ALSO BY PETER DALE SCOTT

The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam

(1966, with Franz Schurmann and

Reginald Zelnik)

The War Conspiracy (1972, 2008)

The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond

(1976, with Paul Hoch and Russell

Stetler)

Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the

Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate

Connection (1977)

The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret

Teams and Covert Operations in the

Reagan Era (1987, with Jonathan

Marshall and Jane Hunter)

Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about

Terror (1988, 1989, poetry)

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and

the CIA in Central America (1991,

1992, 1998, with Jonathan Marshall)

Listening to the Candle: A Poem on

Impulse (1992, poetry)

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

(1993, 1996)

Crossing Borders (1994, poetry)

Deep Politics II: The New Revelations

in Government Files, 1994–1995

(1994, 2007)

Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the

Year 2000 (2000, poetry)

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States

in Afghanistan, Colombia, and

Indochina (2003)

The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and

the Future of America (2007)

The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the

Deep Politics of War (2008)

Mosaic Orpheus (2009, poetry)

American War Machine: Deep Politics,

the CIA Global Drug Connection,

and the Road to Afghanistan (2010,

2014)

Tilting Point (2012, poetry)

Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

(2013, formerly Deep Politics II)

The American

Deep State

The American

Deep State

Wall Street, Big Oil,

and the Attack on

U.S. Democracy

PETER DALE SCOTT

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

A wholly owned subsidiary of The

Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group,

Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200,

Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

16 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BT,

United Kingdom

Copyright © 2015 by Peter Dale Scott

All rights reserved. No part of this book

may be reproduced in any form or by any

electronic or mechanical means,

including information storage and

retrieval systems, without written

permission from the publisher, except by

a reviewer who may quote passages in a

review.

British Library Cataloguing in

Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data

Scott, Peter Dale.

The American deep state : Wall Street,

big oil, and the attack on U.S. democracy

/ Peter Dale Scott.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and

index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-1424-8 (cloth : alk.

paper)—ISBN 978-1-4422-1426-2

(electronic) 1. Elite (Social sciences)—

United States. 2. Power (Social

sciences)—United States. 3. Interest

groups—United States. 4. Wall Street

(New York, N.Y.) 5. Conspiracy—

United States. 6. Democracy—United

States. I. Title.

HN90.E4S43 2015

305.5'20973—dc23

2014029231

The paper used in this publication

meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for

Information Sciences—Permanence of

Paper for Printed Library Materials,

ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note about the Cover Image

1 The Doomsday Project, Deep

Events, and the Shrinking of

American Democracy

2 The Deep State, the Wall Street

Overworld, and Big Oil

3 The Doomsday Project: How COG

on 9/11 Subordinated the U.S.

Constitution

4 The Falsified War on Terror: The

Deep History of U.S. Protection for

al-Qaeda Terrorist Ali Mohamed

5 The Falsified War on Terror II:

How the Deep State Has Protected

Gulf Arab States Rather than the

American People

6 Deep State Uses and Protection of

al-Qaeda Terrorists

7 The U.S. Terror War: The CIA,

9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia

8 Deep Power Takes Its Toll on U.S.

Presidents, 1961–1980

9 The Doomsday Project and Deep

Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-

Contra, and 9/11

10 The American Deep State, Deep

Events, and Off-the-Books

Financing

11 America’s Unchecked Security

State: The Continuity of COG

Planning, 1936–2001

12 America’s Unchecked Security State

and Lawlessness

13 Why Americans Must End

America’s Self-Generating Wars

Epilogue—Greek Theater: Mario Savio

and the Socratic Quest

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Permissions

About the Author

Acknowledgments

I COULD NEVER HAVE FINISHED THIS BOOK

WITHOUT THE GENEROUS assistance of

three skilled editors: Mark Selden at

Japan Focus, my French translator

Maxime Chaix, and my wife Ronna

Kabatznick. I also owe a great debt to

the guidance and patience of my editors,

Susan McEachern and Jehanne

Schweitzer at Rowman & Littlefield,

and to the many people who have

offered me support, advice and criticism

over the last few years. Among these I

would particularly like to thank Daniel

Ellsberg, Jonathan Marshall, Gary

Aguilar, Paul Hoch, Brian Kabatznick,

Rex Bradford, Jefferson Morley, David

Talbot, and Karen Croft. For my thinking

about the deep state in particular, I

would like once again to acknowledge

my general debt to Ola Tunander and

Eric Wilson.

My thanks to Freeman Ng for his

generous assistance and perseverance

with the cover of this book. And my

thanks to the copyeditor Naomi Mindlin

who devoted so much labor to these

pages, to my indexer PJ Heim, and to my

longtime agent, Victoria Shoemaker.

My thanks and love to all my family

and close friends who have suffered

with me through these last four years.

My greatest debt of all can never be

acknowledged enough or too often: to

my wife Ronna Kabatznick, who has

sustained me now for a quarter century,

and given me the life I so cherish. I wish

to say to her here, in the words of

Hermann Hesse, “If I know what love is,

it is because of you.”

Note about the

Cover Image

MANY PEOPLE ARE UNAWARE THAT ON THE

MORNING OF 9/11, DURING THE attack on

the Pentagon, the so-called “Doomsday

plane,” the E-4B, appeared briefly in the

forbidden air space over the White

House and the Capitol. (For CNN’s

account, which CNN soon took off the

Internet, go to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=4upVtXLJ3Ps.) The E-4B, a product

of Continuity of Government (COG)

planning, is a survivable mobile

command post, based at Offutt AFB in

Nebraska, for the National Command

Authority (the President and Secretary of

Defense, though neither were in it that

day). Its purpose, to quote CNN, is “to

keep the government running no matter

what, even in the event of a nuclear war,

the reason it was nicknamed the

‘Doomsday plane’ during the Cold War.”

Its presence on 9/11 has never been

officially acknowledged or explained;

unofficially it has been attributed to a

war game scheduled for the same day.

Metaphorically the E-4B flyover of the

White House on 9/11 symbolizes the

way COG plans (the so-called

“Doomsday Project”) on that day

preempted constitutional authority,

sending the President against his will to

the E-4B’s base at Offutt.

CHAPTER 1

The Doomsday

Project, Deep

Events, and the

Shrinking of

American

Democracy

I know the capacity that is there to

make tyranny total in America, and

we must see to it that this agency

[the National Security Agency] and

all agencies that possess this

technology operate within the law

and under proper supervision, so

that we never cross over that abyss.

That is the abyss from which there

is no return.

—Senator Frank Church (1975)

IN RECENT YEARS I HAVE BECOME MORE

AND MORE CONCERNED WITH THE

interactions between three important and

alarming trends in recent American

history. The first is America’s increasing

militarization, and above all its

inclination, even obsession, to involve

itself in needless and pernicious wars.

(As former President Jimmy Carter has

rightly noted, “The rest of the world,

almost unanimously, looks at America as

the No. 1 warmonger.” 1) The second,

closely related, is the progressive

shrinking of public politics and the rule

of law as they are subordinated, even

domestically, to the requirements of

covert U.S. operations abroad.

The third, also closely related, is the

important and increasingly deleterious

impact on American history of what I

have called deep events: events, like the

JFK assassination, the Watergate break-

in, or 9/11, which repeatedly involve

lawbreaking or violence, are mysterious

to begin with, are embedded in ongoing

covert processes, have consequences

that enlarge covert government, and are

subsequently covered up by systematic

falsifications in media and internal

government records.

One factor linking Dallas, Watergate,

the 1980 “October Surprise” plot to

prevent Carter’s reelection, Iran-Contra,

and 9/11 has been the background

involvement in all these deep events of

personnel from America’s highest-level

emergency planning, that is, Continuity

of Government (COG) planning, known

inside the Pentagon as “the Doomsday

Project.” The implementation of COG

plans on 9/11 was the culmination of

decades of such planning, and has

resulted in the permanent militarization

of the domestic United States, and the

imposition at home of institutions and

processes designed for domination

abroad.

Writing about these deep events as

they occurred over the decades, I have

been interested in the interrelations

among them. It is now possible to show

how each was related both to those

preceding it, and those which followed.

In this chapter, I would like to go still

further, and propose a framework to

analyze the ongoing forces underlying all

of the most important deep events, and

how they have contributed to the

political ascendance of what used to be

called the “military-industrial complex.”

I hope to describe certain impersonal

governing laws that determine the

sociodynamics of all large-scale

societies (often called empires) that

deploy their surplus of power to expand

beyond their own borders and force their

will on other peoples. This process of

expansion generates predictable trends

of behavior in the institutions of all such

societies, and also in the individuals

competing for advancement in those

institutions. In America it has converted

the military-industrial complex from a

threat at the margins of the established

civil order, to a pervasive force

dominating that order.

With this framework I hope to

persuade readers that in some respects

our recent history is simpler than it

appears on the surface and in the media.

Our society, by its very economic

successes and consequent expansion, has

been breeding impersonal forces both

outside and within itself that are

changing it from a bottom-up elective

democracy into a top-down empire. And

among these forces are those that

produce deep events.

I am far from alone in seeing this

degradation of America’s policies and

political processes. A similar pattern,

reflecting the degradation of earlier

empires, was described at length by the

late Chalmers Johnson:

The evidence is building up that in

the decade following the end of the

Cold War, the United States largely

abandoned a reliance on

diplomacy, economic aid,

international law, and multilateral

institutions in carrying out its

foreign policies and resorted much

of the time to bluster, military

force, and financial manipulation. 2

But my analysis goes beyond that of

Johnson, Kevin Phillips, Andrew

Bacevich, and other analysts, in

proposing that three major deep events

—Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11—were

not just part of this degradation of

American democracy, but played a

significant role in shaping it.

As authors like Michael Lind have

observed, for a long time there have

been two prevailing and different

political cultures in America, underlying

political differences in the American

public, and even dividing different

sectors of the American government. 3

One culture is predominantly egalitarian

and democratic, working for the legal

consolidation of human rights both at

home and abroad. The other, less

recognized but with deep historical

roots, prioritizes and teaches the use of

repressive violence against both

domestic and Third World populations

to maintain “order.”

To some extent these two mindsets are

found in all societies. They correspond

to two different and opposing modes of

power and governance that were defined

by Hannah Arendt as “persuasion

through arguments” versus “coercion by

force.” Arendt, following Thucydides,

traced these to “the common Greek way

of handling domestic affairs, which was

persuasion (πείθειν), as well as the

common way of handling foreign affairs,

which was force and violence (βία). ”4 In

another essay, she wrote that “violence

and power [i.e., persuasive power] are

not the same. . . . Power and violence

are opposites; where the one rules

absolutely, the other is absent. ”5

Arendt’s defense of persuasive power

as the norm for an open constitutional

society can be contrasted with the

defense by Harvard Professor Samuel P.

Huntington of top-down, coercive, or

dark power as a prerequisite for social

cohesion. The coercive power extolled

by Huntington was antithetical to that of

persuasion and openness: in his words,

“Power remains strong when it remains

in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it

begins to evaporate.” 6

Arendt admired the American

Revolution for having created a

constitution to ensure the rule of politics

by openness and persuasion. Huntington

in contrast advised the Botha

government of white South Africa on

how to set up a powerful state security

apparatus outside public control. We can

say that Arendt was a theorist of

constitutional power, and Huntington, of

nonconstitutional power. Power “in the

dark” is the essence of what I,

borrowing in 2007 a term from Turkey,

meant by the deep state: a power not

derived from the constitution but outside

and above it, “more powerful than the

public state.” 7 In 2013 the return of the

military to power in Egypt, together with

the revelations about NSA surveillance

by Edward Snowden, gave currency to

the notion of a deep state, which a New

York Times op-ed article defined as “a

hard-to-perceive level of government or

super-control that exists regardless of

elections and that may thwart popular

movements or radical change.” 8 Starting

in chapter 2, I intend to expand on this

definition.

Writing amid the protests and riots of

the 1960s, both Huntington and Arendt

feared that traditional authority was at

risk, threatened (in Arendt’s eyes) by the

contemporary “loss of tradition and of

religion.” A half century later, I would

argue that a far greater danger to social

equilibrium comes now from the deep

state, allied with those on the right who

invoke authority in the name of security,

tradition, and religion. With America’s

huge expansion into the enterprise of

covertly dominating and exploiting the

rest of the world, the open processes of

persuasion, which have been America’s

traditional ideal for handling domestic

affairs, have been increasingly

subordinated to top-down violence.

In terms of this book, the bottom-

upward processes of democracy have

been increasingly supplanted by the top-

downward processes of the deep state.

The deeper strain in history, I would like

to believe, is in the opposite direction:

the ultimate diminution of violence by

the forces of persuasion. Tsarist Russia

became an anachronism waiting to

collapse from its lack of popular roots. I

would wish a better future for America. 9

The current tilt toward top-down

violent or repressive power is defended

rhetorically as a means to preserve

security and social stability, but in fact it

threatens it. As Kevin Phillips and

others have demonstrated, empires built

on violent or repressive power tend to

rise and then fall, often with surprising

rapidity.10 Underlying the discussion in

this chapter is the thesis that repressive

power is unstable, creating dialectical

forces both within and outside its

system. Externally, repressive power

helps create its own enemies, as

happened with Britain (in India), France

(in Indochina), and Russia (in Eastern

Europe).

THE SOCIODYNAMICS OF

REPRESSIVE POWER IN LARGE-

SCALE SOCIETIES

But more dangerous and destabilizing

has been the conversion of those empires

themselves into hubristic mechanisms of

war. The fall of Periclean Athens, which

inspired Thucydides’s reflections, is a

case in point. Thucydides described how

Athens was undone by the overreaching

greed ( pleonexia) of its unnecessary

Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging

America’s follies in Vietnam and Iraq.

Thucydides attributed the rise of this

folly to the rapid change in Athens after

the death of Pericles, and in particular to

the rise of a rapacious oligarchy.11 Paul

Kennedy, Kevin Phillips, and Chalmers

Johnson have described the recreation of

this process in the Roman, Spanish,

Portuguese, Dutch, and British

empires. 12 Its recurrence again in recent

American history corroborates that there

is a self-propelling dynamic of power

that becomes repressive.

It is useful to be reminded of the

historical division between two cultures

in America, which both underlay and

predated the Civil War. 13 But these two

cultures have evolved and been

reinforced by many factors. For example

urbanization in America’s South and

West worked for most of the twentieth

century to meld the two cultures, but

after about 1980 the increasing disparity

of wealth in America tended to separate

them to an extent recalling the Gilded

Age of the nineteenth century.

More importantly, postwar U.S.

history has seen the institutions of

domestic self-government steadily

displaced by an array of new

institutions, like the CIA and Pentagon,

adapted first to the repressive

dominance and control of foreign

populations abroad, and now

increasingly to dominance domestically.

The manipulative ethos of this

repressive bureaucracy promotes and

corrupts those who, in order to be

promoted, internalize the culture of

repressive dominance into a mindset.

The egalitarian mindset is widely

shared among Americans. But

Washington today is securely in the

hands of the global repressive

dominance mindset, and a deepening of

the military-industrial complex into what

in my most recent book I call the

“American war machine.” This

transformation of America represents a

major change in our society. When

Eisenhower warned against the military-

industrial complex in 1961, it was still a

minority element in our political

economy. Today it finances and

dominates both parties, and indeed is

now also financing threats to both

parties from the right, as well as

dominating our international policy. As a

result, liberal Republicans are as scarce

in the Republican Party today as

Goldwater Republicans were scarce in

that party back in 1960.

That change has been achieved partly

by money, but partly as a result of deep

events like the JFK assassination, the

Watergate break-in, and 9/11. As a rule,

each of these deep events is attributed by

our government and media to marginal

outsiders, like Lee Harvey Oswald, or

the nineteen alleged plane hijackers.

I have long been skeptical of these

“lone nut” explanations, but recently my

skepticism has advanced to another

level. My research over four decades

points to the conclusion that each of

these deep events

1. was carried out, at least in part,

by individuals in and out of

government who shared and

sought to promote this repressive

mindset;

2. enhanced (at least in the long

run) the power of the repressive

mindset within the U.S.

government; and

3. formed another stage in a

continuous narrative whose

result has been a transformation

of America into a social system

dominated from above, rather

than governed from below.

Please note that here I am talking

about the result of this continuous

narrative, not about its purpose. In

saying that these deep events have

contributed collectively to a major

change in American society, I am not

attributing them all to a single

manipulative “secret team.” Rather I see

them as flowing from the workings of

repressive power itself, which (as

history has shown many times)

transforms both societies with surplus

power and also the individuals

exercising that surplus power.

We are conditioned to think that the

open institutions of American

governance could not possibly provide a

milieu for plots like 9/11 against public

order. But since World War II covert

U.S. agencies like the CIA have helped

create an alternative world where power

is exercised with minimal oversight,

often at odds with public agencies’

proclaimed policy objectives of law and

order, and often in conjunction with

lawless and even criminal foreign and

domestic elements.

The expansion of this covert world

has occurred principally in Asia. There

covert U.S. decisions were made to

build up drug-financed armies in Burma,

Thailand, and Laos, in a series of

aggressive actions that by the 1960s

involved America in a hot Indochina

War. This war, like the related wars that

ensued later in Kuwait, Iraq, and

Afghanistan, was initiated by America

for a mix of geostrategic and economic

reasons—above all the desire to

establish a dominant U.S. presence in an

important region of petroleum reserves.

One country affected by all these

Asian wars has been the United States

itself. Its expansive forces, backed by

powerful interest groups, are now out of

control, as our managers, like other

empire managers before them, have

“come to believe that there is nowhere

within their domain—in our case,

nowhere on earth—in which their

presence is not crucial.” 14

To illustrate this loss of control, let us

look for a moment at a milieu that I

believe to have been an important factor

in at least some of America’s major

domestic deep events: the CIA’s ongoing

interactions with the global drug

connection.

UNACCOUNTABLE POWER: THE

CIA AND THE RETURN OF THE

GLOBAL DRUG CONNECTION

Since World War II the CIA has made

systematic use of drug trafficking forces

to increase its covert influence—first in

Thailand and Burma, then in Laos and

Vietnam, and most recently in

Afghanistan.15 With America’s expansion

overseas, we have seen more and more

covert programs and agencies, all using

drug traffickers to different and opposing

ends.

