William Casey (1913-87) served as Ronald Reagan’s campaign director in 1980. He then became head of the CIA and was known for his extensive use of a private intelligence network and off-the-book operations.
As described by Susan Trento in The Power House, “Covert action, once reserved for the professionals in the Central Intelligence Agency, became the province of conservative ideologues working for an Administration that did not play by constitutional rules and did not trust the entrenched professionals.”
Casey appears to have worked primarily through:
James Jesus Angleton (1917-87) served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. He played a significant role in the founding of the CIA in 1947 and later became the deputy director for counterintelligence, in which position he maintained extensive connections with Israeli intelligence. He was forced into retirement in December 1974, following journalist Seymour Hersh’s revelations that his division had been involved in illegal domestic operations against anti-war activists.
Angleton became an associate editor of the American Security Council’s Journal of International Relations in 1977/78, when neo-Nazi Roger Pearson was editor. He died in 1987, just five days after CIA Director William Casey.
Cord Meyer is one of those murky individuals whose careers naturally beget conspiracy theories.
In the late 1940s, Meyer spearheaded the American Veterans Committee’s anti-communist purges. He met Timothy Leary at the second AVC national convention in 1948, and this connection is one reason some people suspect Leary of having been a CIA agent.
Meyer started working for the CIA around 1949 and joined formally in 1951. He became the principal operative for Operation Mockingbird — a CIA program that allegedly planted propaganda in US media — and by the late 1950s was running the CIA’s European trade union infiltration effort. He served as London station chief from 1973 to 1976 and retired from the CIA in 1977.
Meyer was married to Mary Pinchot, whose sister Tony Pinchot was married to Ben Bradlee. According to Wikipedia:
In 1952 Bradlee joined the staff of the Office of U.S. Information and Educational Exchange (USIE). …. USIE produced films, magazines, research, speeches, and news items for use by the CIA throughout Europe. USIE (later known as USIA) also controlled the Voice of America, a means of disseminating pro-American ‘cultural information’ worldwide. … Bradlee was officially employed by USIE until 1953, when he began working for Newsweek.
While based in France, Bradlee divorced his first wife and married Antoinette Pinchot. At the time of the marriage, Antoinette’s sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was married to Cord Meyer, a key figure in Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to influence the media. Antoinette Bradlee was also a close friend of Cicely d’Autremont, who was married to James Jesus Angleton. Bradlee worked closely with Angleton in Paris. At the time, Angleton was liaison for all Allied intelligence in Europe.”
Cord and Mary were divorced in 1958. She then had an affair with John Kennedy, which was revealed in 1963, and there are rumors they had used LSD together. Mary was mysteriously shot and killed in 1964. After her death, Ben and Tony Bradlee said they had seen Angleton, who was the trustee of her children, break into her house in an attempt to make off with the diary describing her affair with JFK.
Reinhard Gehlen (1902-79) was a top Nazi intelligence officer who was in charge of spying on the Soviet Union. As World War II was drawing to a close, he deliberately surrendered to the Americans, bringing with him an extensive archive on the Soviets, and offered to make a deal in exchange for exemption from being prosecuted for war crimes.
The Office of Strategic Services accepted Gehlen’s offer and over the next few years reestablished his anti-Soviet espionage apparatus as the Gehlen Organization. When the CIA was created in 1947, Gehlen became central to its operations in Eastern Europe.
Gehlen’s people were also deeply involved in setting up the intelligence apparatus for NATO when it was created in 1949. The Gehlen Organization was allegedly rife with former Nazis, and this fascist element is said to have carried over into NATO.
When West Germany established its own intelligence service, the Bundesnachtrichtendienst (BND), in 1955, Gehlen became its first director. He retired in 1968.
(Continued from Allen Dulles
Allen Dulles’s activities between the final days of World War II in 1945 and when he became director of the CIA in 1951 were shrouded in obscurity at the time. The full story has emerged only in bits and pieces and is still murky enough to give rise to unfounded speculations and conspiracy theories. The general picture, however, seems fairly clear.
