South America.
They made a deal with the head of anti-soviet intelligence, in the third Reich, Reinhard Gehlen and put him in charge of the intelligence services of the newly founded west - German nation state.
They went on to establish an academy anti-communist special warfare training academy in which they trained 1200 men between 1947 - 1965 whom they infiltrated into the highest ranks of the intelligence community, all of the allied nations in the west causing a type of shadow government between them.
They even established the secret Anderson Trust, in which they had taken the gold, platinum, silver and jewel's which they recovered from the Philippines and kept the rest of the government in the dark and did not make congress aware.
They put these 1.2 trillion dollars’ worth of valuables into the hands of Brown Brothers Harriman, two of the major senior partners of BBH, Robert A. lovit and Robert Anderson were two of the three trustees for this.
They then used this money to supress any of the democratic socialist movements anywhere in Europe and Japan
They used these bases of operations in South America, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay for eliminating opponents, such as Operation Condor, in which they assassinated their opponents.
It was based in the security department of Pemex, a Mexican national oil company, in which they set up a heroin trafficking operation out of the golden triangle, in cooperation with the mafia, who were also right wing anti-communists from Italy.
They worked with the mafia to smuggle Opium, in which they used for the production of Heroin, into the United States through Havana, Cuba.
They worked with the fascist Dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and Paul Halliwell, a Cia agent.
They used a portion of the profits from this trade to supplement the Anderson trust, in order to finance their current covert operations.
Their main goal was to create a central intelligence agency, Robert Lovett, a trustee of the Anderson Trust and a senior partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, lead a commission
April 12 1945 Franklin Roosevelt died, Harry S. Truman ascended to the presidency and found himself at the mercy of the individuals in the O.S.S, the state department and the defence department who had rapidly advanced throughout the organisations after receiving training at the anti-communist special training academy and who had now began to manipulate Harry into adopting an anti-communist perspective.
They began to engage in covert operations to try and assemble a major network in Europe working with Reinhard Gehlen, in an attempt to neutralize the effectiveness of the Russian government.
They established a domestic privately funded intelligence organisation, composed of two separate private groups, the foreign intelligence digest from Dallas and the field operations intelligence, which was partly funded by William Pauley.
The two major commissions that were recommending the creation of a new central intelligence agency were the Lovett commission, chaired by Robert Lovett, senior partner of Brown Brothers Herriman and the Doolittle commission, the chairman of which was the aforementioned William D Pauley, who was close friends with Batista the Cuban Dictator and Santo Trafficante, the head of the mafia at the time.
They funded these domestic intelligence organisations because they wanted to engage in anti-subversive intelligence gathering in the United States at the same time that they were moving to try and get a official agency established to engage in covert operations abroad.
All these key players of this cabal were lobbying Harry Truman to approve the creation of the CIA and eventually succeeded, the national security council directive 5412 authorised the CIA to undertake specific operations to which Harry originally did not want them to have this type of authority but Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1952 and allowed it.
The CIA was essentially set up to defend the capitalist economic system of which the CIA pushers were the primary beneficiary’s of, they established an agency that could work directly with the fascists in south America.
Ironically, one of the principal requirements of setting up the Central Intelligence Agency was that it not be allowed to engage in any domestic activity as there was a fear that an intelligence agency like this, functioning within the United States could end up establishing dominion and power over the political parties and neutralizing the effectiveness of the government.
Alan Dulles, the legal council for Brown Brothers Herriman was made the first civilian director of the CIA under the Eisenhower administration.
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that "The Dulles brothers were traitors." Some historians believe that Allen Dulles became head of the newly formed CIA in large part to cover up his treasonous behaviour and that of his clients.
Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy." They really only wanted "absolute power."
Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again "in hell."
THE OSS: FORERUNNER TO THE CIA.
The “multinational” business of drug trafficking can be traced back to the 1940s, even before the CIA was created following World War II. Before the creation of the CIA in 1947, Allen Dulles assembled the Flying Tigers, an inner clique within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Dulles had close ties with Eastern billionaire families, and he was able to run clandestine operations out of the White House.