In 2004 Time and USA Today ran

major stories about two of the chief

Afghan drug traffickers, Haji Juma Khan

and Haji Bashir Noorzai, alleging that

each was supporting al-Qaeda, and that

Khan in particular “has helped al-Qaeda

establish a smuggling network that is

peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across

the Middle East, Asia and Europe.” 16

Later it was revealed that both

traffickers were simultaneously CIA

assets, and that Khan in particular was

“paid a large amount of cash by the

United States,” even while he was

reportedly helping al-Qaeda to establish

smuggling networks. 17

There is no longer anything surprising

in the news that large U.S. payments

were made to a drug trafficker who was

himself funding the Taliban and al-

Qaeda. The arrangement is no more

bizarre than the CIA’s performance

during the U.S. “war on drugs” in

Venezuela in the 1990s, when the CIA

first set up an anti-drug unit in

Venezuela, and then helped its chief,

Gen. Ramon Guillén Davila, smuggle at

least one ton of pure cocaine into Miami

International Airport. 18

It would be easy to conclude from

these reports that the CIA and Pentagon

intentionally use drugs to help finance

the enemy networks that justify their

overseas operations. Yet I doubt that

such a cynical Machiavellian objective

is ever consciously voiced by those

responsible in Washington.

More likely, it is an inevitable

consequence of the U.S. repressive style

of conducting covert operations. Great

emphasis is put on recruiting covert

assets; and in unstable areas with weak

governance, drug traffickers with their

own ample funds and repressive

networks are the most obvious

candidates for recruitment by the CIA.

The traffickers in turn are happy to

become U.S. assets, because this status

affords them at least a temporary

immunity from U.S. prosecution.19

In a nutshell: I am describing a

development that is not so much

intentional, as a consequence of

repressive dynamics. A related example

would be the CIA’s recurring use of

double agents, again for the reason just

suggested. In the 1998 bombing of the

U.S. Embassy in Kenya, we shall see

that the chief planner was a double

agent, Ali Mohamed, who surveyed the

Embassy and reported to Osama bin

Laden in 1993, just months after the FBI

had told the Royal Canadian Mounted

Police (RCMP) to release him from

detention. 20 In the Mumbai terrorist

attack of 2008, the scene was initially

surveyed for the attackers by a DEA

double agent, David Headley (alias

Daood Sayed Gilani) whom “U.S.

authorities sent . . . to work for them in

Pakistan . . . despite a warning that he

sympathized with radical Islamic

groups.” 21

The central point is that expansion

beyond a nation’s borders engenders a

pattern of repressive power with

predictable results—results that

transcend the conscious intentions of

anyone within that repressive power

system. Newly formed and ill-

supervised agencies spawn

contradictory policies abroad, the net

effect of which is usually both expansive

and deleterious—not just to the targeted

nation but also to America.

This is especially true of covert

agencies, whose practice of secrecy

means that controversial policies

proliferate without either coordination

or review. Since 1945, Asia in

particular has been the chief area where

the CIA has ignored or overridden the

policy directives of the State

Department. As I document in American

War Machine, CIA interventions in

Asia, especially those that escalated into

the Laotian, Vietnam, and Afghan wars,

fostered an ongoing global CIA drug

connection, or what I have called

elsewhere a “dark quadrant of

unaccountable power.”

This drug connection, richly endowed

with huge resources and its own

resources of illegal violence, has a

major stake in both American

interventions and, above all, unwinnable

wars to aggravate the conditions of

regional lawlessness that are needed for

drug trafficking. Thus it makes perfect

sense that the global drug connection has

been an ongoing factor in the creation of

an overseas American empire that most

U.S. citizens never asked for. More

specifically, the dark quadrant has

contributed to all the major deep events

—including Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11,

that have helped militarize America and

overshadow its public institutions. 22

“CONTINUITY OF

GOVERNMENT” (COG) AND THE

MILITARY OCCUPATION OF

AMERICA

I have said that, underlying the surface of

America’s major deep events, there has

been a pattern of conflict between two

mindsets—that of openness and that of

repressive dominance—dating back to

the Civil War and the Indian wars of the

mid-nineteenth century (and before that

to the American Revolution). 23 But it

would be wrong to conclude from this

ongoing pattern of conflict that there is

nothing new in our current situation. On

the contrary, America is in the midst of a

new crisis arising from this very old

antagonism.

Since World War II, secrecy has been

used to accumulate new covert

bureaucratic powers under the guise of

emergency planning for disasters,

planning known inside and outside the

government as the “Doomsday Project.”

Known more recently (and misleadingly)

as “Continuity of Government” (COG)

planning, the Doomsday Project, under

the guiding hands in the 1980s of Oliver

North, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney,

and others, on 9/11 became the vehicle

for a significant change of government.

The extreme repressive powers

accumulated under the guise of the

Doomsday Project were first developed

to control the rest of the world. Now, to

an unprecedented extent, America itself

is being treated as an occupied territory.

These plans, originally concerned

with decapitation of the U.S. government

after a nuclear attack, were

progressively reshaped to deal with the

problem of civil disobedience generally,

and specifically American public

opinion’s resistance to foreign wars.

Indeed COG plans were adapted in the

Reagan era to treat the American people

as a kind of enemy. As Oliver North told

the Iran-Contra Select Committees, “We

didn’t lose the war in Vietnam, we lost

the war right here in this city. ”24 Thus the

Doomsday Project picked up and

expanded the Army’s Operation Garden

Plot plans to deal with anti-war

demonstrations and urban rioting, which

had resulted after the Martin Luther

King, Jr. assassination in the creation of

the Pentagon’s so-called “domestic war

room,” the Directorate of Civil

Disturbance and Planning Operations.

The COG planners also incorporated

earlier Justice Department plans for a

system of detention centers to house the

thousands of known dissidents it had

listed to be picked up immediately in an

emergency. 25

The result of this COG planning was

the package of repressive mechanisms

(which I will discuss in chapter 3 under

their official name of “continuity of

government” or COG plans), that was

prepared over two decades by an elite

COG planning group, and then

implemented on 9/11. The package

included 1) warrantless surveillance (as

has since been confirmed by the

Snowden revelations), 2) warrantless

detention (including unprecedented

abridgments of the right to habeas

corpus), and 3) unprecedented steps

toward the militarization of domestic

security enforcement and shrinking of the

posse comitatus acts.

One recent development, for example,

has been the permanent deployment in

the United States since 2008 of a U.S.

Army Brigade Combat Team. Part of its

dedicated assignment is to be “called

upon to help with civil unrest and crowd

control. ”26 Many people seem to be

unaware that Americans, together with

this Brigade, have lived since 2002

under a U.S. Army Command called

NORTHCOM. 27

The brigade is likely to remain, as a

symbol of our militarized homeland

security, until Congress fulfills its

obligations under the National

Emergencies Act, and hopefully

terminates our thirteen-year national

emergency.

POSTSCRIPT

The following chapters represent

successive efforts to define a system that

is essentially as inchoate and yet

powerful as a weather system—the

American deep state. From diverse

perspectives, and with occasional

corroborative repetitions, I shall try to

describe the presence of a transnational

dark hole at the center of our present

diverse political predicaments.

It is clear that from time to time dark

forces intervene to redirect American

policies, such as Kennedy’s announced

decision in 1963 to start withdrawing

troops from Vietnam, or 9/11, which

launched the global terror war. 28 What is

much more difficult to establish is that

these interventions have anything in

common. To investigate this possibility,

one must look outside the publicly

available archival records we are

trained in universities to work with.

I shall argue that underlying the

accessible institutions and records of the

public state is a deeper, only partially

acknowledged and recorded system, the

deep state. Central to the latter are

various agencies that have been

established outside the scrutiny of

Congress and the public, such as the

CIA, the NSA, and since 1980 the Joint

Special Operations Command (JSOC).

On paper the CIA was created in 1947

by a Congressional statute, but in reality

it was designed and pressed into being

on a reluctant president by bankers and

lawyers like Allen Dulles on Wall

Street. I show in chapter 2, where I

describe the deep state system in the

context of Wall Street and big oil.

In chapter 3 I report how the under-

reported Doomsday Project, COG plans

that were implemented on 9/11, helped

subordinate the U.S. Constitution to the

various emergency procedures just

described in chapter 1—procedures that

in 2014 are still in place.

Chapters 4 to 7 look at falsifications

in authorized accounts of the so-called

“war on terror”—a campaign that has

been invoked to justify these emergency

COG procedures. I discuss how the

“war” has masked the protection

provided by key figures in the U.S.,

Saudi, and Qatari governments to key

members of al-Qaeda, from 1990 until

even after 9/11. More specifically,

chapter 7 looks at hidden motives for the

U.S. Terror War waged since 9/11.

Chapter 8 shows how deep powers

took their toll of successive American

Presidents since 1961, leading to the

case—developed in chapter 9—that

deep events like 9/11, and before it the

Kennedy assassination and Watergate,

are only apparently external intrusions

on to American history. As shown in

chapter 9, on a deeper level they can be

seen as a central and structural part of

the American deep state’s history,

linked, for example, because of the

recurring role in each event of the

emergency communications network set

up by what the Pentagon called the

Doomsday Project.

In Chapter 10 we return to the deep

state itself, reprising old material in the

light of the Saudi and other connections

described in chapters 4 to 9. This leads

to a major new claim, that funds from

kickbacks on major long-term arms sales

to Saudi Arabia “are the common

denominator in all of the major structural

deep events (SDEs) that have afflicted

America since . . . 1976.” These deep

events include both Iran-Contra and

9/11.

To better understand the current attack

on American democracy, chapters 11

and 12 describe the earliest origins of

COG planning, from the Red Scare of

1919, the sometimes illegal surveillance

by J. Edgar Hoover, the state of

emergency proclaimed by Truman in the

Korean War, to the short-lived Huston

Plan of 1970 that was rejected as

unconstitutional by Nixon’s Attorney-

General John Mitchell.

Finally I join with those who assess

the decay of the so-called Pax

Americana into ever widening arms

build-ups and military violence, in the

light of the very similar decay a century

ago of the so-called Pax Britannica. We

need to rescind policies that are as

visibly detrimental to America and the

world today as they were to Britain then.

The problem is that American

institutions are again in the grip of a

collective mania, as they were in the

Palmer raids of 1919 and the McCarthy

persecutions of the early 1950s. People

outside government must work for a

redirection of the U.S. government away

from mania and illegality, like the

awakening that ended the McCarthy era.

But to regain control of their politics,

Americans must learn to understand and

cope with the dark forces of the deep

state.

America, I try to suggest at the end,

has like Britain far more to contribute to

the world than violent power.

CHAPTER 2

The Deep State, the

Wall Street

Overworld, and

Big Oil

I hate to say that big oil is bigger

than the United States Government;

but its favored treatment at the

hands of our government certainly

leads to that conclusion.

—Connecticut Attorney General

Robert. K. Killian1

In some of the faraway countries

where it did business . . . Exxon’s

sway over local politics and

security was greater than that of the

United States embassy. 2

IN THE LAST DECADE IT HAS BECOME MORE

AND MORE OBVIOUS THAT WE have in

America today what the journalists Dana

Priest and William Arkin have called

two governments: the one its

citizens were familiar with,

operated more or less in the open:

the other a parallel top secret

government whose parts had

mushroomed in less than a decade

into a gigantic, sprawling universe

of its own, visible to only a

carefully vetted cadre—and its

entirety . . . visible only to God. 3

And in 2013, particularly after the

military return to power in Egypt, more

and more authors referred to this second

level as America’s “deep state.” 4 Here

for example is the Republican analyst

Mike Lofgren:

There is the visible government

situated around the Mall in

Washington, and then there is

another, more shadowy, more

indefinable government that is not

explained in Civics 101 or

observable to tourists at the White

House or the Capitol. The former is

traditional Washington partisan

politics: the tip of the iceberg that a

public watching C-SPAN sees daily

and which is theoretically

controllable via elections. The

subsurface part of the iceberg I

shall call the Deep State, which

operates according to its own

compass heading regardless of who

is formally in power.5

The political activities of the deep

state are the chief source and milieu of

what I have elsewhere called “deep

politics”: “all those political practices

and arrangements, deliberate or not,

which are usually repressed rather than

acknowledged.” 6 Others, like Tom

Hayden, call the deep state a “state

within the state,” and suggest it may be

responsible for the failure of the Obama

administration to follow the policy

guidelines of the President’s speeches. 7

We can see an antecedent to the notion

of a deep state in Henry Fairlie’s

definition of a prevailing establishment

in Great Britain: “the whole matrix of

official and social relations within

which power is exercised. ”8 A more

relevant antecedent was Wright Mills’s

notion of a tripartite American power

elite, composed of corporate executives,

the military establishment, and a

“political directorate.” 9 Both concepts

are relevant, but Fairlie’s establishment

was more of a restraining than an

enabling force; while Mills’s power

elite (combining both state and deep

state elements), was focused conversely

on those with more open and active

managerial roles. Mills himself

believed, as he wrote in 1958, that

“much of what was once called ‘the

invisible government’ is now part of the

quite visible government.” 10 This was

just six years before the first major

exposure of how powerful the invisible

government of the CIA had become. 11

This expansion of a two-level or dual

state has been paralleled by two other

dualities: the increasing resolution of

American society into two classes—the

“one percent” and the “ninety-nine

percent”—and the bifurcation of the U.S.

economy into two aspects: the domestic,

still subject to some governmental

regulation and taxation, and the

international, relatively free from

governmental controls. 12 All three

developments have affected and

intensified each other—particularly

since the Reagan Revolution of 1980,

which saw American inequality of

wealth cease to diminish and begin to

increase.13 Thus for example I shall

describe how Wall Street—the

incarnation of the “one percent”—

played a significant role in creating the

CIA after World War II, and how three

decades later the CIA and big oil played

a significant role in realigning American

politics for the Reagan Revolution.

In earlier books I have given versions

of this America-centered account of

America’s shift into empire and a deep

state. But another factor to be mentioned

is the shift of global history toward an

increasingly global society dominated by

a few emergent superpowers. This trend

was accelerated after the Industrial

Revolution by new technologies of

transport, from the railroad in the

nineteenth century to the jet plane and

space travel in the twentieth.14

In the fallout from this rearrangement

we must include two world wars, as a

result of which Britain ceased to act as

the dominant superpower it had been

since Napoleon. Not surprisingly, the

Soviet Union and the United States

subsequently competed in a Cold War to

fill the gap. It was not however

predetermined that the Cold War would

be as thuggish and covertly violent as for

decades it continued to be. For that we

should look to more contingent causes on

both sides of the Iron Curtain—starting

with the character of Stalin and his party

but also including the partly responsive

development of the Dulles brothers and

more generally of the American deep

state, which has become by far the

bigger threat to U.S. democracy today.

THE DEEP STATE, THE SHADOW

GOVERNMENT AND THE WALL

STREET OVERWORLD

The “deep state” was defined by the

U.K. newsletter On Religion as “the

embedded anti-democratic power

structures within a government,

something very few democracies can

claim to be free from.” 15 The term

originated in Turkey in 1996, to refer to

United States–backed elements,

primarily in the intelligence services and

military, who had repeatedly used

violence to interfere with and realign

Turkey’s democratic political process.

Sometimes the definition is restricted to

elements within the government (or “a

state-within-the-state”), but more often

in Turkey the term is expanded, for

historical reasons, to include “members

of the Turkish underworld.” 16 In this

chapter I shall use “deep state” in the

larger sense, to include both the second

level of secret government inside

Washington and those outsiders powerful

enough, in either the underworld or

overworld, to give it direction. In short I

shall equate the term “deep state” with

what in 1993 I termed a “deep political

system”: “one which habitually resorts

to decision-making and enforcement

procedures outside as well as inside

those publicly sanctioned by law and

society.” 17

Like myself, Mike Lofgren suggests an

ambiguous symbiosis between two

aspects of the American deep state:

1. the Beltway agencies of the

shadow government, like the CIA

and NSA, which have been

instituted by the public state and

now overshadow it, and

2. the much older power of Wall

Street, referring to the powerful

banks and law firms located

there.

Top-level Treasury officials, CIA

officers, and Wall Street bankers and

lawyers think much alike because of the

“revolving door” by which they pass

easily from private to public service and

back. In Lofgren’s words,

It is not too much to say that Wall

Street may be the ultimate owner of

the Deep State and its strategies, if

for no other reason than that it has

the money to reward government

operatives with a second career

that is lucrative beyond the dreams

of avarice—certainly beyond the

dreams of a salaried government

employee. 18

I shall argue that in the 1950s Wall

Street was a dominating complex. It

included not just banks and law firms but

also the oil majors whose cartel

arrangements were successfully

defended against the U.S. government by

the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and

Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers.

This larger complex is what I mean by

the Wall Street overworld.

By recognizing this power reach of

Wall Street, we can see that Tom

Hayden’s notion of a “state within a

state” is too restricted: those with that

inner power (such as the higher echelons

of the CIA) exercise it not by their

seclusion, but by their interactions with

an outside overworld. And Lofgren’s

metaphor of the deep state as an iceberg,

though useful, risks suggesting a too

solid or structural relationship to that

overworld. Unlike the state, the deep

state is not a structure but a system, as

difficult to define, but also as real and

powerful, as a weather system.

An important thesis of this chapter and

this book is that in the uncharted and

virtually unregulated milieu of the

overworld deep state we encounter not

just dominating influence but also

antisocial lawbreaking and sometimes

murderous malfeasance.

THE LONG HISTORY OF THE

WALL STREET OVERWORLD

Lofgren’s inclusion of Wall Street in his

definition of the deep state reinforces

Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in

1933 to his friend Col. E. M. House that

“The real truth . . . is, as you and I know,

that a financial element in the larger

centers has owned the Government ever

since the days of Andrew Jackson.” 19

FDR’s insight is well illustrated by

the efficiency with which a group of

Wall Street bankers (including Nelson

Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson

Aldrich and Paul Warburg) were able in

a 1910 highly secret meeting to establish

the Federal Reserve System—a system

that in effect reserved oversight of the

nation’s currency supply and of all

America’s banks in the not impartial

hands of its largest. 20 The political clout

of the quasi-governmental Federal

Reserve Board (where the federal

Treasury is represented but does not

dominate) was clearly demonstrated in

2008, when Fed leadership secured

instant support from the successive

administrations of a Texan Republican

president, followed by a Midwest

Democratic one, for public money to

rescue the reckless management of Wall

Street banks: banks “Too Big to Fail,”

and of course far “Too Big to Jail,” but

not “Too Big to Bail. ”21

In 1946 General Vandenberg, as

Director of Central Intelligence (DCI),

recruited Allen Dulles, then a

Republican lawyer at Sullivan and

Cromwell in New York, “to draft

proposals for the shape and organization

of what was to become the Central

Intelligence Agency in 1947.” Dulles

promptly formed an advisory group of

six men, all but one of whom were Wall

Street investment bankers or lawyers. 22

Dulles and two of the six (William H.