Like many Americans, Dulles was aware that the United States would be coming out of the war as a global power and could not slide back into isolationism as it had after World War I. As a Wall Street lawyer, however, he dreamed not of peace and freedom but of a world dominated by American financial and business interests. He was implacably opposed to the Soviet Union and saw the restoration of German economic power as an essential bulwark against communism. He was also fully prepared to work with ex-Nazis, particularly when they were men of his own social class.
Questions remain as to whether Dulles’s actions during and after the war reached the level of actual treason and to what extent he may have engaged in a cover-up on behalf of himself and his associates. However, it appears undeniable that for such men class loyalties came before national interests — and that their priorities exerted a powerful distorting influence over US foreign policy.
Operation Sunrise
During World War II, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services and became head of its crucial Bern, Switzerland station. Switzerland was one of the few neutral nations in Europe and was notorious for being a hotbed of intrigue.
In March 1945, when Russian forces were already advancing on Berlin, Dulles became involved in Operation Sunrise, a secretive attempt to do an end run around both Hitler and the Russians by negotiating a separate surrender of German forces in northern Italy. Dulles’s partner in these negotiations was SS General Karl Wolff, a former banker and owner of a public relations firm who had joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and become chief of staff to Heinrich Himmler. Wolff was sent to Italy in 1943 and became military governor of northern Italy after the collapse of Mussolini’s regime.
A few days after his initial talks with Dulles, Wolff held additional meetings with American general Lyman Lemnitzer and British general Terence Airey, who had entered Switzerland disguised as Irish businessmen. The Soviet Union was informed of these negotiations by US Ambassador Averell Harriman but was excluded from participating. Their well-founded objections to what they saw as an American and British attempt to reach a separate peace caused the negotiations to collapse. This incident fueled Russian distrust of the West and may have helped precipitate the Cold War.
When Wolff was taken into custody by the British after the war and charged with war crimes, Dulles intervened]] repeatedly on his behalf and Lemnitzer also provided an affidavit in support. Wolff’s own statements suggested that he had received promises of protection from both men. He ultimately received a lenient sentence that was further reduced to time served, and he was released in 1949.
Wolff returned to public relations work but was indicted again by German authorities in 1962, not long after Dulles had been forced to resign as head of the CIA. He was convicted in 1964, but General Lemnitzer, who was then Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe, continued to press for clemency. Wolff was released from prison in 1971 on grounds of poor health.
The Bank of International Settlements
Towards the end of World War II, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Assistant Secretary Harry Dexter White promoted a plan that called for the partial deindustrialization of Germany and the breakup of its industrial cartels and banking system. This plan was endorsed by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1943 and was still official US policy in May 1945, when President Harry Truman directed US occupation forces to “take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany.”
Morgenthau and White also supported the dissolution of the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, which had a history of close ties to the Nazis and was alleged to have handled looted Nazi gold during the war. A resolution to that effect was approved at the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944 but was never enforced. As described by Wikipedia:
… the Norwegian delegation put forth evidence that the BIS was guilty of war crimes and put forth a motion to dissolve the bank; the Americans, specifically President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, supported this motion. This resulted in a fight between, on one side, several European nations, the American and the Norwegian delegation, led by Henry Morgenthau and Harry Dexter White; and on the other side, the British delegation, headed by John Maynard Keynes and Chase Bank representative Dean Acheson, who tried to veto the dissolution of the bank. …
This dissolution, which was originally proposed by Norway and supported by other European delegates, as well as the United States and Morgenthau and Harry Dexter White, was never accomplished. In July 1944, Dean Acheson interrupted Keynes in a meeting, fearing that the BIS would be dissolved by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Keynes went to Henry Morgenthau to prevent or postpone the dissolution of the BIS, but the next day the dissolution of the BIS was approved. The British delegation did not give up, however, and the dissolution of the bank was still not accomplished when Roosevelt died. In April 1945, the new president Harry S. Truman and the British suspended the dissolution and the decision to liquidate the BIS was officially reversed in 1948.