The OSS-mafia alliance emerged soon after the agency was formed. The OSS was first headed by Earl Brennan who helped plan the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy in World War II. During the war, He had close ties with the head of the Vatican’s Vessel Operation, Monsignor Giovanni Batista Montini who was also an aid to Pope Pius XII. Montini suggested that Brennan recruit Italian exiles such as Masons business leaders, and mafia members to corroborate with the Allies in their invasion. In 1963, Montini become Pope Paul VI.
Colonel Paul Hellwell of the OSS began to smuggle heroin from Burma and sold it in ghettos in the United States. Grown in Burma and processed in Shanghai, OSS agents ran across this bonanza while attempting to bolster the right wing regime of Chiang Kai-shek and to prevent Mao Tse Tung from ascending to power.
Flying Tigers were OSS mercenaries who were financed with secret funds. Hellwell observed how Chiang sold opium to Chinese addicts and used the revenue to purchase weapons for his troops.
Hellwell created Sea Supply, an OSS proprietary company, out of Miami and used it to carry guns across the ocean to China. The opium was grown in Burma, so Hellwell moved on to Southeast Asia in order to consolidate his operation.
In the late 1940s, Hellwell was named the Burmese consulate in Miami and was able to secure a monopoly on opium in Burma. From there, opium was processed in Shanghai, and then it was exported to the United States on Sea Supply boats. In return, Hellwell shipped guns back to China.
The OSS used the mob to distribute heroin in big cities throughout the United States.
THE CIA’S DRUG CONNECTION.
After World War II, the OSS created a situation which helped revive the Sicilian-American mafia and the Corsican underworld. The alliance with the mafia was maintained by the CIA in order to check the growing strength of the Italian Communist Party. For example, the Corsicans in Marseilles smuggled raw opium from Turkey and refined it into high grade heroin for export to the United States. Marseilles relied on a handful of expert chemists who were able to produce high grade number four heroin. After the transformation of the OSS into the CIA, Marseille’s Corsicans fell under the protection of the French intelligence service which allowed heroin trafficking to operate for another 20 years. By 1965, Marseilles syndicates were able to double their production and operated between 20 and 25 laboratories which produced 50 to 150 kilograms of heroin each month. It was estimated that 4.8 tons of pure heroin was exported to the United States in 1965 alone.
The American government was concerned that both the French and Italian communist parties would rise to power in free elections in their respective countries. On the Homefront, the government was concerned of the rising strength of the New York longshoremen’s union and a series of strikes which threatening to erupt a year after World War II ended. To counter the communist parties’ influence in France and Italy as well as to stamp out the longshoremen’s power in New York, the newly formed CIA turned to the mafia’s drug traffickers. The mafia connection assured the CIA the resources which they critically needed: hit-men to help carry out their illicit operations and additional funds to help finance their activities.
After spending 10 years of a 30-to-50 year sentence in prison for drug trafficking, New York’s mafia leader Lucky Luciano was given clemency and released from Albany’s Great Meadows Prison in 1946. In exchange, he promised to cooperate with American authorities. He returned to Italy and was able to build a black market which had been abandoned by the Genovese family. He then expanded his operations by forging close ties with the Marseilles syndicate. He imported raw opium from the Middle East and processed it in laboratories in Italy. Luciano’s top deputy was Meyer Lansky who had first contacted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Luciano initially purchased 200 kilos of heroin and shipped it on to Cuba. Lansky was given a monopoly on Cuba’s gambling operations plus assurances that Sicilian heroin could be shipped from Marseilles to Havana and on to the United States. In return Batista and his assistants received half the profits from the casinos. Lansky and Luciano chose Sicilian-born Santos Trafficante of Florida to run the Cuban gambling and drug business. Luciano made sure that Havana’s prostitutes were addicted to heroin and paid them with diluted forms of the drugs as well.
The CIA armed and funded the Corsican syndicates to break up longshoremen’s strikes in 1947 and 1950. Harry Bridges had been known for his leadership in general strikes in San Francisco in 1934, and he moved on to New York City where he worked to unionize dock workers. The CIA paid the mafia to assault and harass union leaders and workers. Some were even murdered. The CIA also used psychological warfare against the unions. Anti-union pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and posters discouraged workers from continuing the strike.
Meanwhile in Europe, the CIA continued to work with drug traffickers in its war to thwart the election of communists in democratic elections. By the late 1940s, Marseilles had become the post-war heroin capital of the Western world. And Italy’s mafia still maintained its strength as the most powerful component in Europe.