Jackson and Frank Wisner) later joined

the agency, where Dulles proceeded to

orchestrate policies, such as the

overthrow of the Arbenz regime in

Guatemala, that he had previously

discussed in New York at the Council on

Foreign Relations.23

There seems to be little difference in

Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was

a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director.

Although he did not formally join the

CIA until November 1950, he was in

Berlin before the start of the 1948 Berlin

Blockade, “supervising the unleashing of

anti-Soviet propaganda across

Europe. ”24 In the early summer of 1948

he set up the American Committee for a

United Europe (ACUE), in support of

what became, by the early 1950s, “the

largest CIA operation in Western

Europe. ”25

THE DEEP STATE AND FUNDS

FOR CIA COVERT OPERATIONS

Wall Street was also the inspiration for

what eventually became the CIA’s first

covert operation: the use of “over $10

million in captured Axis funds to

influence the [Italian] election [of

1948].” 26 (The fundraising had begun at

the wealthy Brook Club in New York;

but Allen Dulles, still a Wall Street

lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at

first had preferred a private funding

campaign, to authorize the operation

through the National Security Council

and the CIA. )27

Dulles’s friend Frank Wisner then left

Wall Street to oversee an enlarged

covert operations program through the

newly created Office of Policy

Coordination (OPC). Dulles, still a

lawyer, campaigned successfully to

reconstruct Western Europe through what

became known as the Marshall Plan. 28

Together with George Kennan and James

Forrestal, Dulles also “helped devise a

secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that

gave the CIA the capability to conduct

political warfare. It let the agency skim

millions of dollars from the plan. ”29

This created one of the earlier

occasions when the CIA, directly or

indirectly, recruited local assets

involved in drug trafficking. American

Federation of Labor (AFL) organizer

Irving Brown, the assistant of AFL

official Jay Love-stone (a CIA asset),

was implicated in drug smuggling

activities in Europe, at the same time

that he used funds diverted from the

Marshall Plan to establish a

“‘compatible left’ labor union in

Marseilles with Pierre Ferri-Pisani. On

behalf of Brown and the CIA, Ferri-

Pisani (a drug smuggler connected with

Marseilles crime lord Antoine Guerini),

hired goons to shellack striking

Communist dock workers. ”30

An analogous funding source for the

CIA developed in the Far East: the so-

called

“M-Fund,” a secret fund of money

of enormous size that has existed in

Japan [in 1991] for more than forty

years. The Fund was established by

the United States in the immediate

postwar era for essentially the

same reasons that later gave rise to

the Marshall Plan of assistance by

the U.S. to Western Europe,

including the Federal Republic of

Germany. . . . The M-Fund was

used not only for the building of a

democratic political system in

Japan but, in addition, for all of the

purposes for which Marshall Plan

funds were used in Europe. 31

For at least two decades the CIA

lavishly subsidized right-wing parties in

countries including Japan and Indonesia,

again using captured Axis funds.32

(According to Chalmers Johnson, “The

M-Fund . . . was initially created from

sales of confiscated Japanese military

stockpiles of industrial diamonds,

platinum, gold, and silver that had been

plundered in occupied countries.” 33)

As a general rule the CIA, rather than

assimilating these funds into its own

budget, appears to have left them off the

books in the hands of cooperative allied

powers—ranging from other U.S.

agencies like the Economic Cooperation

Administration (ECA, set up in 1948 to

administer the Marshall Plan) to oil

companies, to powerful drug kingpins.34

The CIA never abandoned its

dependency on funds from outside its

official budget to conduct its clandestine

operations. In Southeast Asia in

particular, its proprietary firm Sea

Supply Inc. supplied an infrastructure for

a drug traffic supporting a CIA-led

paramilitary force, PARU.35 The CIA

appears also to have acted in

coordination with slush funds from

various U.S. government contracts,

ranging from the Howard Hughes

organization to the foreign arms sales of

U.S. defense corporations like Lockheed

and Northrop.36

LOCKHEED PAYOFFS AND CIA

CLIENTS: THE NETHERLANDS,

JAPAN, ITALY, INDONESIA, AND

SAUDI ARABIA

Through the 1950s, payouts from the M-

Fund were administered by Kodama

Yoshio, “probably the CIA’s chief asset

in Japan”; while “All accounts say that

after the end of the occupation, the fund’s

American managers came from the

CIA. ”37 Kodama also received and

distributed millions of funds from

Lockheed to secure military contracts, in

which a percentage was kicked back to

local agents who time after time were

also, like Kodama, assets of the CIA. 38

The CIA knew about this operation but

has never admitted involvement in it,

even after it was revealed that the U.S.

Air Force also had a hand in a Lockheed

payoff program, code-named “Operation

Buttercup. ”39 Lockheed’s system of

payoffs was worldwide; and there was

CIA involvement with it in at least four

other countries: the Netherlands, Italy,

Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. (Lockheed,

the builder of the U-2, was a major CIA-

cleared contractor.)40

The beneficiary in the Netherlands

was Prince Bernhard (a close friend of

CIA directors Walter Bedell Smith and

Allen Dulles) and the organizer of the

Bilderberg Group along with Joseph

Retinger of the CIA-funded American

Committee for a United Europe and C.

D. Jackson in Eisenhower’s White

House.41 In the case of Italy, payments

were handled through a contact

(“Antelope Cobbler”) who turned out to

be whoever was the Italian Prime

Minister of the moment (always from

one of the parties subsidized earlier by

the CIA). 42

In the revealing instance of Indonesia,

Lockheed payments were shifted in May

1965, over the legal objections of

Lockheed’s counsel, to a new contract

with a company set up by the firm’s

longtime local agent or middleman,

August Munir Dasaad. 43 This was just

six months after a secret U.S. decision to

have the CIA covertly assist

“‘individuals and organizations

prepared to take obstructive action

against the PKI [Indonesian Communist

Party].’ Over the longer term this meant

identifying and keeping tabs on “anti-

regime elements” and other potential

leaders of a post-Sukarno regime.” 44

Although Dasaad had been a longtime

supporter of Sukarno, by May 1965 he

was already building connections with

Sukarno’s eventual successor, General

Suharto, via a family relative, General

Alamsjah, who knew Suharto and was

the beneficiary of the new Lockheed

account. 45 After Suharto replaced

Sukarno, Alamsjah, who controlled

certain considerable funds, at once made

funds available to Suharto, earning him

the gratitude of the new president. 46

In July 1965, furthermore, at the

alleged nadir of U.S.-Indonesian aid

relations, Rockwell-Standard had a

contractual agreement to deliver two

hundred light aircraft (Aero-

Commanders) to the Indonesian Army

(not the Air Force) in the next two

months. Once again the commission

agent on the deal, Bob Hasan or Hassan,

was a political associate (and eventual

cukong or business partner) of Suharto.

More specifically, Suharto and Bob

Hasan established two shipping

companies to be operated by the Central

Java army division, Diponegoro. This

division, as has long been noticed,

supplied the bulk of the personnel on

both sides of the Gestapu coup drama in

September 1965—both those staging the

coup attempt, and those putting it

down. 47

While this was happening, Stanvac (a

joint venture of the Standard companies

known later as Exxon and Mobil)

increased payments to the army’s oil

company, Permina, headed by an

eventual political ally of Suharto,

General Ibnu Sutowo. Alamsjah (along

with a well-connected Japanese oilman,

Nishijima Shigetada) is said to have

been allied with Ibnu Sutowo in plotting

against Sukarno. 48 After Suharto’s

overthrow of Sukarno, Fortune wrote

that “Sutowo’s still small company

played a key part in bankrolling those

crucial operations, and the army has

never forgotten it.” 49

We shall deal later with the special

case of Lockheed kickbacks to Saudi

Arabia, which were far greater than

those to Japan. It is important to note,

however, the linkage between Middle

East oil and arms sales: as U.S. imports

of Middle East oil increased, the

pressure on the U.S. balance of payments

was offset by increased U.S. arms sales

to the region. “In the period 1963–1974,

arms sales to the Middle East went from

10 per cent of global arms imports to 36

per cent, half of which was supplied by

the United States. ”50

The result was to create a vital

triangle at the heart of the American

deep state, in which oil companies paid

Saudi Arabia for oil; Saudi Arabia paid

the U.S. arms industry for planes and

weapons, and the resulting huge arms

contracts (as we shall see in chapter 10)

paid for off-the-books U.S. covert

operations like Iran-Contra.

IRAN IN 1953: HOW AN OIL

CARTEL OPERATION BECAME A

JOB FOR THE CIA

The international lawyers of Wall Street

did not hide from each other their shared

belief that they understood better than

Washington the requirements for running

the world. As John Foster Dulles wrote

in the 1930s to a British colleague,

The word “cartel” has here

assumed the stigma of a bogeyman

which the politicians are constantly

attacking. The fact of the matter is

that most of these politicians are

highly insular and nationalistic and

because the political organization

of the world has under such

influence been so backward,

business people who have had to

cope realistically with international

problems have had to find ways for

getting through and around stupid

political barriers. 51

This same mentality also explains

why Allen Dulles as an Office of

Strategic Services (OSS) officer in 1945

simply evaded orders from Washington

forbidding him to negotiate with SS

General Karl Wolff about a conditional

surrender of German forces in Italy—an

important breach of Roosevelt’s

agreement with Stalin at Yalta for

unconditional surrender, a breach that is

regarded by many as helping lead to the

Cold War. 52 And it explains why Allen

Dulles, as CIA Director in 1957, dealt

summarily with Eisenhower’s reluctance

to authorize more than occasional U-2

overflights of the USSR, by secretly

approving a plan with Britain’s MI6

whereby U-2 flights could be authorized

instead by the U.K. Prime Minister

Macmillan.53

This mentality exhibited itself in

1952, when Truman’s Justice

Department sought to break up the cartel

agreements whereby Standard Oil of

New Jersey (now Exxon) and four other

oil majors controlled global oil

distribution. (The other four were

Standard Oil Company of New York or

Socony [later Mobil], Standard Oil of

California [now Chevron], Gulf Oil, and

Texaco. Together with Royal Dutch Shell

and Anglo-Iranian, they comprised the

so-called “Seven Sisters” of the cartel.)

Faced with a government order to hand

over relevant documents, Exxon’s

lawyer Arthur Dean at Sullivan and

Cromwell, where Foster was senior

partner, refused: “If it were not for the

question of national security, we would

be perfectly willing to face either a

criminal or a civil suit. But this is the

kind of information the Kremlin would

love to get its hands on.” 54

At this time the oil cartel was working

closely with the British Anglo-Iranian

Oil Company (AIOC, later BP) to

prevent AIOC’s nationalization by Iran’s

Premier Mossadeq, by instituting, in

May 1951, a successful boycott of

Iranian oil exports. “In May 1951 the

AIOC secured the backing of the other

oil majors, who had every interest in

discouraging nationalisation. . . . None

of the large companies would touch

Iranian oil; despite one or two

picturesque episodes, the boycott

held.” 55

As a result Iranian oil production fell

from 241 million barrels in 1950 to 10.6

million barrels in 1952. “This was

accomplished by denying Iran the ability

to export its crude oil. At that time, the

Seven Sisters controlled almost 99% of

the crude oil tankers in the world for

such export, and even more importantly,

the markets to which it was going.” 56 But

Truman declined, despite a direct

personal appeal from Churchill, to have

the CIA participate in efforts to

overthrow Mossadeq, and instead

dispatched Averell Harriman to Tehran

in a failed effort to negotiate a peaceful

resolution of Mossadeq’s differences

with London. 57

All this changed with the election of

Eisenhower in November 1952 (with

considerable support from the oil

industry), followed by the appointment

of the Dulles brothers to be Secretary of

State and head of CIA. The Justice

Department’s criminal complaint against

the oil cartel was swiftly replaced by a

civil suit, from which the oil cartel

eventually emerged unscathed. 58

Eisenhower, an open friend of the

oil industry . . . changed the charges

from criminal to civil and

transferred responsibility of the

case from the Department of Justice

to the Department of State—the

first time in history that an antitrust

case was handed to State for

prosecution. Seeing as how the

Secretary of State was John Foster

Dulles and the defense counsel for

the oil cartel was Dulles’ former

law firm (Sullivan and Cromwell),

the case was soon as good as

dead.59

Thereafter,

Cooperative control of the world

market by the major oil companies

remained in effect, with varying

degrees of success, until the oil

embargo of 1973–74. That the

cooperation was more than tacit

can be seen by the fact that antitrust

regulations were specifically set

aside a number of times during the

1950–1973 period, allowing the

major companies to negotiate as a

group with various Mideastern

countries, and after its inception [in

1960], with the Organization of

Petroleum Exporting Countries or

OPEC. 60

Also in November 1952 CIA officials

began planning to involve the CIA in the

efforts of MI6 and the oil companies in

Iran61 —although its notorious Operation

TP/AJAX to overthrow Mossadeq was

not finally approved by Eisenhower until

July 22, 1953. 62

The events of 1953 strengthened the

role of the oil cartel as a structural

component of the American deep state,

drawing on its powerful connections to

both Wall Street and the CIA.63 (Another

such component was the Arabian-

American Oil Company or ARAMCO in

Saudi Arabia, which increased oil

production in 1951–1953 to offset the

loss of oil from Iran. Until it was fully

nationalized in 1980, ARAMCO

maintained undercover CIA personnel

like William Eddy among its top

advisors.)64 The five American oil

majors in particular were also

strengthened by the success of AJAX, as

Anglo-Iranian (renamed BP) was

henceforth forced to share 40 percent of

the oil from its Iran refinery with them.

Nearly all recent accounts of

Mossadeq’s overthrow treat it as a

covert intelligence operation, with the

oil cartel (when mentioned at all)

playing a subservient role. However the

chronology, and above all the belated

approval from Eisenhower, suggest that

it was CIA that came belatedly in 1953

to assist an earlier oil cartel operation,

rather than vice versa. In terms of the

deep state, in 1951 the oil cartel or deep

state initiated a process that the

American public state only authorized

two years later. Yet the inevitable bias in

academic or archival historiography,

working only with those primary sources

that are publicly available, is to think of

the Mossadeq tragedy as simply a “CIA

coup.”

The oil cartel’s victories in 1952–

1953 left a legacy that was not felt only

in Iran. As we shall see, the oil majors

now had a license to act in conjunction

with the CIA to destabilize or overthrow

governments in other countries, such as

Indonesia in 1965. Later in this chapter

we will see how oil companies, Saudi

Arabia, and former CIA personnel all

operated together in ways that

terminated the presidential career of

someone who had earned their

disapproval, President Jimmy Carter.

THE CIA, BOOZ ALLEN

HAMILTON, AND THE WALL

STREET OVERWORLD

In the 1950s Eisenhower further

consolidated the role of the private

sector in the deep state system by his

decision to bring private corporation

chiefs into the super-secret COG

planning process. 65 (This was the

precedent for placing Rumsfeld and

Cheney in a position to plan for the

suspension of the U.S. Constitution, even

in the 1990s under Clinton, when both

men, as we shall see in chapter 3, were

corporation CEOs and not in the U.S.

government.)

But a much larger role for the private

sector has come with the increased

outsourcing of the government’s

intelligence budget. Tim Shorrock

revealed in 2007 that “about 70 percent

of the estimated $60 billion the

government spends every year on . . .

intelligence” is now outsourced to

private intelligence contractors like

Booz, Allen & Hamilton (now Booz

Allen Hamilton) and SAIC (Science

Applications International

Corporation). 66

Indeed the distinction between

“public” and “private” fades even more

with the “revolving door” mentioned

above, which circulates top-level

intelligence officials and the chiefs of

the contracting firms cleared for

intelligence work. For example Mike

McConnell “went from being head of the

National Security Agency under Bush 41

and Clinton directly to Booz Allen, one

of the nation’s largest private

intelligence contractors, then became

Bush’s Director of National Intelligence

(DNI), then went back to Booz Allen,

where he is now Executive Vice

President.” 67 Intelligence officers in

government write the non-competitive

contracts for the private corporations

that they may have worked for and may

work for again. And over the years the

“revolving door” has also exchanged

personnel between Booz Allen and the

international oil companies served by

the firm.

The original firm of Booz, Allen, &

Hamilton split in 2008 into Booz Allen

Hamilton, focused on USG business, and

Booz & Company in New York,

assuming the old company’s commercial

and international portfolio. Booz Allen

Hamilton is majority owned by the

private equity firm the Carlyle Group,

noted for its association with political

figures like both Presidents Bush. 68

Lofgren points to the deep state

importance of Booz Allen Hamilton, 99

percent of whose business is dependent

on the U.S. government. 69 Booz Allen

has been linked in the media to the NSA

ever since its employee Edward

Snowden decamped with NSA records.

Booz Allen is also prominent in the

profitable area of “continuity of

government” (COG) and “continuity of

operations” (COOP) contracts. 70

But Booz Allen, one of the oldest and

largest of the “cleared contractors,” has

been intertwined with the CIA’s covert

operations since Allen Dulles became

CIA Director in 1953.71 In the same year,

Booz Allen began “to take on several

overseas assignments . . . : a land-

registration system in the Philippines, a

restructuring of Egypt’s customs

operations and textile industries, and

work for Iran’s national oil company. ”72

All three assignments overlapped with

CIA covert operations in 1953, including

the Philippine land distribution program

that Edward Lansdale promoted in order

to fight a Huk insurrection, and the CIA’s

operation TP/AJAX (with Britain’s

MI6) to rescue the Anglo-Iranian oil

company (later BP).73

But the most important CIA-Booz

Allen cooperation may have been in

Egypt. In March 1953 Miles Copeland,

having resigned from the CIA to join

Booz Allen, “returned to Cairo under

what was, for all practical purposes, a

joint CIA-BA&H mission.” 74 In addition

to offering management advice to the

Egyptian government in general, and to a

private textile mill, Miles also gave

Nasser advice on establishing his

intelligence service (the Mukhabarat),

and “soon became his closest Western

advisor” (as well as his top channel to

the USG, more important than either the

local U.S. ambassador or CIA chief). 75

Copeland’s role with Nasser did not

make him a shaper of U.S. policy; his

pro-Nasser views were largely

subordinated to the pro-British anti-

Nasserism of the Dulles brothers. But

they did establish a bond between

Copeland and the Eisenhower White

House. By 1967, when Nixon was

preparing to run for president, Copeland

had taken a leave of absence from Booz

Allen to become a prestigious and well-

paid consultant for oil companies.