Both the abandonment of plans to deindustrialize Germany and the willingness to let BIS off the hook were justified at the time by the onset of the Cold War. However, researcher Peter Dale Scott has suggested that there were also “deeper aspects” surrounding these events and points to the influence of Allen Dulles, who was deeply committed to both German reindustrialization and the retention of the prewar banking system in which BIS played a central role.
According to Scott, Dulles was motivated in part by a desire to overturn New Deal restrictions on banking. He was also a personal friend of Thomas McKittrick, a fellow Wall Street lawyer and OSS agent who had been the wartime president of BIS. In addition to dealing with the Nazis during the war, McKittrick had continued to protect German industrialists as the war ended, promising them that he would “preserve the industrial substance of the Reich.”
McKittrick suffered no ill effects from his divided loyalties but returned home after the war to a position at Chase Manhattan Bank, followed by an administrative role with the Marshall Plan, which was set up in 1948 to oversee the reconstruction of Europe.
Scott quotes from James Calvin Baker, who notes that McKittrick’s actions were successfully concealed for the next fifty years:
And for nearly 50 years, the operations involving the the BIS and Swiss banks and looted assets by the Nazis were hidden in classified documents…. The U.S. Treasury Department [under White] tracked Nazi gold as it moved in and out of the BIS. Several of these transactions were found to have occurred between the BIS and major Swiss banks. From these Swiss banks, money was used by the Nazis to purchase war materiel or was wired to accounts in Spain, Argentina, and the Middle East.
McKittrick was suspected by Allied authorities of helping Axis countries acquire funds the U.S. government had tried to freeze. He maintained that the BIS was neutral and that no looted gold was held by the BIS. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, had found evidence that McKittrick had collaborated with the Nazis. A report given to President Bill Clinton alleged that the Axis powers had virtually taken over the BIS.
Allen Dulles’s private intelligence operation
The Office of Strategic Services was disbanded in September 1945, with its research and analysis branch being folded into the State Department and its covert operations into the Department of War. The Central Intelligence Agency would not come into existence until the passage of the National Security Act two years later. Meanwhile, Allen Dulles perceived an opening that he took it upon himself to fill with his own private intelligence operation.
As described by Joseph Trento in Prelude to Terror:
Allen Welsh Dulles, who had run the famous Bern (Switzerland) Station of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, was now running a private intelligence service out of an office at 44 Wall Street, using some of the biggest names in American business. Dulles did it because he felt he had to. “The Soviets were throwing everything they had at us. The NKVD (later the KGB) were eating us alive, and Washington could not make up its mind about what to do on intelligence,” said Robert T. Crowley, a former aide to Dulles. In Washington, a fight had broken out about who should run the United States intelligence service, or even whether it needed one. J. Edgar Hoover wanted to control overseas intelligence collection through the FBI.
Dulles did not wait while the politicians debated. In the two years between the end of World War II and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, Dulles, who had done business with Hitler’s supporters before the war, began a massive ex-Nazi recruitment campaign, using a State Department refugee office as a front. The enemy was now Communism; anyone, no matter how unsavory, who was willing to oppose Communism was an ally and a friend to be sought out and courted. Dulles made sure that investment bankers and lawyers who had done business with the Germans before and even during the war were back in touch with their old German contacts. In 1951, when he moved over to the new CIA, he brought with him the networks and assets he had recruited as a private citizen. His knowledge of how Hitler and his cronies had risen to power, and of which Americans had financed that rise, helped make recruiting in the postwar American business community “a lot easier,” according to Crowley. Recruitment was so easy that Crowley and a colleague ran an entire CIA office devoted solely to working with executives of major corporations.
This account raises two interesting points. One is the implication that Dulles was not only prepared to deal with ex-Nazis and Americans who had done business with them but actively used his knowledge of those connections to blackmail people into working for him. The other is the suggestion that the CIA had from the start an “off the books” quality, a resistance to the ordinary institutions and procedures of government. If that was so, then William Casey’s off-the-books operations in the 1980s were not an anomaly but part of the Agency’s very nature.