The CIA’s protection of the Corsican syndicate continued into the 1970s. Frank Matthews, one of the East Coast’s prime heroin dealers, brought in $130 million annually. In 1973, he was finally arrested for drug trafficking in Las Vegas. Matthews was released on $325,000 bail and returned to New York with $20 million in cash. According to the Justice Department charges against nine of his suppliers were dropped at the insistence of the CIA which contended that prosecutions would jeopardize national security interests.
The Italian mafia continued to maintain a stronghold in the United States. In the 1950s, the CIA once again turned to the mafia to foil communism — this time in Cuba. The very year that the right wing Batista government was overthrown, Operation 40 was organized as an assassination unit to kill Fidel Castro. Organized crime leaders Santo Trafficante and John Roselli, with the knowledge of Vice President Nixon, were heavily involved in importing drugs from Laos. After the failure at the Bay of Pigs two years later, Operation 40 was replaced by Operation Mongoose, a larger scale paramilitary organization. Its purpose was also to overthrow the Castro regime. The CIA officials who directed Operation Mongoose were Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines. Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban refugee, was hired to be a member of a special assassination team. Rodriguez worked under Shackley in Miami, Florida. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, dozens of anti-Castro sympathizers were indicted for drug trafficking.
After the defeat of the French at Dienbienphu in 1954, the United States quickly moved to fill the void. In that decade, over a thousand tons of opium was being cultivated in the Golden Triangle — Laos, Burma, and Thailand. This amounted to 70 percent of the entire world’s illicit opium supply. In addition, this marked the first time that number three heroin (three to six percent pure) was being refined. As a result, the Thai government launched an opium suppression campaign which compelled most of the planters to switch to heroin. In the 1960s large quantities of number three heroin were being refined in Bangkok and northern Thailand. It was during this decade that both Shackley and Clines were transferred from Florida to run CIA operations in the heart of Southeast Asia as well as in the heart of the world’s largest heroin region.
KHUN SA AND THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE. During the heated cold war in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, large scale decisions were made by the CIA in its Langley, Virginia headquarters. The agency’s operants were given a large scale of autonomy in the field. The agency did not ask questions as long as those on the payroll produced results. One of the major objectives of these factions was to gain control of opium trade in their regions. A large amount of duplicity, which included tortures and murders, occurred among various groups: CIA headquarters, its operants in the field, and drug lords.
The Thyssens' steel business had suffered greatly from Germany's defeat, and old August Thyssen had decided to guard against future setbacks by creating a system of private banks. He founded one in Berlin and another in the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In the wake of Harriman's trip, a third bank was added to the network, the Union Banking Corporation, founded in New York in 1924 with George Herbert Walker as president. Having their own personal banking system made it easy for the Thyssens to move assets around, launder money, conceal profits, and evade taxes.
By 1926, W.A. Harriman was doing so well that Walker gave his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, the gift of making him a vice president. In 1931, W.A. Harriman merged with a British firm to create Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Prescott Bush became a senior partner. During the 1930's, Brown Brothers, Harriman would increasingly direct its clients' investments to German companies. The Rockefeller family was prominent among these clients, and Standard Oil developed particularly close connections with the chemical giant I.G. Farben.
It was into this heady atmosphere of high-level investments and financial manipulation that Allen Dulles entered when he joined the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell in 1926. He would become the lawyer for the Thyssens' Rotterdam bank and would also represent other German firms, including I.G. Farben.
However, there was a serpent in this businessmen's Eden, and its name was Adolph Hitler. August Thyssen's son and successor, Fritz Thyssen, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and had been funding the Nazi Party since 1923. Other German industrialists would do the same. It is hard to say to what extent the American investors shared Thyssen's enthusiasm, though it seems likely that most of them were swayed less by ideology than by the prospect that Hitler would be good for business. Either way, the outcome was that many wealthy and powerful Americans wound up supporting a regime that would ultimately become their own nation's enemy, and investing in the very firms that would provide the core of that regime's military machine.