THE CIA, MILES COPELAND, AND

ADNAN KHASHOGGI

In 1966 Copeland, while technically on

leave from Booz Allen, made close

contact with Adnan Khashoggi, a young

Arab who was in the course of becoming

both a “principal foreign agent” of the

United States and also extremely

wealthy on the commissions he earned

from Lockheed, Northrop, and other

military firms on arms sales to Saudi

Arabia. 76 (“To give some sense of the

size of the business, the company

acknowledged in the mid-1970s that it

had provided $106 million in

commissions to Khashoggi between

1970 and 1975, more than ten times the

level of payments made to the next most

important connection, Yoshi [sic]

Kodama of Japan. ”77

By Copeland’s own account in 1989,

this encounter with Khashoggi “put the

two of us on a ‘Miles-and-Adnan’ basis

that has lasted for more than twenty

years of business, parties, and a very

special kind of political action.” 78

Copeland adds that “Adnan and I,

separately had been called on by our

respective friends in Langley [i.e., CIA]

to . . . have an official [sic], off-the-

record exchange of ideas on the

emerging crisis in the Middle East, and

come up with suggestions that the tame

bureaucrats would like to have made but

couldn’t. ”79

Copeland almost immediately flew to

Cairo and immersed himself in a series

of high-level but ultimately unsuccessful

efforts to forestall what soon became the

1967 Egyptian-Israeli Six-Day War. By

his account, his mission, though

unsuccessful, gave a “tremendous boost”

to his reputation, enabling him “to

accelerate the attempt I had already

started to establish a ‘private CIA’ by

use of confidential arrangements with

politically astute members of the client

companies. ”80

Copeland’s self-promoting claims are

controversial, and a number of

establishment writers have described his

books as “unreliable.” 81 But eyewitness

Larry Kolb corroborates that Copeland

was close to Khashoggi, and that the two

of them “had written a white paper . . .

proposing that . . . rich countries,

including not only the United States but

also the Arab oil states, should establish

a ‘Marshall Plan’ for all the needy

countries of the Middle East, including

Israel.” Rewritten with Kolb’s

assistance after consultation with the

Reagan White House, the plan would be

backed by a “Mideast Peace Fund” to

which “Adnan was pledging a hundred

million dollars of his own money.” 82

The proposal failed, partly because of

the Middle East’s resistance to

negotiated solutions, but also partly

because by the 1980s Khashoggi was no

longer as rich and influential as he had

once been. His function as an agent of

influence in the Middle East and

elsewhere had been sharply limited after

the United States, by the Corrupt Federal

Practices Act of 1978, outlawed direct

payments by U.S. corporations to foreign

individuals. Henceforward the function

of bestowing money and sexual favors

on client politicians passed primarily

from Khashoggi to the bank he used, the

recently created Bank of Credit and

Commerce International (BCCI, also a

CIA connection).83 A major shareholder

in BCCI was Saudi intelligence chief

Kamal Adham, Khashoggi’s friend and

business partner and (according to the

Senate BCCI Report) “the CIA’s former

principal contact in the Arab Middle

East.” 84

What the story of the failed “Mideast

Peace Fund” reveals is first, that

Khashoggi (like BCCI after him) was of

interest to Washington because of his

financial resources and ability to

negotiate with both Israel and Arab

countries; and second, that Copeland and

what Copeland called his “private

CIA, ”85 was in a commanding position

as lead adviser to Khashoggi, while still

on unpaid leave from Booz Allen

Hamilton.

KHASHOGGI, THE CIA’S ASSET

EDWARD K. MOSS, AND

POLITICAL CORRUPTION

A powerful connection was formed by

combining Copeland’s political contacts

with Khashoggi’s millions. And

Copeland may have been responsible for

Khashoggi’s inspired choice of the

under-recognized Edward K. Moss,

another man with CIA connections, as

his public relations agent in

Washington.86

Back in November 1962, the CIA, as

part of its planning to get rid of Castro,

decided to use Moss for the Political

Action Group of the CIA’s Covert

Action (CA) staff.87 This was more than

a year after the FBI had advised the CIA

that Moss’s mistress Julia Cellini and

her brother Dino Cellini were alleged to

be procurers, while “the Cellini brothers

have long been associated with the

narcotics and white slavery rackets in

Cuba. ”88

This FBI report suggests an important

shared interest between Moss and

Khashoggi: sexual corruption. Just as his

uncle Yussuf Yassin had been a procurer

of women for King Abdul-Aziz, so

Khashoggi himself was said to have

“used sex to win over U.S. executives.”

The bill for the madam who supplied

girls en masse to his yacht in the

Mediterranean ran to hundreds of

thousands of dollars. 89 Khashoggi made

a practice of supplying those he wished

to influence with dollars as well as

sex. 90

In the United States, the CIA of course

was forbidden to use sex and money in

this way or to make the payments to

right-wing politicians that characterized

its behavior in the rest of the world. But

no such prohibition applied to

Khashoggi. According to Anthony

Summers,

Khashoggi had courted Nixon in

1967 by putting a plane at his

disposal to tour the Middle East

after the Six-Day War. Soon

afterward, using a proxy, he opened

an account at Rebozo’s [Bebe

Rebozo, Nixon’s close confidante]

bank in Florida. He did so, he

explained to Watergate prosecutors,

hoping to “curry favor with

Rebozo,” to get an entrée to the man

who might become president, and

to pursue business deals. 91

Khashoggi in effect served as a

“cutout,” or representative, in a number

of operations forbidden to the CIA and

the companies he worked with.

Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously

absent from the list of military

contractors who contributed illicitly to

Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But

there was no law prohibiting their

official representative, Khashoggi, from

cycling $200 million through the bank of

Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.92 (Pierre

Salinger heard from Khashoggi that in

1972 he had donated $1 million to

Nixon, corroborating the often-heard

claim that Khashoggi had brought it in a

briefcase to Nixon’s western White

House in San Clemente, and then

“forgotten” to take it away.)93

Khashoggi of course did not introduce

such corruption to American politics; he

merely joined a milieu where defense

companies had used money and girls for

years to win defense contracts in

Washington and Las Vegas. 94 Prominent

in this practice was Howard Hughes,

whom Khashoggi soon joined in

international investments. (After a

Senate investigator on Khashoggi’s trail

registered at the Hughes-owned Sands

Hotel in Las Vegas, a blonde came

unexpectedly to his hotel room, and said,

“I’m here for your pleasure.” 95)

But Khashoggi’s corruption channels

and targets overlapped with those of

others with CIA connections. In 1972 it

was alleged that funds from the Paradise

Island casino in the Bahamas were being

secretly carried to Nixon and his friend

Bebe Rebozo, by a casino employee.

This was Seymour (Sy) Alter, who was

both “a friend of Nixon and Rebozo

since 1962” and also an associate of

Edward Moss’s brother-in-law Eddie

Cellini, the casino manager at Paradise

Island. 96 The funds came from the

Paradise Island Bridge Company, a

company partly owned by an officer of

Benguet International, a firm represented

in America by Paul Helliwell.97 It is

likely that Nixon himself had a hidden

interest in the Bridge Company, which

might explain the revelation through

Operation Tradewinds that a “Richard

M. Nixon” (not otherwise identified)

had an account at Helliwell’s Castle

Bank. 98 For decades persons from Booz

Allen Hamilton have been among the

very small group owning the profitable

Paradise Island Bridge Company. (A

recent partner in the Paradise Island

Bridge Company was Booz Allen Senior

Vice-President Robert Riegle.)99

Two facts point to a deep state interest

in what might otherwise seem a matter of

personal corruption. The first is that

Paul Helliwell had set up two

companies for the CIA—CAT Inc. (later

Air America) and Sea Supply Inc. in

Bangkok—that became the infrastructure

of the CIA’s covert operations with

drug-trafficking armies in Southeast

Asia.100 The second is that Paul

Helliwell’s banking partner, E. P. Barry,

had been the postwar head of OSS

Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna,

which oversaw the recovery of SS gold

in Operation Safehaven.101 Elsewhere I

have reported speculations that in the

years between the shutdown of OSS in

1945 and the creation of the CIA in

1947, William Donovan and Allen

Dulles, using the resources of a private

World Commerce Corporation, were

able to use recovered SS gold to initiate

the Bangkok drug connection.102

MOSS, KHASHOGGI, THE SAFARI

CLUB, AND THE INTERNATIONAL

OVERWORLD

The power exerted by Khashoggi and

Moss was not limited to Khashoggi’s

access to funds and women. By the

1970s, Moss was chairman of the elite

Safari Club in Kenya, where he invited

Khashoggi in as majority owner.103 The

exclusive property was the first venue

for an alliance with the same name

between national intelligence agencies

that wished to compensate for the CIA’s

retrenchment in the wake of President

Carter’s election and Senator Church’s

post-Watergate reforms. 104

As former Saudi intelligence chief

Prince Turki bin Faisal once told

Georgetown University alumni,

In 1976, after the Watergate matters

took place here, your intelligence

community was literally tied up by

Congress. It could not do anything.

It could not send spies, it could not

write reports, and it could not pay

money. In order to compensate for

that, a group of countries got

together in the hope of fighting

Communism and established what

was called the Safari Club. The

Safari Club included France, Egypt,

Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and

Iran. 105

Prince Turki’s candid remarks—“your

intelligence community was literally tied

up by Congress. . . . In order to

compensate for that, a group of countries

got together . . . and established what

was called the Safari Club”—made it

clear that the Safari Club, operating at

the level of the deep state, was expressly

created to overcome restraints

established by political decisions of the

public state in Washington. Though Turki

talked of overriding the intent of

Congress, the effect was also to override

the explicit intent of President Carter.

Obviously the property owned by

Khashoggi and Moss in Kenya should

not be confused with the intelligence

operation of the same name. But it would

be wrong also to make a radical

separation between the two: Khashoggi

would appear to be part of this

supranational intelligence milieu.

Specifically Khashoggi’s activities of

corruption by sex and money, after they

too were somewhat curtailed by Senator

Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear

to have been taken up by the Bank of

Credit and Commerce International

(BCCI), a bank where Khashoggi’s

friend and business partner Kamal

Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief and

Safari Club financier, was a part-

owner. 106

THE DEEP STATE, THE SAFARI

CLUB, AND BCCI

The usual account of the Safari Club’s

origin is that it was

the brainchild of Count Alexandre

de Marenches, the debonair and

mustachioed chief of France’s CIA,

the SDECE (Service de

Documentation Extérieure et de

Contre-Espionnage). . . . Worried

by Soviet and Cuban advances in

post-colonial Africa, and by

America’s post-Watergate paralysis

in the field of undercover activity,

the swashbuckling de Marenches

had come to Turki’s father, King

Faisal, with a proposition. . . . [By

1979] Somali president Mohammed

Siad Barre had been bribed out of

Soviet embrace by $75 million

worth of Egyptian arms (paid for . .

. by Saudi Arabia). . . . 107

In this same period de Marenches was

also a member of the Pinay Circle, “an

international right-wing propaganda

group which brings together serving or

retired intelligence officers and

politicians with links to right-wing

intelligence factions from most of the

countries in Europe.” 108

However the well-informed

Mahmood Mamdani sees it as the

product of Washington’s search for new

proxies after the debacle of the U.S.–

South African intervention in Angola in

the mid-1970s:

No matter its military strength and

geopolitical importance, apartheid

South Africa was confirmed to be a

political liability. The recognition

only aggravated the search for

proxies. Its first success was a

regional alliance called the Safari

Club, put together with the blessing

of Henry Kissinger.109

As Kissinger was still Secretary of

State when the Safari Club was founded,

this would suggest that it was created

with U.S. approval. So would the Club’s

early successes that Mamdani cites,

especially when

it helped bring about the historic

rapprochement between two

strategic American Allies, Egypt

and Israel, laying the ground for

Anwar al-Sadat’s pathbreaking

November 1977 visit to Jerusalem.

The suggestion for the meeting was

first made in a letter from Israeli

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to

President Sadat, carried by the

Moroccan representative in the

club. 110

But after Carter was elected,

according to Joseph Trento, the Safari

Club allied itself with Richard Helms

and Theodore Shackley against the more

restrained intelligence policies of Jimmy

Carter. In Trento’s account, the dismissal

by William Colby in 1974 of CIA

counterintelligence chief James

Angleton,

combined with Watergate, is what

prompted the Safari Club to start

working with [former DCI Richard]

Helms [then U.S. Ambassador to

Iran] and his most trusted

operatives outside of

Congressional and even Agency

purview. James Angleton said

before his death that “Colby

destroyed counterintelligence. But

because Colby was seen by

Shackley and Helms as having

betrayed the CIA to Congress, they

simply began working with

outsiders like Adham and Saudi

Arabia. The traditional CIA

answering to the president was an

empty vessel having little more than

technical capability.” 111

Trento adds that “The Safari Club

needed a network of banks to finance its

intelligence operations. With the official

blessing of George Bush as the head of

the CIA, Adham transformed . . . the

Bank of Credit and Commerce

International (BCCI), into a worldwide

money-laundering machine.” 112 Kevin

Phillips agrees that in this period “Bush

cemented strong relations with the

intelligence services of both Saudi

Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked

closely with Kamal Adham, the head of

Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of

King Faisal and an early BCCI

insider.” 113

Trento claims also that the Safari Club

then was able to work with some of the

controversial CIA operators who had

been forced out of the CIA by Turner,

and that this was coordinated by perhaps

the most controversial of them all:

Theodore Shackley.

Shackley, who still had ambitions

to become DCI, believed that

without his many sources and

operatives like [Edwin] Wilson, the

Safari Club—operating with

[former DCI Richard] Helms in

charge in Tehran—would be

ineffective. . . . Unless Shackley

took direct action to complete the

privatization of intelligence

operations soon, the Safari Club

would not have a conduit to [CIA]

resources. The solution: create a

totally private intelligence network

using CIA assets until President

Carter could be replaced.114

BIG OIL, THE SAUDIS, THE

SAFARI CLUB, AND THE DEFEAT

OF PRESIDENT CARTER IN 1980

During the 1980 election campaign each

party accused the other of plotting an

October Surprise to elect their

candidate. In the fall of 1980, Jack

Anderson charged in the Washington

Post that the Carter administration, to

help get Carter reelected, was preparing

a major military operation in Iran to

rescue the U.S. hostages held captive in

Tehran.115 Subsequently other journalists,

notably Robert Parry, accused CIA

veterans on the Reagan campaign, along

with Theodore Shackley, of an arguably

treasonable but successful plot with

Iranians to delay return of the U.S.

hostages until Reagan took office in

January 1981.116

According to Parry, Alexandre de

Marenches of the Safari Club (and Pinay

Circle) arranged for William Casey (a

fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with

Iranian and Israeli representatives in

Paris in July and October 1980, where

Casey promised delivery to Iran of

needed U.S. armaments in exchange for a

delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in

Iran. 117 This was after a June 1980

meeting of the Pinay Circle, at which

“attention was turned towards the

American Presidential election that was

to bring Reagan to power.” 118 Parry also

suspects a role of BCCI in both the

funding of payoffs for the secret deal and

the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments

to Iran. We will deal with Parry’s

charges in chapter 8.

A more usual explanation for Carter’s

defeat in 1980 was the second oil shock

of 1979–1980, in which an acute gas

shortage led to both a sudden increase in

prices and long gas lines at service

stations. It is customary for

establishment scholars to blame the

shortage on political upheavals in Iran,

which led to “a cutoff of Iranian oil.” 119

However Robert Sherrill’s close

analysis of the American oil industry

demonstrates that American oil

companies, not Iranian turmoil, were

primarily responsible for the gas

shortage:

U.S. companies were up to their

own strategy. . . . Although in fact

America was importing more oil in

January and February [1979],

during the Iranian shutdown, than it

had imported during the same

period in 1978, major oil importers

pretended that the Iranian

“shortage” . . . was real. It was the

excuse they gave for slashing the

amount of gasoline they supplied to

their retail dealers. . . . A CIA study

showed that in the first five months

of the year, at a time when the

Administration was deploring our

oil shortage, U.S. companies

exported more oil than they had in

those glut years 1977 and 1978.120

This is only one of the examples

Sherrill supplies of the domestic

consequences of having liberated the oil

majors in 1953 from the disciplinary

restraints of antitrust legislation. But in

this case their manipulation of domestic

oil prices, combined with Carter’s

failure to bring the hostages home,

combined to cause the first defeat for an

elected president running for reelection,

since that of Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Not mentioned by either mainstream

journalists or Sherrill was the role

quietly played by Saudi Arabia in

augmenting the 1979 gas crisis: “The

Saudis had cut production by nearly 1

million barrels a day to 9.5 million at

the start of the year [1979], and in April

1979 they made a second cut to 8.5

million. The Saudis had the capacity to

produce 12 million barrels a day at that

point. ”121

The Saudi manipulation of gas prices

reflected their acute displeasure with the

Camp David Accords of 1978, which

did nothing to change Israeli control of

Jerusalem. 122 But what concerns us here

is that the concerted policy of big oil in

1979 was closely aligned with their

deep state allies in the Saudi government

and the Safari Club, to the severe

detriment of Americans and their

nominal government, the beleaguered

Carter administration.

The oil shock and gas shortage

contrived by big oil in 1979, together

with the October Surprise, were the

chief factors in enabling the subsequent

Reagan Revolution. This in turn opened

the door for a new phase in “continuity

of government” or COG plans, that were

secretly prepared over two decades by

planners like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick

Cheney, and then implemented on 9/11.

THE DEEP STATE AND THE BCCI

COVER-UP

It is also clear that throughout the 1980s

the American deep state in Washington

was involved with BCCI and protected

it. Acting CIA director Richard Kerr

acknowledged to a Senate Committee

“that the CIA had also used BCCI for

certain intelligence-gathering

operations.” 123 “Later, a congressional

inquiry showed that for more than ten

years preceding the BCCI collapse in the

summer of 1991, the FBI, the DEA, the

CIA, the Customs Service, and the

Department of Justice all failed to act on

hundreds of tips about the illegalities of

BCCI’s international activities. ”124

Far less clear is the attitude taken by

Wall Street banks toward the miscreant

BCCI. The Senate report on BCCI

charged however that the Bank of

England “had withheld information

about BCCI’s frauds from public

knowledge for 15 months before closing

the bank. ”125

Of course the scope and influence of

BCCI reflected changes in the global

superstructure of finance since the oil

price hikes of the 1970s. A recent study

of the dangerously unstable

concentration of ownership in the world

showed only four recognizable Wall

Street institutions among the top twenty:

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the Goldman

Sachs Group, Bank of New York Mellon

Corporation, and Merrill Lynch. 126 Of

these, Bank of New York, the bank

heavily involved in the 1990s looting of

Russia, interlocked with BCCI through

the Swiss banking activities of the

international banker Bruce Rappa-port,

“thought to have ties to U.S. and Israeli

intelligence.” (Alfred Hartmann, a board

member of BCCI, was both vice-

chairman of Rappaport’s Swiss bank,

Bank of New York-Inter Maritime, and

also head of BCCI’s Swiss subsidiary,

the Banque de Commerce et de

Placements.)127 The mysterious E. P.

