Mitchell Livingston WerBell III (1918–1983) was the son of a former cavalry officer in the czarist Russian Army. He served with the Office of Strategic Services in China, Burma, and Indo-China during World War II. After the war, WerBell briefly went into public relations, then turned to designing silencers for military rifles and machine guns, at which he became an acknowledged expert.
WerBell worked as a mercenary during the 1950s, advising both Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republican and the Batista regime in Cuba. The Cuba connection brought him into contact with a lot of people in the CIA/organized crime nexus, which is why his name sometimes shows up in Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.
In 1966-67, he was involved with a plot by anti-Castro Cubans and Haitian exiles to overthrow Duvalier in Haiti. The plot was subsidized by CBS News, which had obtained film rights, but the participants were arrested by the FBI before it could be carried out. WerBell was released without charges.
WerBell designed a silencer for sniper rifles that was widely used in Vietnam, and according to one source “in the late 1960s he traveled to and from Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, with a high security clearance and the temporary rank of U.S. Army general, to confer with the appropriate CIA or foreign officials on the subject of ‘programmatic liquidations.'” (This was later confirmed by General John K. Singlaub.)
WerBell was in the business of manufacturing silenced machine guns from 1967 to 1973 and was also involved in plots in the Bahamas in 1972 and in Panama in 1973. However, after being indicted for allegedly trying to sell weapons to Robert Vesco, he got out of arms sales and into security and counter-terrorism. According to Wikipedia, WerBell developed a training center whose students “included members of the military, high-risk executives, CIA agents, and private individuals.”
In 1976, WerBell was charged in Florida with conspiring to import marijuana from Columbia. His defense was that he’d been working for Nixon’s Drug Enforcement Agency to develop sophisticated assassination devices to use against drug smugglers. He was acquitted after the main prosecution witness died in a mysterious plane crash.
In 1977, WerBell started providing security for Lyndon LaRouche, drawing heavily on his counter-terrorism trainees. In May 1978, he hosted a meeting of right-winger which was attended by General John K. Singlaub just a few days before his forced retirement for criticizing President Carter. Singlaub lectured at WerBell’s training facility in 1982.
In 1980, WerBell provided security for Larry Flynt (who had been shot in 1978.) Around the same time, he was training security forces for Afghanistan.
General John K. Singlaub was born July 10, 1921 and died January 29, 2022. He served with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and then with the CIA, becoming deputy chief in South Korea during the Korean War. He spent two years in Vietnam during the Vietnam War and was commander of the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force (MACSOG). However, he strenuously denied having played any part in Operation Phoenix, the notorious assassination operation run by that unit.
In 1978, while serving as chief of staff of the United Nations Command in South Korea, Singlaub publicly criticized President Jimmy Carter’s decision to reduce the number of US troops in Korea and was forced to retire.
According to Third World Traveler’s The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era, “Ten days before his retirement, in May 1978, Singlaub attended a meeting of right-wingers who ‘didn’t think the country was being run properly and were interested in doing something about it.’ The meeting was hosted by Mitch WerBell, a conspiratorial colleague of Singlaub from their OSS days together at Kunming in China. … Singlaub then began a series of co-ordinated visits to Central America, with Generals Graham and Sumner, laying the basis for Reagan’s current support of the contras in Nicaragua.”
In 1981, Singlaub founded a new US affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League after the previous affiliate had become discredited by its fascist connections. The United States Council for World Freedom (USWCF) was established with support from Joseph Coors and is also said to have received a $16,500 loan from the Taiwanese branch of WACL. USCWF soon became the most active branch of WACL.
Singlaub additionally served as WACL chairman from 1984 to 1986, during the period when it was a principal channel for covert support to the Nicaraguan Contras from the Reagan White House and Colonel Oliver North served as White House liaison to WACL. Singlaub was indicted for these activities in 1986 and 1988.
Singlaub was also a member of a number of other right-wing and anti-communist groups. In the late 1980s, he participated in attempts to uncover caches of “Japanese gold” allegedly secreted during World War II in Indonesia and the Philippines.
Theodore Shackley (1927-2002) joined the CIA in the early 1950s and rose to become station chief in Miami in 1962-65, when it was heavily focused on Castro’s Cuba, following the abortive Bay of Pigs operation. He oversaw the operation known as JMWAVE that was dedicated to overthrowing Castro’s government and was the largest CIA operation in the world.
In 1966-68, Shackley served as CIA station chief in Laos, where he oversaw the secret war of Hmong tribesman against the North Vietnamese and suspected communists. He allegedly paid them in part with the profits of the trade in opium, which the Hmong grew and which was flown to Thailand by the CIA’s Air America.
Shackley then became station chief in Vietnam, where his drug-smuggling operation ballooned after Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. visited Saigon in 1968. The profits went to fund the assassination squads of Operation Phoenix, although Shackley himself was not in charge of those operations.
Shackley’s associates during this period included Thomas Clines, who oversaw the Hmong in Laos; Richard Secord, who coordinated the arms and drugs flights; Richard Armitage, who was a naval officer in Saigon and later an embassy employee in Thailand; Donald Gregg; and Felix Rodriguez.
In February 1972, Shackley returned to the US and became head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, which was focused on the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, which occurred on September 11, 1973. It has been claimed that Shackley coordinated with P2, which is said to have been implicated in the coup.
Meanwhile, Clines and Secord remained in Vietnam, where the excess profits of the heroin trade were allegedly smuggled out of the country and deposited in an account in the money-laundering [[Nugan Hand Bank]], which had been established in Australia in 1973. They also allegedly smuggled weapons out of Vietnam and stories them in Thailand. After the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975, they increasingly went rogue and kept both the money and the arms under their own control.
Around this time, Shackley and Clines sent Armitage to Iran to set up an unauthorized operation that would funnel drug money from Southeast Asia and create a covert assassination program for the Shah. In late 1975 or early 1976, [[Edwin Wilson]] of Air America was sent to head this program and train the secret police, SAVAK, in assassination techniques. Secord was also in Iran at this time. This operation helped lead to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.
George H.W. Bush became CIA director in January 1976, and Shackley was made Deputy Director of Operations that May, with the expectation that he would eventually succeed Bush as director. However, when Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977, he replaced Bush with Stansfield Turner, who began dismantling the covert operations apparatus and pulled Shackley’s people out of Iran. Shackley himself was demoted at the end of 1977.
Over the next couple of years, Shackley, Clines, Wilson, Secord, and former CIA employee Frank Terpil were involved in various covert businesses, with a focus on Middle Eastern arms dealing. Wilson’s arms sales to Colonel Qaddafi eventually got them all in trouble and led to Shackley and Clines being forced out of the CIA in 1979.
Shackley still had hopes of returning to the CIA as director if Carter was defeated. He supported Bush’s presidential aspirations and continued to meet with Bush during the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign. There are rumors that he helped set up the October Surprise.
By then, Wilson had become involved in supplying arms to the Contras in Nicaragua and also allegedly in the cocaine trade. During the 1980s, Shackley, Clines, and Secord were all involved in the Reagan administration’s off-the-books support for the Contras, and allegedly in the arms and drugs trade as well.
During the Vietnam War, Theodore Shackley and Donald Gregg were running a CIA racket in which the proceeds of opium-smuggling funded assassinations. In 1970, Felix Rodriguez joined them. This was the heart of the later “Enterprise.”
It was Shackley who allegedly formed the Military Assistance Group-Special Operations Group (MAG-SOG), where John K. Singlaub was a commander and Oliver North and Richard Secord were officers. By 1971, the group is said to have killed about 100,000 civilians in Southeast Asia.