Early in 1933, both Dulles brothers attended a meeting in Germany where German industrialists agreed to back Hitler's bid for power in exchange for his pledge to break the German unions. A few months later, John Foster Dulles negotiated a deal with Hitler's economics minister whereby all German trade with the United States would be coordinated through a syndicate headed by Averell Harriman's cousin. With the Nazis enforcing a favourable climate for business, the profits for Thyssen and other companies soared, and the Union Banking Corporation increasingly became a Nazi money-laundering machine. In 1934, George Herbert Walker placed Prescott Bush on Union Bank's board of directors, and Bush and Harriman also began to use the bank as the basis for a complex and deceptive system of holding companies.
The Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, which Harriman and Walker had controlled since 1920, had a particularly high degree of Nazi involvement in its operations.
In 1934, a congressional investigation revealed it to have become a front for I.G. Farben's spying, propaganda, and bribery on behalf of the German government. Rather than advising Walker and Harriman to divest themselves of these tainted assets, Prescott Bush hired Allen Dulles to help conceal them. From 1937 on, the Dulles brothers would serve Bush and Harriman in all their covert dealings with Nazi firms.
They also performed similar cloaking services for others, like the Rockefellers.
It goes without saying that Harriman, Walker, Bush, and Dulles were morally tainted by their connections with German firms like Thyssen and I.G. Farben, since they both funded and profited from Hitler's crimes against humanity. However, their entire enterprise was corrupt in a more subtle sense as well, in that its very basis was financial fraud on an unprecedented scale. That would have been true even if Hitler had never come to power. The real significance of adding the Nazis to the equation was that it upped the stakes, both increasing the potential rewards for the participants and forcing them into increasingly elaborate deceptions to conceal their frauds.
The American government was not the only object of these deceptions. In the late 1930's, Fritz Thyssen, worried about the economic impact of the oncoming war, started concealing his assets. He placed many of them under the names of distant relatives in Holland and also moved large amounts of cash through his family's Rotterdam bank and from there to the Union Banking Corporation in New York. He was aided in this by Prescott Bush, George Herbert Walker, and Allen Dulles.
He put his property into the hands of various non-Jewish friends before fleeing Europe and then returned after the war to reel it all back in. But Thyssen was no sweet old Jewish granny, and his machinations and those of his American friends amounted to treason against both nations.
After the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 brought the United States into the war, the close associations of so many of its leading industrialists with German firms began to catch up with them. For example, it was discovered that Standard Oil had engaged in a cartel with I.G. Farben to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal for the Nazis.
They had renewed this agreement even after war broke out in Europe in 1939 and had supplied certain patents to the Germans while keeping them hidden from the U.S. Navy and American industry.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the principal owner of Standard Oil, claimed he had no involvement in day-to-day operations, leaving the blame to fall entirely on company chairman William S. Farish.
Farish, whose daughter was married to Averell Harriman's nephew, pled "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy in March of 1942 and agreed to make the patents available in the US. However, fresh revelations kept coming out, and Farish was called repeatedly to testify before a Senate committee investigating national defence.
His health broken by the increasingly hostile questioning, he collapsed and died of a heart attack in November 1942.
At the same time, in October of 1942, Prescott Bush was charged with running Nazi front groups, and all shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian. The elaborate system of holding companies which Bush and Harriman had created in association with the bank started unravelling as well.
The CIA was eventually Established September 1947 and specializes in Propaganda, Economic warfare, Sabotage and Demolition.
By early 1950's they controlled over 25 newspapers and wire agencies and had 3000 plus employees engaged in propaganda.
The CIA had essentially paid workers within the media to push Propaganda.
Journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included members of the New York Times, Time Magazine, News Week, Washington Post and CBS Television.
The CIA's gaining of influence eventually gave birth to the Military Industrial Complex, which came about as a result of the perceived institutional need among government policy makers for some sort of intelligence coordination after WW2.
It was used to generate imperial bases around the world for the projection of US military power, in order to open markets for the major corporations and businesses, to get access to these strategic raw materials and boost profits.
When these companies’ efforts were discovered, Alan Dulles, a high ranking CIA official, stepped in and came to the defence of these companies as he was the legal counsel for Brown Brothers Harriman and a senior partner to Sullivan & Cromwell, heavily involved within the accused organisations.
Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen (supposedly including key members of Brown Brothers Harriman and Sullivan & Cromwell) were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with Butler as its leader, and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to stop him from going to war against Germany. In 1934, Butler testified before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormack-Dickstein Committee") on these claims.