Barry, the OSS veteran who had

overseen the recovery of SS gold in

Operation Safehaven before becoming

the banking partner of Paul Helliwell,

was also a major stockholder in

Rappaport’s Inter Maritime Bank.128

The collapse of BCCI in 1991 did not

see an end to systematic Saudi-financed

political corruption in the United States

and elsewhere. After a proposed major

arms sale in the 1980s met enhanced

opposition in Congress from the Israeli

lobby, Saudi Arabia negotiated a multi-

billion pound long-term contract with the

United Kingdom—the so-called “al-

Yamamah” deal. We shall see in chapter

10 that overpayments for the purchased

weapons were siphoned off into a huge

slush fund for political payoffs,

including “hundreds of millions of

pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to

the United States, Prince Bandar bin

Sultan. ”129 According to Robert Lacey,

the payments to Prince Bandar were said

to total one billion pounds over more

than a decade and Bandar distributed

these funds lavishly: for example: “a

suitcase containing more than $10

million” went to a Vatican priest for the

CIA’s longtime clients, the Christian

Democratic Party.130

CONCLUSION: A

SUPRANATIONAL DEEP STATE

The complex milieu of Khashoggi, the

BCCI, and the Safari Club can be

characterized as part of a supranational

deep state, whose organic links to the

CIA may have helped consolidate it. It is

clear however that decisions taken at

this level by the Safari Club and BCCI

were in no way guided by the political

determinations of those elected to power

in Washington. On the contrary, Prince

Turki’s candid remarks revealed that the

Safari Club (with the alleged

collaboration of two former CIA

Directors, Bush and Helms) was

expressly created to overcome restraints

established by political decisions in

Washington.

A former Turkish president and prime

minister once commented that the

Turkish deep state was the real state, and

the public state was only a “spare state,”

not the real one.131 A better

understanding of the American deep

state is necessary, if we are to prevent it

from assuming permanently the same

role.

POSTSCRIPT

In accordance with the book’s title, this

chapter has focused on aspects of the

deep state with special relevance to

Wall Street and big oil. There are other

aspects we could have looked at, such as

the roles of the media, of kingmakers

like Clark Clifford, William Pawley, and

Jackson Stephens, and of opinion

managers like Henry Luce, C. D.

Jackson, and Joe Alsop. Abroad there

are supranational meetings like

Bilderberg and Davos, and the

Washington and global public relations

firm Hill & Knowlton, said to have

opened many overseas offices on the

advice of friends, including then CIA

director Allen W. Dulles.

Yet another aspect, to which we must

return, is that of right-wing Texas oilmen

and the John Birch Society, opposed to

the relative internationalism of Wall

Street and big oil.

CHAPTER 3

The Doomsday

Project

How COG on 9/11

Subordinated the U.S.

Constitution

When the dust finally clears,

Americans will see that September

11 was a triumph for the

intelligence community, not a

failure. 1

IN JULY 1987, DURING THE IRAN-CONTRA

HEARINGS GRILLING OF OLIVER North, the

American public got a glimpse of

“highly sensitive” emergency planning

North had been involved in. Ostensibly

North had been handling plans for an

emergency response to a nuclear attack

(a legitimate concern). But press

accounts alleged that the planning was

for a more generalized suspension of the

Constitution at the President’s

determination.

As part of its routine Iran-Contra

coverage, the following exchange was

printed in The New York Times without

journalistic comment or follow-up:

[Congressman Jack] Brooks:

Colonel North, in your work at the

N.S.C. were you not assigned, at

one time, to work on plans for the

continuity of government in the

event of a major disaster?

Both North’s attorney and Senator

Daniel Inouye, the Democratic Chair of

the Committee, responded in a way that

showed they were aware of the issue:

Brendan Sullivan [North’s counsel,

agitatedly]: Mr. Chairman?

[Senator Daniel] Inouye: I

believe that question touches upon

a highly sensitive and classified

area so may I request that you not

touch upon that?

Brooks: I was particularly

concerned, Mr. Chairman, because

I read in Miami papers, and several

others, that there had been a plan

developed, by that same agency, a

contingency plan in the event of

emergency, that would suspend the

American Constitution. And I was

deeply concerned about it and

wondered if that was an area in

which he had worked. I believe that

it was and I wanted to get his

confirmation.

Inouye: May I most respectfully

request that that matter not be

touched upon at this stage. If we

wish to get into this, I’m certain

arrangements can be made for an

executive session. 2

Brooks was responding to a story by

Alfonso Chardy in the Miami Herald

about Oliver North’s involvement with

the Federal Emergency Management

Agency (FEMA) in planning for

“Continuity of Government” (COG).

According to Chardy, the plans

envisaged “suspension of the

Constitution, turning control of the

government over to the Federal

Emergency Management Agency,

emergency appointment of military

commanders to run state and local

governments and declaration of martial

law during a national crisis. ”3

Reagan had installed at FEMA a

counterinsurgency team that he had

already assembled as governor of

California. The team was headed by

Army Col. Louis Giuffrida, who had

attracted Reagan’s attention by a paper

he had written while at the U.S. Army

War College, advocating the forcible

warrantless detention of millions of

black Americans in concentration

camps. Reagan first installed Giuffrida

as head of the California National

Guard, and called on him “to design

Operation Cable Splicer . . . martial law

plans to legitimize the arrest and

detention of anti-Vietnam war activists

and other political dissidents.” 4 These

plans were refined with the assistance of

British counterinsurgency expert Sir

Robert Thompson, who had used

massive detention and deportations to

deal with the 1950s Communist

insurgency in what is now Malaysia.

Thompson’s plans for concentration

camps in Malaysia, adapted first by

Giuffrida in California’s Operation

Cable Splicer, were further refined by

Giuffrida and FEMA with the assistance

of Oliver North. In 1984 they were the

focus of a massive COG exercise, REX-

84,

In 1986, the Associated Press

reported on a FEMA directive that

described a REX-84 exercise

across preparing for the detention

of more than 400,000 Central

American refugees in ten military

centers located across the country.5

The revelation was a temporary

setback for such extreme planning. In the

ensuing controversy, Chardy himself

suggested that Reagan’s Attorney

General, William French Smith, had

intervened to stop the COG plan from

being presented to the President. 6

Earlier, in 1985, Giuffrida was forced

out of office for having spent government

money to build a private residence. But

COG planning not only continued, it

expanded. 7

Seven years later, in 1994, Tim

Weiner reported in The New York Times

that what he called “The Doomsday

Project”—the search for “ways to keep

the Government running after a sustained

nuclear attack on Washington”—had

“less than six months to live.” 8

Weiner’s language was technically

justifiable, but also very misleading. In

fact COG planning now simply

continued with a new target: terrorism.

On the basis of Weiner’s article, the first

two books to discuss COG planning, by

James Bamford and James Mann, both

reported that COG planning had been

abandoned.9 Recently Tim Shorrock in

2008 repeated that “the COG program

was abandoned during the Clinton

administration,” and Shirley Anne

Warshaw in 2009 wrote that “the Clinton

administration . . . shut down the super-

secret Project.” 10 But on this specific

point, all these otherwise excellent and

well-informed authors were wrong.

What Weiner and these authors did not

report was that in the final months of

Reagan’s presidency the purpose of

COG planning had officially changed: it

was no longer for arrangements “after a

nuclear war,” but for any “national

security emergency.” This was defined

in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as:

“any occurrence, including natural

disaster, military attack, technological

emergency, or other emergency, that

seriously degrades or seriously threatens

the national security of the United

States.” 11 In this way a totally legitimate

program dating back to Eisenhower, of

planning extraordinary emergency

measures for an America devastated in a

nuclear attack, was now converted to

confer equivalent secret powers on the

White House for anything it considered

an emergency.

In the wake of the Oklahoma City

bombing of 1995, Clinton’s

counterterrorism coordinator Richard

Clarke further increased the scope of

COG planning.

On Oct. 21, 1998, President Bill

Clinton signed Presidential

Decision Directive 67, “Enduring

Constitutional Government and

Continuity of Government

Operations.” No longer would only

the very few elite leaders

responsible for national security be

covered. Instead, every single

government department and agency

was directed to see to it that they

could resume critical functions

within 12 hours of a warning. 12

William Arkin later wrote that “after

9/11 . . . these secret [COG] procedures

and plans weren’t just geared toward the

possibility of Doomsday, for some

single and distant event, because

Doomsday was now every day. ”13 But

this expanded application of COG was

apparently envisaged as early as 1984,

when, according to Boston Globe

reporter Ross Gelbspan,

Lt. Col. Oliver North was working

with officials of the Federal

Emergency Management Agency . .

. to draw up a secret contingency

plan to surveil political dissenters

and to arrange for the detention of

hundreds of thousands of

undocumented aliens in case of an

unspecified national emergency.

The plan, part of which was

codenamed Rex 84, called for the

suspension of the Constitution

under a number of scenarios,

including a U.S. invasion of

Nicaragua.14

In other words, extreme measures,

designed originally to deal with an

externally directed and devastating

nuclear attack, were being secretly

modified to deal whenever desired with

domestic dissenters: a situation that still

pertains to today.15

The revival of Doomsday Project

planning under Reagan, which dated

back to NSDD 55 of September 14,

1982, was an important but invisible

part of the Reagan Revolution. It was

explicitly designed to roll back what

some of the Doomsday planners, notably

Richard Cheney, regarded as the

mistakes committed after Watergate,

when as William Arkin has written,

Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter

carried out the largest number of

revisions to presidential directives

since Eisenhower, carefully

rewriting each of the [COG]

emergency documents, aware of

changes in the Cold War (and the

country) since Ike’s time, and the

recent massive unlawfulness on the

part of the secret services. 16

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF COG

ON 9/11

Clearly 9/11 met the conditions for the

implementation of COG measures, and

we know for certain that COG plans

were implemented on that day in 2001,

before the last plane had crashed in

Pennsylvania. The 9/11 Report confirms

this twice, on pages 38 and 326.17 It was

under the auspices of COG that Bush

stayed out of Washington on that day, and

other government leaders like Paul

Wolfowitz were swiftly evacuated to

Site R, inside a hollowed out mountain

near Camp David. 18

But the implementation of COG went

beyond short-term responses, to the

installation of what Professor Shirley

Anne Warshaw calls a ninety-day

alternative “shadow government”

outside Washington.

Cheney jumped into action in his

bunker beneath the East Wing to

ensure continuity in government. He

immediately began to create his

shadow government by ordering

one hundred mid-level executive

officials to move to specially

designated underground bunkers

and stay there twenty-four hours a

day. They would not be rotated out,

he informed them, for ninety days,

since there was evidence, he

hinted, that the terrorist

organization al-Qa’ida, which had

masterminded the attack, had

nuclear weapons. The shadow

government, as a result, needed to

be ready to take over the

government from the bunkers. 19

In the President’s absence, Cheney

secured legal authorization for his

actions by a path of deputies that would

later arouse controversy:

To accomplish these goals, the vice

president and his lawyer [David

Addington] had to set the

government’s legal direction. . . .

By the afternoon of September 11,

Addington had made contact with

Timothy Flanigan, the deputy White

House counsel. Flanigan’s boss,

Alberto Gonzalez, was stranded in

Norfolk. . . . Flanigan was in the

[White House] Situation Room on

September 11. When Addington

reached him from the [underground]

bunker, Flanigan patched in the

Justice Department Command

Center across town. There he found

[sic] a young attorney named John

C. Yoo . . . [who] had taken leave

from university life to join the

[Justice Department’s] Office of

Legal Counsel as a deputy.20

Apparently by accident, Cheney and his

legal counsel had set in motion on 9/11

the ongoing secret back channel of

deputies that would later produce the

notorious memos justifying torture and

warrantless surveillance. (On surveil-

lance, “among those kept out of the

circle were Jay Bybee, ostensibly John

Yoo’s boss . . . and two successive

deputy attorneys general”.)21

The next ninety days after 9/11 saw

the swift implementation of the key

features attributed to COG planning by

Gelbspan and Chardy in the 1980s:

militarization of homeland security,

warrantless detentions, warrantless

deportations, and the warrantless

surveillance that is their logical

counterpart. The clearest example was

the administration’s Project Endgame—a

ten-year plan, initiated in September

2001, to expand detention camps, at a

cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007

alone. 22 This implemented the central

feature of the massive detention

exercise, Rex 84, conducted by Louis

Giuffrida and Oliver North in 1984. 23

There was also a flurry of other rapid

moves to restructure America’s external

and domestic structures. Before

discussing these, I should acknowledge

the obvious: that enhanced measures to

deal with terrorism are needed, and for

some of them we should be grateful. We

should acknowledge also, however, that

the most significant achievements against

terrorism have been the result of

traditional intelligence and police work.

As for the war on terror, the most

prominent achievement of Cheney’s

ninety days, many experts have asserted

that it has created far more terrorists

than it has disposed of. 24

On September 20, 2001, Bush

launched the war on terror in a televised

address to a joint session of Congress,

when he said, “Our ‘war on terror’

begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end

there. It will not end until every terrorist

group of global reach has been found,

stopped and defeated.” 25 In 2010 the

United States had about 100,000 U.S.

troops in Afghanistan to deal with an

officially estimated sixty members of al-

Qaeda. The predictable result has been

an expansion of terrorist activities in

Somalia, Yemen, and above all Pakistan.

The war on terror was

administratively implemented in three

National Security Presidential

Directives: NSPDs 7, 8, and 9. All three

are classified, and the topics of two of

them are unknown. The third, NSPD 9 of

October 25, 2001, directed the Secretary

of Defense to plan military options

against both Taliban and al-Qaeda

targets in Afghanistan.26

The October date is misleading. A

version of the directive calling for

covert action in Afghanistan had been

approved by principals on September 4,

2001, one week before 9/11.27 An

enhanced plan for military action in

Afghanistan, had been approved by Bush

on September 17; and the same

document “directed the Pentagon to

begin planning military options for an

invasion of Iraq.” 28

Perhaps the most significant domestic

product from Cheney’s trimester

mirabilis was the Patriot Act of October

25, 2001. Congress was given only one

week to pass this 340-page bill, which

in the opinion of researchers “was

already written and ready to go long

before September 11th.” 29

We should not forget that the Patriot

Act was only passed after lethal

weapons-grade anthrax letters were

mailed to two crucial Democratic

Senators—Senators Daschle and Leahy

—who had initially questioned the bill.

After the anthrax letters, however, they

withdrew their initial opposition.30

Someone—we still do not know who—

must have planned those anthrax letters

well in advance. We should not forget

either that some government experts

initially blamed the attacks on Iraq.

Much later, referring to Fort Detrick,

Salon reporter Glenn Greenwald pointed

out that the “Government lab where the

anthrax attacks themselves came from

was the same place where the false

reports originated that blamed those

attacks on Iraq.” 31

It is generally agreed that, of the three

men in National Command Authority on

9/11, Cheney was the ideologue most

committed to restoring the power of a

presidency that had been weakened by

Watergate. 32 Cheney had already

declared in his Iran-Contra Minority

Report of 1987 his belief that “the Chief

Executive will on occasion feel duty

bound to assert monarchical notions of

prerogative that will permit him to

exceed the law.” 33 And Vice President

Cheney, along with Cheney’s counsel

David Addington and John Yoo,

established the legal justifications for

declaring that the President had the

prerogative power to “deploy military

forces preemptively,” and that “the

Geneva Conventions and other

international agreements against torture

‘do not protect members of the al Qaeda

organization.’”34

By Executive Order 13228 of October

8, 2001, the President established an

Office of Homeland Security within the

presidential Executive Office. This has

engendered in turn the Department of

Homeland Security (DHS), now the third

largest U.S. Cabinet Department, and

also a series of Home-land Security

Presidential Directives. For example

Homeland Security Presidential

Directive-6 (HSPD-6) of September 16,

2003, created a Terrorism Screening

Center (TSC), to “consolidate the

Government’s approach to terrorism

screening.” 35

Since then we have become inured to

repeated stories about nonviolent

individuals who are prevented from

boarding airplanes, because their names

are in TSC computers on the No Fly List

and the Terrorist Watch List. Senator Ted

Kennedy testified in Congress that he

had been repeatedly delayed at airports

because a “T Kennedy” was on the No

Fly List. Until July 2008, Nelson

Mandela was also on the list.

In addition to the No Fly List, with

4,000 names in 2009 and 21,000 in

2012, some people are prevented from

flying because they are on the Terrorist

Watch List, a much longer list that

contained 440,000 names as of

December 2010. 36 This is why Walter F.

Murphy, a noted professor of

constitutional law, was detained in 2007

on his journey to lecture, ironically,

about his book Constitutional

Democracy. According to Professor

Murphy, he was asked by an airline

employee,

“Have you been in any peace

marches? We ban a lot of people

from flying because of that.” . . . “I

explained,” said Murphy, “that I

had not so marched but had, in

September 2006, given a lecture at

Princeton, televised and put on the

web, highly critical of George Bush

for his many violations of the

[C]onstitution.” “That’ll do it,” the

man said.37

In the end these cases were resolved

satisfactorily. But you risk permanent

deportation if you have an Arabic-

sounding name. The ACLU sued in 2010

on behalf of Ayman Latif, not just a U.S.

citizen but a disabled U.S. Marine

veteran, who under Obama had been

stranded in Egypt for months, because,

on orders from the U.S. Embassy, he had

not been able to board a plane to come

home.

This was a real hardship case: Latif

told NPR that “because I missed my

appointments in the United States to be

evaluated [as a disabled vet], now the

VA administration is saying that they’re

going to cut my benefits from what they

are now to zero.” On the same program

Stewart Baker, a former assistant

secretary for policy with the Department

of Homeland Security, vigorously

defended the No Fly List. But when

asked if there is “any legal authority by

which the United States can say to a

citizen who is abroad, you may not

return to this country?” Baker replied, “I

know of none.” 38 This did not seem to

concern him.

Ayman Latif’s case is far from unique.