July 5, 2015
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.
Ray S. Cline (1919-96) served in the Office of Strategic Services in China during World War II and then in the CIA. He was the key CIA analyst on Korea from 1949 to 1952 and is believed to have authored an infamous CIA report that failed to predict the North Korean invasion, which occurred just a few days later. He then served as a liaison agent between the American and British services and finally became CIA station chief in Taiwan (1958-62).
The authors of an expose titled Inside the League assert that covert U.S. funding played a role in the establishment of the World Anti-Communist League and that Cline may have participated in this effort when preparatory meetings were held in Taiwan in 1958.
When newly-appointed CIA Director John McCone reorganized the agency in 1962, Cline became deputy director for intelligence and played a major role in the Cuban missile crisis that fall.
Cline is said to have become disillusioned with Lyndon B. Johnson, and at his own request he left Washington in 1966 and became a special coordinator and advisor to the US ambassador to Germany. He returned to DC during the Nixon administration and served as director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department from 1969 to 1973, when he retired.
According to an article which appeared in the Village Voice in 1988, when George H.W. Bush was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, Cline boasted during the primaries that he intended to “organize something like one of my old CIA staffs” to help Bush win. The New York Times reported that Bush, who had been CIA director from January 1976 to January 1977, received offers of campaign assistance from many former CIA officials and that even some active CIA agents may have worked for his campaign. Cline then became a top adviser to the Reagan-Bush campaign.
Cline attended World Anti-Communist League conferences in 1980, 1983, and 1984.
Cline spent his later years writing studies on geopolitics in which he advised that the United States must counter the superior size and resources of Eurasia with overseas bases, air power, and a three-ocean navy. He also focused on terrorism in works such as “Terrorism: Seedbed for Soviet Influence,” Terrorism as State-Sponsored Covert Welfare and Terrorism: The Soviet Connection.
The OSS in China
As described by Henrik Kruger in The Great Heroin Coup – Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism, “The place was Kunming in the South China province of Yunnan. The time was the end of World War II. Amid the chaos of war, opium and gold became the primary media of exchange, and cult-like bonds were forged among a small staff of Americans and high-ranking Chinese. Yunnan was a center of Chinese opium cultivation and Kunming was the hotbed of military operations, among them Claire Chennault’s 14th Air Force and Detachment 202 of the Office of Strategic Services.
Third World Traveler’s The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era also describes Kunming as “the very center of the World War II KMT drug traffic” and notes that “according to the Wall Street Journal, OSS payments at this base were frequently made with five-pound shipments of opium.” (The KMT was Chiang Kai-shek’s party, the Kuomintang, which ruled China until the communist takeover in 1949.)
Many members of Detachment 202 later joined the CIA, with Ray Cline and John K. Singlaub having the most public careers. Several others were involved in the shadier side of things, often involving operations that replicated the Kunming pattern of arms supplies funded by illicit drugs.
Paul Helliwell set up the CIA proprietaries Air America and Sea Supply to support the KMT on Taiwan and used them to carry on an arms-for-drugs trade involving KMT troops that had taken refuge in Burma. In 1960, he was transformed to the CIA’s Cuban operations out of Miami, where he worked with drug-dealing Cuban exiles and founded offshore money-laundering banks that were also used by organized crime.
E. Howard Hunt had an extended CIA career and was at times associated with Lucien Conein, who had not been a member of Detachment 202 but had met Hunt while he was stationed in Kunming. Conein was the CIA’s top expert on Southeast Asia and was allegedly involved in the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. He is also said to have served as the CIA’s liaison to the Corsican Mafia, who were deeply involved in the Saigon drug trade and were buying off the Vietnamese government.
Hunt and Conein worked together in the Nixon White House, along with another Kunming veteran, Mitch WerBell, who never officially joined the CIA.
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.