After they had been caught attempting to mount a military cue against Franklin Roosevelt, they came into the Roosevelt administration during the war and took high positions in the state department and defence department and in the newly created office of strategic services to utilize their talents in the war, on behalf of the American administration, to act as a peace offering, so they could retain their positions within the American government.
However, using their new strategic positions they facilitated the escape from Europe of the major ranking officials in the Nazi government, as well as high ranking S.S military officials and brought them to South America, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay and they established a base of operations for the Fourth Reich of which they would continue functioning from South America.
They made a deal with the head of anti-soviet intelligence, in the third Reich, Reinhard Gehlen and put him in charge of the intelligence services of the newly founded west - German nation state.
They went on to establish an academy anti-communist special warfare training academy in which they trained 1200 men between 1947 - 1965 whom they infiltrated into the highest ranks of the intelligence community, all of the allied nations in the west causing a type of shadow government between them.
They even established the secret Anderson Trust, in which they had taken the gold, platinum, silver and jewel's which they recovered from the Philippines and kept the rest of the government in the dark and did not make congress aware.
They put these 1.2 trillion dollars’ worth of valuables into the hands of Brown Brothers Harriman, two of the major senior partners of BBH, Robert A. lovit and Robert Anderson were two of the three trustees for this.
They then used this money to supress any of the democratic socialist movements anywhere in Europe and Japan
They used these bases of operations in South America, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay for eliminating opponents, such as Operation Condor, in which they assassinated their opponents.
It was based in the security department of Pemex, a Mexican national oil company, in which they set up a heroin trafficking operation out of the golden triangle, in cooperation with the mafia, who were also right wing anti-communists from Italy.
They worked with the mafia to smuggle Opium, in which they used for the production of Heroin, into the United States through Havana, Cuba.
They worked with the fascist Dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and Paul Halliwell, a Cia agent.
They used a portion of the profits from this trade to supplement the Anderson trust, in order to finance their current covert operations.
Their main goal was to create a central intelligence agency, Robert Lovett, a trustee of the Anderson Trust and a senior partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, lead a commission
April 12 1945 Franklin Roosevelt died, Harry S. Truman ascended to the presidency and found himself at the mercy of the individuals in the O.S.S, the state department and the defence department who had rapidly advanced throughout the organisations after receiving training at the anti-communist special training academy and who had now began to manipulate Harry into adopting an anti-communist perspective.
They began to engage in covert operations to try and assemble a major network in Europe working with Reinhard Gehlen, in an attempt to neutralize the effectiveness of the Russian government.
They established a domestic privately funded intelligence organisation, composed of two separate private groups, the foreign intelligence digest from Dallas and the field operations intelligence, which was partly funded by William Pauley.
The two major commissions that were recommending the creation of a new central intelligence agency were the Lovett commission, chaired by Robert Lovett, senior partner of Brown Brothers Herriman and the Doolittle commission, the chairman of which was the aforementioned William D Pauley, who was close friends with Batista the Cuban Dictator and Santo Trafficante, the head of the mafia at the time.
They funded these domestic intelligence organisations because they wanted to engage in anti-subversive intelligence gathering in the United States at the same time that they were moving to try and get a official agency established to engage in covert operations abroad.
All these key players of this cabal were lobbying Harry Truman to approve the creation of the CIA and eventually succeeded, the national security council directive 5412 authorised the CIA to undertake specific operations to which Harry originally did not want them to have this type of authority but Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in 1952 and allowed it.
The CIA was essentially set up to defend the capitalist economic system of which the CIA pushers were the primary beneficiary’s of, they established an agency that could work directly with the fascists in south America.
Ironically, one of the principal requirements of setting up the Central Intelligence Agency was that it not be allowed to engage in any domestic activity as there was a fear that an intelligence agency like this, functioning within the United States could end up establishing dominion and power over the political parties and neutralizing the effectiveness of the government.
Alan Dulles, the legal council for Brown Brothers Herriman was made the first civilian director of the CIA under the Eisenhower administration.
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once stated that "The Dulles brothers were traitors." Some historians believe that Allen Dulles became head of the newly formed CIA in large part to cover up his treasonous behaviour and that of his clients.
Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy." They really only wanted "absolute power."
Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again "in hell."
THE OSS: FORERUNNER TO THE CIA.