According to The New York Times,

Advocacy groups say they are

trying to help Americans stranded

in Yemen, Egypt, Colombia and

Croatia, among other countries. At

least one American, Raymond Earl

Knaeble IV, who studied in Yemen

and is now in Colombia, was

returned to Colombia by the

Mexican authorities after he sought

to cross the border into the United

States, the groups say. 39

THE MILITARIZATION OF

AMERICAN LAW ENFORCEMENT

Another post-9/11 innovation from the

Giuffrida-Oliver North COG plans was

the militarization of domestic United

States law enforcement in 2002, under a

new military command, NORTHCOM. 40

Through NORTHCOM the U.S. Army

now is engaged with local enforcement

in the surveillance and counterterrorism

planning of America, in the same way

that through CENT-COM it is engaged

with local enforcement to police Iraq. Of

course army platoons do not patrol roads

and break down the doors of Kansas

homes, as they routinely do in Iraq or

Afghanistan. But behind the scenes, in

so-called “fusion centers,” the military,

the FBI, and state police, along with

private intelligence corporations like

SAIC, maintain and analyze data to

identify potential threats to those in

power.41

These fusion centers “have been

internally promoted by the US Army as

means to avoid restrictions preventing

the military from spying on the domestic

population. ”42 In other words,

administrative arrangements have been

used to fulfill Giuffrida’s plans of

circumventing the Posse Comitatus Acts

on the statute books, without repealing

them.

THE PROCLAMATION OF

PERMANENT EMERGENCIES

Finally, still in the ninety-day “shadow

government” period after 9/11, President

Bush proclaimed two important

emergencies that are still in force today.

1. On September 14, 2001, Bush

issued Proclamation 7463

(“Declaration of National

Emergency by Reason of Certain

Terrorist Attacks”) together with

Executive Order 13223

(“Ordering the Ready Reserve of

the Armed Forces To Active

Duty”). As we shall see, the

terms of this proclamation were

significantly expanded when it

was renewed in 2007.

2. “On September 23, 2001, by

Executive Order 13224, the

President declared a national

emergency with respect to

persons who commit, threaten to

commit, or support terrorism,

pursuant to the International

Emergency Economic Powers

Act (50 U.S.C. 1701–1706).” 43

This gave the president the

power to confiscate without trial

or warning the property of

individuals providing funds to

entities, such as charitable

foundations, which were judged

to be supporting terrorism. The

executive order initially blocked

property of twenty-seven

designated terrorists. But the list

has become enormous. When I

looked at it on November 18,

2010, the list included eighty-

seven pages just for the letter A.

By June 2014 the letter A took

158 pages.

A lawsuit was instituted, asserting that

the designation of “alleged terrorists”

was arbitrary. A lower court initially

agreed that the President’s designation

authority was unconstitutionally vague;

but after the judge reversed herself, the

suit lost. 44

CHENEY AND RUMSFELD ON THE

SECRET COMMITTEE TO PLAN

COG

From its beginning in 1982, two of the

key planners on the secret COG planning

committee were Dick Cheney and

Donald Rumsfeld, the same two men

who implemented COG on 9/11.45 The

committee had been established by

Reagan under a secret executive order,

NSDD 55 of September 14, 1982.

Despite what Weiner implied, the

committee continued to meet without

interruption until the George W. Bush

presidency in 2001. 46

Thus Cheney and Rumsfeld continued

their secret planning during the Clinton

presidency; even after both men, both

Republicans, were by that time heads of

major corporations and not in the

government. Andrew Cockburn cites a

Pentagon source to support a claim that

the Clinton administration had “no idea

what was going on.”

Although the exercises continued,

still budgeted at over $200 million

a year in the Clinton era, the

vanished Soviets were now

replaced by terrorists. . . . There

were other changes, too. In earlier

times the specialists selected to run

the “shadow government” had been

drawn from across the political

spectrum, Democrats and

Republicans alike. But now, down

in the bunkers, Rumsfeld found

himself in politically congenial

company, the players’ roster being

filled almost exclusively with

Republican hawks. . . . “You could

say this was a secret government-

in-waiting. The Clinton

administration was extraordinarily

inattentive, [they had] no idea what

was going on.” 47

Cockburn’s account requires some

qualification. Richard Clarke, a Clinton

Democrat, makes it clear that he

participated in the COG games in the

1990s and indeed drafted Clinton’s

Presidential Decision Directive (PDD)

67 on “Enduring Constitutional

Government and Continuity of

Government. ”48 But COG planning

involved different teams for different

purposes. It is quite possible that the

Pentagon official was describing the

Department of Defense team dealing

with retaliation.

It is important to understand that the

COG “Doomsday Project” in the 1980s

involved more than planning and

exercises. It also oversaw the National

Program Office (NPO), also known as

“Project 908,” the construction of a

multibillion-dollar infrastructure for an

alternative government. The key element

of this was an $8 billion

communications and logistics program

headquartered at Fort Huachuca,

Arizona, the headquarters for Army

Intelligence. 49 It also created ground

command centers, some of them mobile,

to work with the four Boeing E-4

Advanced Airborne Command Posts, or

“Doomsday Planes,” stationed at Offutt

Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska.

Despite initial failures in the

communications network, it was ready to

be put into operation and utilized on

September 11, 2001, by Vice President

Cheney.50 Key commands, including the

implementation of COG itself, appear to

have been made over this highest-

classification security network.51 This

may explain why a Boeing E-4B

Advanced Airborne Command Post, the

mobile communications center for the

National Command Authority (NCA),

was seen around 10 a.m. in the

prohibited air space above the White

House.52 (The NCA is defined as

consisting of the President and the

Secretary of Defense or their deputies,

though of course none of these men were

in an E-4 on that day.)

There is no way to determine how

many of the constitutional changes since

9/11 can be traced to COG planning.

However we do know that new COG

planning measures were still being

introduced in 2007, when President

Bush issued National Security

Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-

51/HSPD-20). This Directive set out

what FEMA later called “a new vision

to ensure the continuity of our

Government,” and was followed in

August by a new National Continuity

Policy Implementation Plan.53

Under pressure from his 911truth

constituents, Congressman Peter De-

Fazio of the Homeland Security

Committee twice requested to see these

annexes. When his request was denied,

DeFazio made a second request, in a

letter signed by the chair of his

committee. The request was denied

again.54

COG, THE NATIONAL

EMERGENCY, AND THE

NATIONAL EMERGENCIES ACT

I mentioned earlier that the proclamation

of a national emergency, issued by Bush

on September 14, 2001, and since

renewed annually to this day, changed

significantly in 2007. All previous

annual renewals had enumerated the

emergency measures that were being

renewed, for example “the measures

taken on September 14, 2001, November

16, 2001, and January 16, 2002.” After

Bush issued NSPD-51 of 2007, with its

“new vision” and its new classified

COG annexes, the next renewal of the

emergency proclamation replaced the

previous specific enumerations with a

more sweeping general sentence:

Because the terrorist threat

continues, the national emergency

declared on September 14, 2001,

last extended on September 5,

2006, and the powers and

authorities adopted to deal with

that emergency, must continue in

effect beyond September 14,

2007. 55

“The powers and authorities adopted

to deal with that emergency.” This

language is so vague, it is hard to see

how it could not cover the “classified

continuity annexes” of NSPD-51 as

well. If so, the public proclamation was

now proclaiming the continuation of

secret powers. (The annual renewals of

the emergency by Barack Obama do not

repeat this language from 2007, but

likewise fail to enumerate just what

powers are being extended.)56

The National Emergencies Act, one of

the post-Watergate reforms that Vice

President Cheney so abhorred, specifies

that: “Not later than six months after a

national emergency is declared, and not

later than the end of each six-month

period thereafter that such emergency

continues, each House of Congress shall

meet to consider a vote on a joint

resolution to determine whether that

emergency shall be terminated.” 57 The

law does not permit Congress to review

an emergency; it requires Congress to

review it.

Yet since 2001 Congress has not once

met to discuss the State of Emergency

declared by George W. Bush in response

to 9/11, a State of Emergency that

remains in effect today. Appeals to

Congress to meet its responsibilities to

review COG have fallen on deaf ears,

even during periods when Congress has

been dominated by Democrats. 58 Former

Congressman Dan Hamburg and I

appealed publicly in 2009, both to

President Obama to terminate the

emergency, and to Congress to hold the

hearings required of them by statute. 59

But Obama, without discussion, has

extended the 9/11 Emergency again in

every year of his presidency. 60

Meanwhile Congress has continued to

ignore its statutory obligations.

In 2009 one Congressman explained

to a constituent that the provisions of the

National Emergencies Act may have

now been rendered inoperative by COG.

If true, this would indicate that the

constitutional system of checks and

balances no longer applies, and also that

secret decrees now override public

legislation as the law of the land.

With a few notable exceptions, there

has thus far been scant interest in the

media and the public in the extraordinary

facts that Cheney and Rumsfeld were

able to

1. help plan successfully for

constitutional modifications,

when they were not in

government, and

2. implement these same changes

themselves when back in power.

The first of these facts gives us a

glimpse of an ongoing power realm, or

deep state, independent of the publicly

acknowledged state. In the words of

James Mann, “Cheney and Rumsfeld

were, in a sense, a part of the permanent,

though hidden, national security

apparatus of the United States,

inhabitants of a world in which

Presidents come and go, but America

always keeps on fighting.” 61 A CNN

Special Assignment assessment of the

COG planners was even more dramatic:

“In the United States of America there is

a hidden government about which you

know nothing. ”62

What is the first step out of this

current state of affairs, in which the

Constitution appears to have been

superseded by a higher, if less legitimate

authority? A traditional response would

be that people should get Congress to do

what the law requires, and determine

whether our present proclamation of

emergency “shall be terminated.” 63 As

part of this procedure, Congress should

find whether secret COG powers, never

submitted to Congress or seen by it, are

among “the powers and authorities” that

Bush in 2007 included in his

prolongation of the 2001 emergency and

that are maintained today under Obama.

This would not be a technical or

procedural detail. It would be a test of

whether the United States is presently

governed by its laws and Constitution,

or whether, as has been alleged, the laws

and Constitution have now in places

been superseded by COG. Ideally

Congress should go further to look into

the activities of Cheney’s ninety days of

COG shadow government in 2001, and

their relationship to the genesis of the

Patriot Act, the ten-year program for

detention camps, and the permanent

militarization of U.S. domestic law

enforcement.

But such a traditional recourse to

Congress may be impossible, if

Congress itself has indeed been

subordinated to the higher powers of the

deep state.

CHAPTER 4

The Falsified War

on Terror

The Deep History of

U.S. Protection for al-

Qaeda Terrorist Ali

Mohamed

BEFORE WORLD WAR II, THE AMERICAN

GOVERNMENT, FOR ALL OF ITS glaring

faults, also served as a model for the

world of limited government, having

evolved a system of restraints on

executive power through its

constitutional arrangement of checks and

balances. All that changed with

America’s emergence as a dominant

world power, and changed further after

the Vietnam War.

Since 9/11, above all, constitutional

American government has been

overshadowed by a series of emergency

measures to fight terrorism. The latter

have mushroomed in size and budget,

while traditional government has been

shrunk. As a result we have today (as

noted in chapter 2) what the journalists

Dana Priest and William Arkin have

called

two governments: the one its

citizens were familiar with,

operated more or less in the open;

the other a parallel top secret

government whose parts had

mushroomed in less than a decade

into a gigantic, sprawling universe

of its own, visible to only a

carefully vetted cadre—and its

entirety . . . visible only to God. 1

More and more, it is becoming

common to say that America, like Turkey

before it, now has what Marc Ambinder

and John Tirman have called a “deep

state” behind the public one. 2 And this

parallel government is guided in

surveillance matters by its own Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Court, known

as the “FISA Court,” which according to

The New York Times “has quietly

become almost a parallel Supreme

Court. ”3 Thanks largely to Edward

Snowden, it is now clear that the FISA

Court has permitted this deep state to

expand surveillance beyond the tiny

number of known and suspected Islamic

terrorists, to any incipient protest

movement that might challenge the

policies of the American war machine.

Most Americans have by and large not

questioned this parallel government,

accepting that sacrifices of traditional

rights and traditional transparency are

necessary to keep us safe from al-Qaeda

attacks. However, secret power is

unchecked power, and experience of the

last century has only reinforced the truth

of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that

unchecked power always corrupts. It is

time to consider the extent to which

American secret agencies have

developed a symbiotic relationship with

the forces they are supposed to be

fighting—and have even on occasion

intervened in a way that let al-Qaeda

terrorists proceed with their plots.

For indeed it is certain that on various

occasions U.S. agencies have

intervened, letting al-Qaeda terrorists

proceed with their plots. This alarming

statement will be dismissed by some as

“conspiracy theory.” Yet in this chapter,

I will show that this claim does not arise

from theory, but from facts that are true,

even though they have been

systematically suppressed or under-

reported in the American mainstream

media.

I am describing a phenomenon that

occurred not just once, but repeatedly,

almost predictably. We shall see that,

among the al-Qaeda terrorists who were

first protected and then continued their

activities were the following:

1. Ali Mohamed, identified in the

9/11 Commission Report as the

leader of the 1998 Nairobi

Embassy bombing;4

2. Mohammed Jamal Khalifa,

Osama bin Laden’s close friend

and, while in the Philippines,

financier of both Ramzi Yousef

(principal architect of the first

World Trade Center [WTC]

attack) and his uncle Khalid

Sheikh Mohammed;

3. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,

identified in the 9/11

Commission Report as “the

principal architect of the 9/11

attacks”; 5

4. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf

al-Hazmi, two of the alleged

9/11 hijackers, whose presence

in the United States was

concealed from the FBI by CIA

officers for months before 9/11.6

It might sound from these citations that

the 9/11 Commission marked a new

stage in the U.S. treatment of these

terrorists, and that the report now

exposed those terrorists who in the past

had been protected. On the contrary, a

principal purpose of my chapter is to

show that

1. one purpose of protecting these

individuals had been to protect a

valued intelligence connection

(the “al-Qaeda connection,” if

you will);

2. one major intention of the 9/11

Commission Report was to

continue protecting this

connection;

3. those on the 9/11 Commission

staff who were charged with this

protection included at least one

commission member (Jamie

Gorelick), one staff member

(Dietrich Snell), and one

important witness (Patrick

Fitzgerald) who earlier had

figured among the terrorists’

protectors.

In the course of writing this chapter, I

came to another disturbing conclusion I

had not anticipated. This is that a central

feature of the protection has been to

defend the 9/11 Commission’s false

picture of al-Qaeda as an example of

non-state terrorism, ignoring not just the

CIA but also the royal families of Saudi

Arabia and Qatar. In reality, as I shall

show, royal family protection from Qatar

and Saudi Arabia (concealed by the 9/11

Commission) was repeatedly given to

key figures like Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed, the alleged “principal

architect of the 9/11 attacks.”

The establishment claims that the

wars fought by America in Asia since

9/11 have been part of a global “war on

terror.” But this “war on terror” has

been fought in alliance with Saudi

Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan—precisely

the principal political and financial

backers of the al-Qaedist networks the

United States has supposedly been

fighting. 7 Meanwhile the most authentic

opponents in the region of these Sunni

al-Qaedists—the governments of Iraq,

Libya, Syria, and Iran—have found

themselves overthrown (in the case of

Iraq and Libya), subverted with U.S.

support (in the case of Syria), or

sanctioned and threatened as part of an

“axis of evil” (in the case of Iran). We

should not forget that, just one day after

9/11, “Rumsfeld was talking about

broadening the objectives of our

response and ‘getting Iraq.’” 8

To understand U.S. involvement in the

area I believe we must look at the

complex of networks behind the post-

9/11 U.S. campaign against Osama bin

Laden and his followers in al-Qaeda. In

fact both British and U.S. intelligence

have had a deep and complex

involvement for decades with the

emerging movement of political Islam—

a movement exemplified above all by

the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) or

Ikhwan, and its many spinoffs, of which

al-Qaeda is but one.

The MB itself should be regarded

more as a movement than as a formal

organization. Like the civil rights

movement in America, it has been in

continuous flux, and comprised of many

tendencies, leading to some alliances

that are nonviolent, others that are

violent. Its complex relationships with

the royal families of Saudi Arabia and

Qatar have also been in flux.

In the 1950s, when the Soviet Union

and Nasserite nationalism were seen as

enemies, MI6 and the CIA developed

mostly positive links with the MB and

its allies. What follows in chapters 4–6

suggests that, even since the fall of the

USSR, U.S. officials, particularly in the

CIA, have repeatedly chosen on

occasion to preserve their long-term

relationship with the MB and al-

Qaedists.9

I conclude that the pseudowar has

been fought for other motives than the

official one of fighting terrorism—

indeed few informed observers would

contest the obvious and often-voiced

observation, from U.S. intelligence

analysts among others, that U.S. wars

overseas (as opposed to intelligence and

police actions) have radically increased

the dangers of terrorism, not reduced

them. 10 Among the hidden motives, two

stand out. One is the intention to

establish a permanent U.S. military

presence in the oil- and gas-rich regions

of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.

Another is to justify a permanent

domestic apparatus, in part to contain the

threat of opposition to militarist

policies, opposition either by direct

action or by the publication (as in this

chapter) of suppressed truths. 11

The protection to terrorists described

in this chapter, in other words, has been

sustained partly in order to support the

false ideology that has underlain U.S.

Asian wars, disguised as a war on

terror, for more than a decade. And the

blame cannot be assigned all to the

Saudis. Two months before 9/11, FBI

counterterrorism expert John O’Neill

described to the French journalist Jean-

Charles Brisard America’s “impotence”

in getting help from Saudi Arabia

concerning terrorist networks. The

reason? In Brisard’s paraphrase, “Just

one: the petroleum interests. ”12 Former

CIA officer Robert Baer voiced a

similar complaint about the lobbying

influence of “the Foreign Oil Companies

Group, a cover for a cartel of major

petroleum companies doing business in

the Caspian. . . . The deeper I got, the

more Caspian oil money I found sloshing

around Washington.” 13

The decade of protection for terrorists

demonstrates the power of this extra

dimension to the American deep state:

the dark forces in our society

responsible for protecting terrorists,

over and above the parallel government

that was strengthened on and after 9/11.14

Although I cannot securely define these

dark forces, I hope to demonstrate that

they are related to the black hole at the

heart of the complex U.S-Saudi

connection, a complex that involves the

oil majors like Exxon, the Pentagon’s

concern with oil and gas movements

from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia,

offsetting arms sales, Saudi investments

in major U.S. corporations like Citibank

and the Carlyle Group (the owners of

Booz Allen Hamilton), and above all the

ultimate United States dependency on

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC, for the

defense of the petrodollar.15 The

apparatus of U.S. security appears to

have been hijacked by these deeper

forces, in order to protect terrorists who

should have been reined in. And the

governing media have been complicit in

concealing this situation.

In other words, this profound

dimension of the deep state, behind its

institutional manifestation in our parallel

government, could be seen as a greater

threat than foreign terrorism to the

preservation of U.S. democracy.