The “multinational” business of drug trafficking can be traced back to the 1940s, even before the CIA was created following World War II. Before the creation of the CIA in 1947, Allen Dulles assembled the Flying Tigers, an inner clique within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Dulles had close ties with Eastern billionaire families, and he was able to run clandestine operations out of the White House.
The OSS-mafia alliance emerged soon after the agency was formed. The OSS was first headed by Earl Brennan who helped plan the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy in World War II. During the war, He had close ties with the head of the Vatican’s Vessel Operation, Monsignor Giovanni Batista Montini who was also an aid to Pope Pius XII. Montini suggested that Brennan recruit Italian exiles such as Masons business leaders, and mafia members to corroborate with the Allies in their invasion. In 1963, Montini become Pope Paul VI.
Colonel Paul Hellwell of the OSS began to smuggle heroin from Burma and sold it in ghettos in the United States. Grown in Burma and processed in Shanghai, OSS agents ran across this bonanza while attempting to bolster the right wing regime of Chiang Kai-shek and to prevent Mao Tse Tung from ascending to power.
Flying Tigers were OSS mercenaries who were financed with secret funds. Hellwell observed how Chiang sold opium to Chinese addicts and used the revenue to purchase weapons for his troops.
Hellwell created Sea Supply, an OSS proprietary company, out of Miami and used it to carry guns across the ocean to China. The opium was grown in Burma, so Hellwell moved on to Southeast Asia in order to consolidate his operation.
In the late 1940s, Hellwell was named the Burmese consulate in Miami and was able to secure a monopoly on opium in Burma. From there, opium was processed in Shanghai, and then it was exported to the United States on Sea Supply boats. In return, Hellwell shipped guns back to China.
The OSS used the mob to distribute heroin in big cities throughout the United States.
THE CIA’S DRUG CONNECTION.
After World War II, the OSS created a situation which helped revive the Sicilian-American mafia and the Corsican underworld. The alliance with the mafia was maintained by the CIA in order to check the growing strength of the Italian Communist Party. For example, the Corsicans in Marseilles smuggled raw opium from Turkey and refined it into high grade heroin for export to the United States. Marseilles relied on a handful of expert chemists who were able to produce high grade number four heroin. After the transformation of the OSS into the CIA, Marseille’s Corsicans fell under the protection of the French intelligence service which allowed heroin trafficking to operate for another 20 years. By 1965, Marseilles syndicates were able to double their production and operated between 20 and 25 laboratories which produced 50 to 150 kilograms of heroin each month. It was estimated that 4.8 tons of pure heroin was exported to the United States in 1965 alone.
The American government was concerned that both the French and Italian communist parties would rise to power in free elections in their respective countries. On the Homefront, the government was concerned of the rising strength of the New York longshoremen’s union and a series of strikes which threatening to erupt a year after World War II ended. To counter the communist parties’ influence in France and Italy as well as to stamp out the longshoremen’s power in New York, the newly formed CIA turned to the mafia’s drug traffickers. The mafia connection assured the CIA the resources which they critically needed: hit-men to help carry out their illicit operations and additional funds to help finance their activities.
After spending 10 years of a 30-to-50 year sentence in prison for drug trafficking, New York’s mafia leader Lucky Luciano was given clemency and released from Albany’s Great Meadows Prison in 1946. In exchange, he promised to cooperate with American authorities. He returned to Italy and was able to build a black market which had been abandoned by the Genovese family. He then expanded his operations by forging close ties with the Marseilles syndicate. He imported raw opium from the Middle East and processed it in laboratories in Italy. Luciano’s top deputy was Meyer Lansky who had first contacted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Luciano initially purchased 200 kilos of heroin and shipped it on to Cuba. Lansky was given a monopoly on Cuba’s gambling operations plus assurances that Sicilian heroin could be shipped from Marseilles to Havana and on to the United States. In return Batista and his assistants received half the profits from the casinos. Lansky and Luciano chose Sicilian-born Santos Trafficante of Florida to run the Cuban gambling and drug business. Luciano made sure that Havana’s prostitutes were addicted to heroin and paid them with diluted forms of the drugs as well.
The CIA armed and funded the Corsican syndicates to break up longshoremen’s strikes in 1947 and 1950. Harry Bridges had been known for his leadership in general strikes in San Francisco in 1934, and he moved on to New York City where he worked to unionize dock workers. The CIA paid the mafia to assault and harass union leaders and workers. Some were even murdered. The CIA also used psychological warfare against the unions. Anti-union pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and posters discouraged workers from continuing the strike.
Meanwhile in Europe, the CIA continued to work with drug traffickers in its war to thwart the election of communists in democratic elections. By the late 1940s, Marseilles had become the post-war heroin capital of the Western world. And Italy’s mafia still maintained its strength as the most powerful component in Europe.
The CIA’s protection of the Corsican syndicate continued into the 1970s. Frank Matthews, one of the East Coast’s prime heroin dealers, brought in $130 million annually. In 1973, he was finally arrested for drug trafficking in Las Vegas. Matthews was released on $325,000 bail and returned to New York with $20 million in cash. According to the Justice Department charges against nine of his suppliers were dropped at the insistence of the CIA which contended that prosecutions would jeopardize national security interests.
The Italian mafia continued to maintain a stronghold in the United States. In the 1950s, the CIA once again turned to the mafia to foil communism — this time in Cuba. The very year that the right wing Batista government was overthrown, Operation 40 was organized as an assassination unit to kill Fidel Castro. Organized crime leaders Santo Trafficante and John Roselli, with the knowledge of Vice President Nixon, were heavily involved in importing drugs from Laos. After the failure at the Bay of Pigs two years later, Operation 40 was replaced by Operation Mongoose, a larger scale paramilitary organization. Its purpose was also to overthrow the Castro regime. The CIA officials who directed Operation Mongoose were Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines. Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban refugee, was hired to be a member of a special assassination team. Rodriguez worked under Shackley in Miami, Florida. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, dozens of anti-Castro sympathizers were indicted for drug trafficking.
After the defeat of the French at Dienbienphu in 1954, the United States quickly moved to fill the void. In that decade, over a thousand tons of opium was being cultivated in the Golden Triangle — Laos, Burma, and Thailand. This amounted to 70 percent of the entire world’s illicit opium supply. In addition, this marked the first time that number three heroin (three to six percent pure) was being refined. As a result, the Thai government launched an opium suppression campaign which compelled most of the planters to switch to heroin. In the 1960s large quantities of number three heroin were being refined in Bangkok and northern Thailand. It was during this decade that both Shackley and Clines were transferred from Florida to run CIA operations in the heart of Southeast Asia as well as in the heart of the world’s largest heroin region.
KHUN SA AND THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE. During the heated cold war in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, large scale decisions were made by the CIA in its Langley, Virginia headquarters. The agency’s operants were given a large scale of autonomy in the field. The agency did not ask questions as long as those on the payroll produced results. One of the major objectives of these factions was to gain control of opium trade in their regions. A large amount of duplicity, which included tortures and murders, occurred among various groups: CIA headquarters, its operants in the field, and drug lords.
The Thyssens' steel business had suffered greatly from Germany's defeat, and old August Thyssen had decided to guard against future setbacks by creating a system of private banks. He founded one in Berlin and another in the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In the wake of Harriman's trip, a third bank was added to the network, the Union Banking Corporation, founded in New York in 1924 with George Herbert Walker as president. Having their own personal banking system made it easy for the Thyssens to move assets around, launder money, conceal profits, and evade taxes.
By 1926, W.A. Harriman was doing so well that Walker gave his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, the gift of making him a vice president. In 1931, W.A. Harriman merged with a British firm to create Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Prescott Bush became a senior partner. During the 1930's, Brown Brothers, Harriman would increasingly direct its clients' investments to German companies. The Rockefeller family was prominent among these clients, and Standard Oil developed particularly close connections with the chemical giant I.G. Farben.
It was into this heady atmosphere of high-level investments and financial manipulation that Allen Dulles entered when he joined the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell in 1926. He would become the lawyer for the Thyssens' Rotterdam bank and would also represent other German firms, including I.G. Farben.
However, there was a serpent in this businessmen's Eden, and its name was Adolph Hitler. August Thyssen's son and successor, Fritz Thyssen, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and had been funding the Nazi Party since 1923. Other German industrialists would do the same. It is hard to say to what extent the American investors shared Thyssen's enthusiasm, though it seems likely that most of them were swayed less by ideology than by the prospect that Hitler would be good for business. Either way, the outcome was that many wealthy and powerful Americans wound up supporting a regime that would ultimately become their own nation's enemy, and investing in the very firms that would provide the core of that regime's military machine.