THE FBI’S INTERVENTION WITH

THE ROYAL CANADIAN

MOUNTED POLICE TO RELEASE

ALI MOHAMED, 1993

Let me begin my survey of protecting

terrorists with the FBI’s instruction in

1993 to the Royal Canadian Mounted

Police (RCMP) to release the major al-

Qaeda organizer Ali Mohamed, who

then proceeded to Nairobi in the same

year to begin planning the U.S. Embassy

bombing of 1998.

In early 1993 a wanted Egyptian

terrorist named Essam Hafez Marzouk, a

close ally of Osama bin Laden and

Ayman al-Zawahiri, arrived at Canada’s

Vancouver Airport and was promptly

detained by the RCMP. A second

terrorist by the name of Ali Mohamed,

“the primary U.S. intelligence agent for

Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin

Laden,” came from California to the

airport to meet him; and, not finding him,

made the mistake of asking about his

friend at the Vancouver airport customs

office. As a result the RCMP

interrogated Ali Mohamed for two days,

but finally released him, even though

Mohamed had clearly come in order to

smuggle a wanted terrorist into the

United States. 16

If the RCMP had detained Ali

Mohamed, who was much bigger game

than the first terrorist, hundreds of lives

might have been saved. After being

released, Ali went on to Nairobi, Kenya.

There in December 1993 he and his team

photographed the U.S. Embassy, and then

delivered the photos to Osama bin Laden

in Khartoum, leading to the embassy

bombing of 1998. 17 Mohamed later told

an FBI agent that at some point he also

trained al-Qaeda terrorists in using box

cutters to hijack airplanes. 18

The RCMP release of Ali Mohamed

was unjustified, clearly had historic

consequences, and may have contributed

to 9/11. Yet the FBI authorized it: Ali

Mohamed gave the RCMP the phone

number of an FBI agent, John Zent, in the

San Francisco FBI office, and told them,

“If they called that number, the agent on

the other end of the line would vouch for

him.” As Ali had predicted, the ensuing

phone call led to his release. 19

Ali Mohamed was an important

double agent, of major interest to more

important U.S. authorities than Zent.

Although Mohamed was at last arrested

in September 1998 for his role in the

Nairobi Embassy bombing, the U.S.

government still had not sentenced him

in 2006; and as late as 2011 he may still

not have gone to jail. 20

The story of his Vancouver release

and its consequences is another example

of the dangers of working with double

agents. One can never be sure if the

agent is working for his movement, for

his agency, or—perhaps most likely—

for increasing his own power and

influence along with that of both his

movement and his agency, by increasing

violence in the world.21

ALI MOHAMED’S RELEASE AS A

DEEP EVENT IGNORED BY THE

U.S. MEDIA

Mohamed’s release in Vancouver was a

deep event, by which I mean an event

predictably suppressed in the media and

still not fully understandable. A whole

chapter in my book The Road to 9/11

was not enough to describe Mohamed’s

intricate relationships at various times

with the CIA, U.S. Special Forces at

Fort Bragg, the murder in New York of

Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, and

finally, the cover-up of 9/11 perpetrated

by the 9/11 Commission and their

witness, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald

(Mohamed’s former prosecutor).22

The deep event is also an example of

deep politics, a mixture of intrigue and

suppression involving not just a part of

the U.S. government, but also the

governing media. According to a 2013

search of LexisNexis, the Vancouver

release incident, well covered in

Canada’s leading newspaper The

Toronto Globe and Mail (December 22,

2001), has never been mentioned in any

major American newspaper.

More disturbingly, it is not even

hinted at in the otherwise well-informed

books and articles about Ali Mohamed

by Steven Emerson, Peter Bergen, and

Lawrence Wright. 23 Nor is there any

mention of it in the best insider’s book

about the FBI and Ali Mohamed, The

Black Banners, by former FBI agent Ali

Soufan (a book that was itself heavily

and inexcusably censored by the CIA,

after being cleared for publication by the

FBI).24 Since first publishing this

paragraph in 2013, I have noticed that

former CIA officer Michael Scheuer

also faults both Steve Coll and

Lawrence Wright for their “whole-hog

acceptance of the Saudi narrative” that

minimizes U.S.-Saudi differences. 25

There is no doubt about the FBI’s

responsibility for Mohamed’s release. It

(along with other FBI anomalies in

handling Mohamed) is frankly

acknowledged in a Pentagon Security

bio on Mohamed:

In early 1993, Mohamed was

detained by the Royal Canadian

Mounted Police (RCMP) at the

Vancouver, Canada, airport. He had

come to the airport to meet an

Egyptian who had arrived from

Damascus but was found to be

carrying two forged Saudi

passports. When Mohamed was

about to be arrested as well, he told

the RCMP he was collaborating

with the FBI and gave them a name

and phone number to call to

confirm this. The RCMP made the

call and Mohamed was released

immediately at the request of the

FBI. When the FBI subsequently

questioned Mohamed about this

incident, he offered information

about a ring in California that was

selling counterfeit documents to

smugglers of illegal aliens. This is

the earliest hard evidence that is

publicly available of Mohamed

being an FBI informant.26

Contrast this official candor about the

FBI responsibility for Mohamed’s

release with the suppression of it in the

following much longer account of

Mohamed (3,200 words) by Benjamin

Weiner and James Risen in The New

York Times:

[In 1993] he was stopped by the

border authorities in Canada, while

traveling in the company of a

suspected associate of Mr. bin

Laden’s who was trying to enter the

United States using false

documents.

Soon after, Mr. Mohamed was

questioned by the F.B.I., which had

learned of his ties to Mr. bin Laden.

Apparently in an attempt to fend off

the investigators, Mr. Mohamed

offered information about a ring in

California that was selling

counterfeit documents to smugglers

of illegal aliens. 27

A long Wall Street Journal account

massages the facts even more evasively:

At about the same time [1993], the

elusive Mr. Mohamed popped up

again on the FBI radar screen with

information that underscored the

emerging bin Laden threat. The

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

questioned Mr. Mohamed in the

spring of 1993 after his

identification was discovered on

another Arab man trying to enter the

U.S. from Vancouver—a man Mr.

Mohamed identified as someone

who had helped him move Mr. bin

Laden to Sudan. The FBI located

Mr. Mohamed near San Francisco

in 1993, where he volunteered the

earliest insider description of al

Qaeda that is publicly known.28

In 1998, after the Embassy bombings,

Mohamed was finally arrested. In the

ensuing trial an FBI Agent, Daniel

Coleman, entered a court affidavit

(approved by prosecutor Patrick

Fitzgerald) that summarized the

Vancouver incident as follows:

In 1993, MOHAMED advised the

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

(“RCMP”) that he had provided

intelligence and counterintelligence

training in Afghanistan to a

particular individual. . . .

MOHAMED admitted that he had

travelled to Vancouver, Canada, in

the spring of 1993 to facilitate the

entry of that individual into the

United States. . . . MOHAMED

further admitted that he and the

individual had transported Osama

bin Laden from Afghanistan to the

Sudan in 1991. . . . MOHAMED

told the RCMP that he was in the

process of applying for a job as an

FBI interpreter and did not want

this incident to jeopardize the

application. (In fact, MOHAMED

then had such an application

pending though he was never hired

as a translator.)29

Like the American media, this FBI

affidavit suppressed the fact that

Mohamed, an admitted ally of Osama

bin Laden caught red-handed with

another known terrorist, was released at

the request of the FBI.

THE TWO LEVELS OF AMERICAN

HISTORY: OFFICIAL HISTORY

AND DEEP HISTORY

The whole episode illustrates what has

become all too common in recent

American history, the way in which

secret bureaucratic policies can take

priority over the public interest, even to

the point of leading to mass murder

(since it contributed at a minimum to the

1998 Embassy bombings, if not also

9/11). It is also an example of what I

mean by the “two levels of history” in

America, We can refer to them as those

historical facts officially acknowledged,

and those facts officially suppressed; or

alternatively as those facts fit to be

mentioned in the governing media, and

those suppressed by the same media.

This leads in turn to two levels of

historical narrative: official or archival

history, which ignores or marginalizes

deep events, and a second level—called

“deep history” by its practitioners or

“conspiracy theory” by its critics—

which incorporates them. The task of

deep political research is to recover

deep events from this second level.

This activity sets deep political

research at odds with the governing

media, but not, I believe, with the

national interest. Quite the contrary.

Speaking personally as an ex-diplomat, I

should acknowledge clearly that the

national interest does occasionally

require secrets, at least for a time.

Kissinger’s trip to China, for example,

which led to a normalization of U.S.-

Chinese relations, probably required

secrecy (at least at the time) in order to

succeed.

When insiders and the governing

media collaborate in the keeping of a

secret, as in the case of the FBI-ordered

release of Mohamed, they probably

persuade themselves that they are

protecting, not just the FBI, but also

national security—indeed, the national

interest. However national security in

this case was conspicuously not served

by the subsequent embassy bombings, let

alone by 9/11.

In the glaring gap between these two

levels of history is a third level—that of

the privileged books about Mohamed

—“privileged” in the sense that they

have access to sources denied to others

—that give important but selective parts

of the truth. This selectivity is not

necessarily culpable; it may for example

be due to pressure from lawyers

representing Saudi millionaires (a

pressure I have yielded to myself). 30 But

cumulatively it is misleading.

I owe a considerable debt in

particular to Lawrence Wright’s book,

The Looming Tower, which helped

expose many problems and limitations in

the official account of 9/11. But I see

now in retrospect that I, like many

others, have been delayed by its

selectivity on many matters (including

for example Mohamed’s RCMP release)

from developing a less warped

understanding of the truth.

THE LONGER HISTORY OF FBI

AND U.S. GOVERNMENT

PROTECTION FOR ALI

MOHAMED

Why did John Zent vouchsafe for

Mohamed in 1993, so that the RCMP

released him? The explanation of Peter

Lance, the best chronicler of FBI

culpability in both the first and second

WTC attacks, is that Zent did so because

Mohamed was already working as his

personal informant, “feeding Zent

‘intelligence’ on Mexican smugglers

who were moving illegal immigrants

into the United States from the South.” 31

(FBI agent Cloonan confirms that

Mohamed had been working as a local

FBI informant since 1992.32) Elsewhere

Lance describes Zent as “trusting and

distracted,” so that he failed to realize

Mohamed’s importance.33

But the FBI’s protection of Ali

Mohamed did not begin with Zent, nor

was it limited to him. It dated back at

least to 1989, according to the following

Pentagon Security bio account:

While serving in the Army at Fort

Bragg, he traveled on weekends to

Jersey City, NJ, and to Connecticut

to train other Islamic

fundamentalists in surveillance,

weapons and explosives. . . .

Telephone records show that while

at Fort Bragg and later, Mohamed

maintained a very close and active

relationship with the Office of

Services [Maktab Al-Khidamat] of

the Mujihadeen, in Brooklyn, which

at that time was recruiting

volunteers and soliciting funds for

the jihad against the Soviets in

Afghanistan. This was the main

recruitment center for the network

that, after the Soviets left

Afghanistan, became known as al-

Qaida. . . .

The FBI observed and

photographed Mohamed giving

weapons training to a group of New

York area residents during four

successive weekends in July 1989.

They drove from the Farouq

Mosque in Brooklyn to a shooting

range in Calverton, Long Island,

and they fired AK-47 assault rifles,

semiautomatic handguns and

revolvers during what appeared to

be training sessions. For reasons

that are unknown, the FBI then

ceased its surveillance of the

group. 34

(Similarly in 1993 an FBI supervisor

would again abruptly close down

surveillance of another group from the

al-Kifah Center at a militant training

camp in Pennsylvania.)35

In the subsequent trial of Mohamed’s

trainees and others for bombing the

World Trade Center, the defense

attorney, Roger Stavis, established that

Mohamed was giving the al-Kifah

trainees “courses on how to make

bombs, how to use guns, how to make

Molotov cocktails.” He showed the

court that a training manual seized in

Nosair’s apartment “showed how to

make explosives and some kind of

improvised weapons and explosives. ”36

So why would the FBI, after having

discovered terrorist training, then cease

its surveillance? Here the Wall Street

Journal gives the correct answer: the

FBI ceased surveillance because they

somehow determined that the men were

training “to help the mujahedeen fighting

the Soviet puppet government in

Afghanistan.” 37 (Note however that the

mujahedin were no longer fighting the

Soviet army itself, which had been

withdrawn from Afghanistan as of

March 1989.)

AL-KIFAH, ALI MOHAMED, THE

FLOW OF ARABS TO

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan is indeed a plausible

explanation for the FBI’s terminating its

videotaping of al-Qaedists from the

Brooklyn Al-Kifah Refugee Center.

Incorporated officially in 1987 as

“Afghan Refugee Services, Inc.,” the Al-

Kifah Center “was the recruitment hub

for U.S.-based Muslims seeking to fight

the Soviets. As many as two hundred

fighters were funneled through the center

to Afghanistan. ”38 More importantly, it

was

a branch of the Office of Services

[Maktab Al-Khidamat], the

Pakistan-based organization that

Osama bin Laden helped finance

and lead and would later become al

Qaeda. In fact, it was Mustafa

Shalabi, an Egyptian who founded

and ran the center, whom bin Laden

called in 1991 when he needed

help moving to Sudan. 39

As we shall see, the Maktab, created

in 1984 to organize Saudi financial

support to the foreign “Arab Afghans” in

the jihad, was part of a project that had

the fullest support of the Saudi,

Egyptian, and U.S. governments. And

Ali Mohamed, who answered bin

Laden’s call to Shalabi, and who

remained in the U.S. Army Reserves

until August 1994, was clearly an

important trainer in that project—in

Egypt, in Afghanistan, and finally in

America.

A privileged account of Mohamed’s

career by Peter Bergen, in Holy Wars,

Inc., claims,

Ali Mohamed . . . was an

indispensable player in al-Qaeda. .

. . At some point in the early

eighties he proffered his services

as an informant to the CIA, the first

of his several attempts to work for

the U.S. government. The Agency

was in contact with him for a few

weeks but broke off relations after

determining he was “unreliable.”

That would turn out to be a

masterful understatement, as

Mohamed was already a member of

Egypt’s terrorist Jihad group.

After being discharged from the

Egyptian Army in 1984, Mohamed .

. . [took] a job in the

counterterrorism department of

Egyptair. The following year he

moved to the United States. 40

Bergen’s most serious omission here

is that Mohamed, though he was on the

State Department’s visa watch list, had

been admitted to the United States in

1984 “on a visa-waiver program that

was sponsored by the agency [i.e., CIA]

itself, one designed to shield valuable

assets or those who have performed

valuable services for the country. ”41 This

should be enough to question the CIA’s

cover story that it dismissed Mohamed

as “unreliable.” (Later, one of

Mohamed’s officers at Fort Bragg was

also convinced that Mohamed was

“sponsored” by a U.S. intelligence

service, “I assumed the CIA.” )42 In

addition Bergen omits that, before

Mohamed’s brief stint as a formal CIA

agent, he had been selected out of the

Egyptian army in 1981 for leadership

training at Fort Bragg—an important

point to which we shall return. 43

THE FBI’S COVER-UP OF ALI

MOHAMED’S CONNECTION TO

THE KAHANE MURDER

The CIA may have wanted to think that

the Al-Kifah training was only for

Afghanistan. But the blind Sheikh Omar

Abdel Rahman (the mentor of the

Center), whom the CIA brought to

America in 1990, was preaching for the

killing of Jews and also for the

destruction of the West. 44 His preachings

guided Mohamed’s Maktab trainees: as a

first step, in November 1990, three of

them conspired to kill Meir Kahane, the

founder of the Jewish Defense League,

in New York City.

Kahane was then shot in Manhattan in

November 1990. His actual killer, El

Sayyid Nosair, was detained by accident

almost immediately, and by luck the

police soon found his two

coconspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima

and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at

Nosair’s house. Also at the house,

according to John Miller (formerly of

the FBI), “were training manuals from

the Army Special Warfare School at Fort

Bragg [where Ali Mohamed at the time

was a training officer]. There were

copies of teletypes that had been routed

to the Secretary of the Army and the

Joint Chiefs of Staff.” 45

And the Pentagon bio, with yet

another gentle dig at the FBI, identifies

the documents as Mohamed’s:

In a search of Nosair’s home, the

police found U.S. Army training

manuals, videotaped talks that

Mohamed delivered at the JFK

Special Warfare Center at Fort

Bragg, operational plans for joint

coalition exercises conducted in

Egypt, and other materials marked

Classified or Top Secret. These

documents belonged to Mohamed,

who often stayed in New Jersey

with Nosair. The documents did not

surface during Nosair’s 1991 trial

for the Kahane murder. It is not

known if the FBI investigated

Mohamed in connection with these

documents.

Yet only hours after the 1990 killing,

Joseph Borelli, the chief of the New

York Police Department (NYPD)

detectives, pronounced Nosair a “lone

de-ranged gunman.” 46 A more extended

account of his remarks in The New York

Times actually alluded to Mohamed,

though not by name, and minimized the

significance of the links to terrorism in a

detailed account of the Nosair home

cache:

The files contained articles about

firearms and explosives apparently

culled from magazines, like Soldier

of Fortune, appealing to would-be

mercenaries. But the police said the

handwritten papers, translated by

an Arabic-speaking officer,

appeared to be minor

correspondence and did not

mention terrorism or outline any

plan to kill the militant Jewish

leader who had called for the

removal of all Arabs from Israel.

“There was nothing [at Nosair’s

house] that would stir your

imagination,” Chief Borelli said. . .

. A joint anti-terrorist task force of

New York City police and the

Federal Bureau of Investigation has

been set up to look into any

possible international links to the

slaying, the official said, but so far

has not turned up anything.

“Nothing has transpired that

changes our opinion that he acted

alone,” Chief Borrelli [sic] told a

news conference yesterday

afternoon. 47

Later an FBI spokesman said the FBI

also believed “that Mr. Nosair had acted

alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane.” “The

bottom line is that we can’t connect

anyone else to the Kahane shooting,” an

FBI agent said.48

Blaming the New York County

District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau,

the FBI later claimed that the evidence

retrieved from Nosair’s home was not

processed for two or three years. 49 But

Robert Friedman suggests that the FBI

were not just lying to the public, but also

to Morgenthau (who had just helped

expose and bring down the CIA-favored

Muslim bank BCCI, a Saudi-sponsored

ally of the Safari Club).

According to other sources familiar

with the case, the FBI told District

Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau

that Nosair was a lone gunman, not

part of a broader conspiracy; the

prosecution took this position at

trial and lost, only convicting

Nosair of gun charges. Morgenthau

speculated the CIA may have

encouraged the FBI not to pursue

any other leads, these sources say.