Early in 1933, both Dulles brothers attended a meeting in Germany where German industrialists agreed to back Hitler's bid for power in exchange for his pledge to break the German unions. A few months later, John Foster Dulles negotiated a deal with Hitler's economics minister whereby all German trade with the United States would be coordinated through a syndicate headed by Averell Harriman's cousin. With the Nazis enforcing a favourable climate for business, the profits for Thyssen and other companies soared, and the Union Banking Corporation increasingly became a Nazi money-laundering machine. In 1934, George Herbert Walker placed Prescott Bush on Union Bank's board of directors, and Bush and Harriman also began to use the bank as the basis for a complex and deceptive system of holding companies.
The Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, which Harriman and Walker had controlled since 1920, had a particularly high degree of Nazi involvement in its operations.
In 1934, a congressional investigation revealed it to have become a front for I.G. Farben's spying, propaganda, and bribery on behalf of the German government. Rather than advising Walker and Harriman to divest themselves of these tainted assets, Prescott Bush hired Allen Dulles to help conceal them. From 1937 on, the Dulles brothers would serve Bush and Harriman in all their covert dealings with Nazi firms.
They also performed similar cloaking services for others, like the Rockefellers.
It goes without saying that Harriman, Walker, Bush, and Dulles were morally tainted by their connections with German firms like Thyssen and I.G. Farben, since they both funded and profited from Hitler's crimes against humanity. However, their entire enterprise was corrupt in a more subtle sense as well, in that its very basis was financial fraud on an unprecedented scale. That would have been true even if Hitler had never come to power. The real significance of adding the Nazis to the equation was that it upped the stakes, both increasing the potential rewards for the participants and forcing them into increasingly elaborate deceptions to conceal their frauds.
The American government was not the only object of these deceptions. In the late 1930's, Fritz Thyssen, worried about the economic impact of the oncoming war, started concealing his assets. He placed many of them under the names of distant relatives in Holland and also moved large amounts of cash through his family's Rotterdam bank and from there to the Union Banking Corporation in New York. He was aided in this by Prescott Bush, George Herbert Walker, and Allen Dulles.
He put his property into the hands of various non-Jewish friends before fleeing Europe and then returned after the war to reel it all back in. But Thyssen was no sweet old Jewish granny, and his machinations and those of his American friends amounted to treason against both nations.
After the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 brought the United States into the war, the close associations of so many of its leading industrialists with German firms began to catch up with them. For example, it was discovered that Standard Oil had engaged in a cartel with I.G. Farben to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal for the Nazis.
They had renewed this agreement even after war broke out in Europe in 1939 and had supplied certain patents to the Germans while keeping them hidden from the U.S. Navy and American industry.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the principal owner of Standard Oil, claimed he had no involvement in day-to-day operations, leaving the blame to fall entirely on company chairman William S. Farish.
Farish, whose daughter was married to Averell Harriman's nephew, pled "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy in March of 1942 and agreed to make the patents available in the US. However, fresh revelations kept coming out, and Farish was called repeatedly to testify before a Senate committee investigating national defence.
His health broken by the increasingly hostile questioning, he collapsed and died of a heart attack in November 1942.
At the same time, in October of 1942, Prescott Bush was charged with running Nazi front groups, and all shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian. The elaborate system of holding companies which Bush and Harriman had created in association with the bank started unravelling as well.
The CIA was eventually Established September 1947 and specializes in Propaganda, Economic warfare, Sabotage and Demolition.
By early 1950's they controlled over 25 newspapers and wire agencies and had 3000 plus employees engaged in propaganda.
The CIA had essentially paid workers within the media to push Propaganda.
Journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included members of the New York Times, Time Magazine, News Week, Washington Post and CBS Television.
The CIA's gaining of influence eventually gave birth to the Military Industrial Complex, which came about as a result of the perceived institutional need among government policy makers for some sort of intelligence coordination after WW2.
It was used to generate imperial bases around the world for the projection of US military power, in order to open markets for the major corporations and businesses, to get access to these strategic raw materials and boost profits.