“The FBI lied to me,” Morgenthau

has told colleagues. “They’re

supposed to untangle terrorist

connections, but they can’t be

trusted to do the job. ”50

Using evidence from the Nosair trial

transcript, Peter Lance confirms the

tension between Morgenthau’s office,

which wanted to pursue Nosair’s

international terrorist connections, and

the FBI, which insisted on trying Nosair

alone. 51

THE FBI’S PROTECTION OF ALI

MOHAMED IN THE 1993 WTC

BOMBING

In thus limiting the case, the police and

the FBI were in effect protecting, not just

Ali Mohamed, but also Nosair’s two

Arab coconspirators, Mahmoud

Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, in

the murder of a U.S. citizen. The two

were thus left free to kill again on

February 26, 1993, one month after the

FBI secured Mohamed’s release in

Vancouver. Both Abouhalima and

Salameh were ultimately convicted in

connection with the 1993 World Trade

Center bombing, along with another

Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad.

To quote the Pentagon biography yet

again,

In February 1993, the terrorist cell

that Mohamed had trained exploded

a truck bomb under the World

Trade Center that killed six and

injured about 1,000 persons. The

perpetrators of this bombing

included people Mohamed had

trained, and Mohamed had been in

close contact with the cell during

the period leading up to the

bombing [i.e., including January

1993, the month of Mohamed’s

detention and release in

Vancouver]. Mohamed’s name

appeared on a list of 118 potential

un-indicted co-conspirators that

was prepared by federal

prosecutors. 52

Ali Mohamed was again listed as one

of 172 unindicted coconspirators in the

follow-up “Landmarks” case, which

convicted Sheikh Rahman and others of

plotting to blow up the United Nations,

the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, and the

George Washington Bridge. 53 The two

cases were closely related, as much of

the evidence for the Landmarks case

came from an informant, Emad Salem,

whom the FBI had first planted among

the WTC plotters. But the prosecutors’

awareness of Ali Mohamed’s

involvement must be contrasted with the

reported intelligence failure at the CIA’s

Counterterrorism Center (CTC):

according to Steve Coll, the CTC

“immediately established a seven-day,

twenty-four hour task force to collect

intelligence about the World Trade

Center bombing . . . but nothing of

substance came in.” 54

In the WTC bombing case, the FBI

moved swiftly to bring the Al-Kifah

plotters to trial one month later, in

March. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)

officer, later said,

we [i.e., DIA] were surprised how

quickly they’d [i.e., FBI] made the

arrests after the first World Trade

Center bombing. Only later did we

find out that the FBI had been

watching some of these people for

months prior to both incidents [i.e.,

both the 1993 WTC bombing and

9/11]. 55

Shaffer’s claim that the FBI had been

watching some of the plotters is

abundantly corroborated, for example,

by Steve Coll in Ghost Wars.56

THE U.S., EGYPTIAN, AND SAUDI

BACKING FOR THE MAKTAB

NETWORK

What was being protected here by the

FBI? One obvious answer is an

extension of Lance’s explanation for

Zent’s behavior: that Mohamed had

already been a domestic FBI informant

since 1992. However I entirely agree

with New York County District Attorney

Robert Morgenthau, who suspected that

a much larger asset was being protected,

the Saudi-sponsored network that we

now know was the Maktab Al-

Khidamat, by this time already evolving

into al-Qaeda.

On the day the FBI arrested four

Arabs for the World Trade Centre

bombing, saying it had all of the

suspects, Morgenthau’s ears

pricked up. He didn’t believe the

four were “self-starters,” and

speculated that there was probably

a larger network as well as a

foreign sponsor. He also had a

hunch that the suspects would lead

back to Sheikh Abdel Rahman. But

he worried [correctly] that the dots

might not be connected because the

U.S. government was protecting the

sheikh for his help in Afghanistan. 57

This “larger network” of the Maktab,

although created in 1984, consolidated

an assistance program that had been

launched by the U.S. government much

earlier in Egypt by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

At almost the beginning of the Afghan

war itself, Brzezinski arranged for a

program to train members of the anti-

Communist Muslim Brotherhood, a

group that the CIA, and the British MI6,

had supported in various ways since the

1950s. 58

In January 1980, Brzezinski visited

Egypt to mobilize support for the

jihad. Within weeks of his visit,

Sadat authorized Egypt’s full

participation, giving permission for

the U.S. Air Force to use Egypt as a

base . . . and recruiting, training,

and arming Egyptian Muslim

Brotherhood activists for battle. . . .

Not only were they packaged and

shipped to Afghanistan, but [by the

end of 1980] they received expert

training from U.S. Special Forces.59

U.S. military trainers had in fact

already been in Egypt since at least 1978

(the year of the Israel-Egypt Camp

David peace accords), training Sadat’s

elite praetorian guard, of which Ali

Mohamed was at the time a member. At

first the training was handled by a

“private” firm, J. J. Cappucci and

Associates, owned by former CIA

officers Ed Wilson and Theodore

Shackley (who is said to have been

collaborating at this time with the Safari

Club). But after Brzezinski’s visit in

1980, the contract was taken over by the

CIA.60

In 1981 Ali Mohamed was selected

out of the U.S.-trained praetorian guard

for four months of Special Forces

training at Fort Bragg: “Working

alongside Green Berets, he learned

unconventional warfare,

counterinsurgency operations, and how

to command elite soldiers on difficult

missions.” 61 Mohamed was in Fort

Bragg as part of the Pentagon’s

Professional Military Education (PME)

program for future leaders; he was being

trained to transmit to Egypt the kind of

Afghanistan-related skills that he later

provided to Al-Kifah on Long Island in

1989. 62

Mohamed was thus in America when

some of his fellow guard members,

responding to a fatwa or religious order

from Muslim Brotherhood member

Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman,

assassinated Sadat in October 1981. The

assassination only accelerated the export

out of Egypt to Afghanistan of Muslim

Brotherhood members accused of the

murder. These included two of

Mohamed’s eventual close associates,

Sheikh Abdel Rahman and Rahman’s

then friend Ayman al-Zawahiri, to whom

Mohamed swore a bayat or oath of

allegiance in 1984, after his return to

Egypt.63

In other words Ali Mohamed was a

double agent in a milieu much broader

than just the San Francisco FBI office: a

milieu involving the United States,

Egypt, and al-Qaeda. In the next chapter

we shall suggest that in assisting Osama

bin Laden, Mohamed was also serving

the interests of Saudi Arabia.

CHAPTER 5

The Falsified War

on Terror II

How the Deep State

Has Protected Gulf

Arab States Rather

than the American

People

THE AL-KIFAH TARGET IN 1993:

NOT AFGHANISTAN, BUT BOSNIA

MORGENTHAU’S SUSPICIONS IN 1993 THAT

AL-KIFAH WAS RECRUITING AL-Qaedists

for Afghanistan were very pertinent. But

they were also anachronistic: By 1993,

under its new director James Woolsey,

both the CIA and al-Kifah had lost

interest in Afghanistan. The new interim

president of Afghanistan, Mojaddedi,

under pressure from Washington, had

announced that the Arab Afghans should

leave. In January 1993 Pakistan

followed suit, closed the offices of all

mujahedin in its country, and ordered the

deportation of all Arab Afghans. 1

The al-Kifah support network, in

conjunction with wealthy backers in

Saudi Arabia, now had new targets in

mind elsewhere. After 1991 the

Brooklyn Center was focused chiefly on

training people for jihad in Bosnia, and

at least two sources allege that Ali

Mohamed himself visited Bosnia in

1992 (when he also returned to

Afghanistan). 2

Al-Kifah’s English-language

newsletter Al-Hussam (The Sword)

also began publishing regular

updates on jihad action in Bosnia. .

. . Under the control of the minions

of Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman, the

newsletter aggressively incited

sympathetic Muslims to join the

jihad in Bosnia and Afghanistan

themselves. . . . The al-Kifah

Bosnian branch office in Zagreb,

Croatia, housed in a modern, two-

story building, was evidently in

close communication with the

organizational headquarters in New

York. The deputy director of the

Zagreb office, Hassan Hakim,

admitted to receiving all orders and

funding directly from the main

United States office of al-Kifah on

Atlantic Avenue controlled by

Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman. 3

One of Ali Mohamed’s trainees at al-

Kifah, Rodney Hampton-El, assisted in

this support program, recruiting warriors

from U.S. Army bases like Fort Belvoir,

and also training them in New Jersey to

be fighters. 4 In 1995 Hampton-El was

tried and convicted for his role (along

with al-Kifah leader Sheikh Omar Abdel

Rahman) in the plot to blow up New

York landmarks. At the trial Hampton-El

testified how he was personally given

thousands of dollars for this project by

Saudi Prince Faisal in the Washington

Saudi Embassy. 5 (In addition, “Saudi

intelligence has contributed to Sheikh

Rahman’s legaldefence fund, according

to Mohammed al-Khilewi, the former

first secretary to the Saudi mission at the

U.N.”)6

Later in this chapter we shall have

much more to say about Saudi support

for this terrorist network, and in

particular about the Saudi embassy in

Washington.

AL-KIFAH, AL-QAEDA,

TAJIKISTAN, AND DRUGS

Meanwhile the Pakistani Inter-Services

Intelligence (ISI) had not lost interest in

bin Laden’s Arabs, but began to recruit

them with bin Laden’s support for battle

in new areas, notably Central Asia and

Kashmir.7 Bin Laden in the same period

began to dispatch his al-Qaedists into

areas of the former Soviet Union,

notably to the infant Islamic Movement

of Uzbekistan (IMU) in Tajikistan.

The outbreak of Islamist violence

in Tajikistan . . . moved bin Laden

to send a limited number of al-

Qaeda cadre to support Tajik

Islamist forces, among them his

close associate Wali Khan Amin

Shah [an Uzbek later working in the

Philippines with Ramzi Yousuf and

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and the

soon-to-be-famous mujahid, Ibn

Khattab. In addition, bin Laden,

even after his 1991 move to Sudan,

continued to run training camps in

Afghanistan, where he welcomed

the chance to train Tajiks, Uzbeks,

Uighurs, and Chechens. 8

In an al-Qaeda document captured in

Iraq, bin Laden wrote:

With the grace of Allah, we were

successful in cooperating with our

brothers in Tajikistan in various

fields including training. We were

able train a good number of them,

arm them and deliver them to

Tajikistan. Moreover, Allah

facilitated to us delivering weapons

and ammunition to them; we pray

that Allah grants us all victory.9

Many other accounts report that the

delivery of arms and ammunition was

facilitated by the involvement of the

IMU and bin Laden in the massive flow

of heroin from Afghanistan into the

former Soviet Union. According to

Ahmed Rashid,

Much of the I.M.U.’s financing

came from the lucrative opium

trade through Afghanistan. Ralf

Mutschke, the assistant director of

Interpol’s Criminal Intelligence

Directorate, estimated that sixty per

cent of Afghan opium exports were

moving through Central Asia and

that the “I.M.U. may be responsible

for seventy per cent of the total

amount of heroin and opium

transiting through the area.” 10

Among the experts confirming the

IMU–al-Qaeda drug connection is

journalist Gretchen Peters:

The opium trade . . . supported the

global ambitions of Osama bin

Laden. . . . There was . . . evidence

that bin Laden served as middleman

between the Taliban and Arab drug

smugglers. . . . With Mullah Omar’s

approval, bin Laden hijacked the

state-run Ariana Airlines, turning it

into a narco-terror charter service .

. . according to former U.S. and

Afghan officials. . . . One U.S.

intelligence report seen by the

author described a smuggling route

snaking up through Afghanistan’s

northwest provinces in Baghdis,

Faryab, and Jowzan into

Turkmenistan. It was being used as

of mid-2004 by “extremists

associated with the Taliban, the

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan

and al-Qaeda,” the report said.

Traffickers would move “both

heroin and terrorists” along the

route and “then onwards into other

countries in Central Asia,” the CIA

document said.11

It has been widely reported that in the

early 1990s, as U.S. financial support

dwindled and bin Laden’s finances were

being rapidly exhausted in Sudan, his

new involvement with the IMU and later

the Taliban involved al-Qaeda also in

the growing Afghan heroin traffic. Peters

saw a CIA document confirming this. 12

Yet The 9/11 Commission Report, in

contorted language, denied this, as did a

Staff Report:

No persuasive evidence exists that

al Qaeda relied on the drug trade as

an important source of revenue, had

any substantial involvement with

conflict diamonds, or was

financially sponsored by any

foreign government. 13

This surprising claim was at odds

with the views of many U.S. intelligence

operatives. It also contradicted the

official position of the British

government, which told its Parliament in

2001,

Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaida

have been based in Afghanistan

since 1996, but have a network of

operations throughout the world.

The network includes training

camps, warehouses, communication

facilities and commercial

operations able to raise significant

sums of money to support its

activity. That activity includes

substantial exploitation of the

illegal drugs trade from

Afghanistan.14

Meanwhile there were allegations that

the Brooklyn al-Kifah Center, as well as

bin Laden, was involved in drug

trafficking. Back in 1993, The New York

Times reported that, according to

investigators, “Some of the 11 men

charged in the [Day of Terror] plot to

bomb New York City targets are also

suspected of trafficking in drugs. ”15

Mujahid Abdulqaadir Menepta, a

Muslim suspect in both the 9/11 case and

the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was

linked by telephone numbers on his cell

phones to ongoing criminal

investigations, involving “organized

crime, drugs, and money laundering. ”16

And Raed Hijazi, an al-Qaeda terrorist

arrested in Jordan in 1999, had

previously become an FBI informant in

order to avoid drug charges.17

The Commission may have covered

up and lied about this activity to protect

CIA interests in Uzbekistan. It is certain

that in the 1980s, the CIA, along with

Pakistani and Saudi intelligence, hoped

to foment Islamic fundamentalism in

Uzbekistan; the CIA even

“commissioned an Uzbek exile living in

Germany to produce translations of the

Koran in the Uzbek language, ”18 for

distribution by Islamist factions. Hence

it is not surprising that “from the

beginning the IMU has received

substantial support from Pakistan’s Inter-

Services Intelligence agency. However. .

. . sympathetic foundations and banks in

Saudi Arabia and the Arab world, also

remain major IMU sponsors.” 19

This would not be the first time that

the CIA protected a drug traffic that

supported the activities of its assets

abroad. 20 If al-Kifah supported its

operations through drugs, it would have

followed in the tradition of the drug-

money–laundering Australian Nugan

Hand Bank in the 1970s, founded in part

by American veterans of the Vietnam

War, with former CIA Director William

Colby serving as legal counsel.21 Nugan

Hand had become involved in supplying

arms to the UNITA faction of rebels in

Angola that was later supported by the

Safari Club. 22

WAS THE U.S. PROTECTION OF

THE AL-KIFAH CENTER

INTENDED TO HELP EXPORT

AND FINANCE AL-QAEDISTS?

There is also no treatment in the 9/11

Report, and almost none elsewhere, of

the allegations from Steven Emerson that

by 1987, the al-Kifah Center at the Al-

Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn “had

become a center for counterfeiting tens

of thousands of dollars.” 23 Similarly

there has been no government follow-up

of the allegation by Yossef Bodansky,

citing FBI informant Emad Salem, that

one of the al-Kifah cell leaders (Siddiq

Ibrahim Siddig Ali) “had offered to sell

a million dollars [of counterfeit

currency] for $150,000, well below

market value. . . . Quantities of

counterfeit $100 bills were later found

at the apartment of Sheikh Umar Abdel-

Rahman.” 24

J. M. Berger goes further, reporting

from court testimony: “In order to

support Al Kifah’s operations,” Mustafa

Shalabi, the head of the al-Kifah Center

until his murder in 1991, “employed a

number of for-profit criminal

enterprises, including gunrunning, arson

for hire, and a counterfeiting ring set up

in the basement of the jihad office.” 25 Yet

The 9/11 Commission Report is silent

about these serious charges, which U.S.

prosecutors at the time did not pursue.

Why this official reticence? The

answer may lie in the fact that by 1996

bin Laden was “supporting Islamists in

Lebanon, Bosnia, Kashmir, Tajikistan,

and Chechnya.” 26 And in step with bin

Laden, the al-Kifah Center was also

supporting al-Qaedist terrorism after

1992 “in Afghanistan, Bosnia, the

Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir,

Palestine, and elsewhere. ”27

Osama bin Laden and al-Kifah were

not acting on their own, they were

supporting projects, especially in Bosnia

(1992), Tajikistan (1993–1995), and

then Chechnya (after 1995), where their

principal ally, Ibn al-Khattab (Thamir

Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem), also

enjoyed high-level support in Saudi

Arabia. 28

Khattab enjoyed a certain amount of

logistical and financial support

from Saudi Arabia. Saudi sheikhs

declared the Chechen resistance a

legitimate jihad, and private Saudi

donors sent money to Khattab and

his Chechen colleagues. As late as

1996, mujahidin wounded in

Chechnya were sent to Saudi

Arabia for medical treatment, a

practice paid for by charities and

tolerated by the state. 29

Ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan adds that

America also supported this jihad: by

1996, “the United States had been on the

side of Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia,

and Chechnya.” 30

By protecting the al-Kifah Center and

its associates (including Mohamed) and

not prosecuting them for their crimes

(including murder), the U.S. government

was in effect imitating Saudi Arabia and

Egypt, by keeping open a channel to

export those in America who wished to

wage al-Qaedist terrorism—thereby

ensuring they would wage it in other

countries, not here. (After the arrest of

Sheikh Rahman in 1993 al-Kifah closed

itself down. But we shall see that an

allied institution, Sphinx Trading,

continued to be protected after 9/11,

even after the FBI knew it had helped

one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.)31

Was all this protection intended to

keep just such a channel open? It was

certainly an intentional result of the

protection and support for the Maktab

al-Khidamat in Saudi Arabia.

SAUDI SUPPORT FOR THE

MAKTAB, AND LATER FOR AL-

QAEDA

The Saudis, like the Egyptians, had

domestic reasons for wishing to export

as many Muslim Brotherhood members

to possible death in Afghanistan, Bosnia,

or anywhere else. Until 1979 Saudi

Arabia had provided a home to

Brotherhood members fleeing

persecution in countries like Syria and

Egypt, where some of them had tried to

assassinate the Saudis’ political enemy

Gamel Abdel Nasser. But in 1979

radical Wahhabis, condemning the ruling

Saudi family as corrupt infidels, seized

the Grand Mosque at Mecca and

defended it for weeks. 32 Profoundly

shaken, the Saudi family used its

foundations, like the World Muslim

League (WML), to subsidize the

emigration of political Islamists, above

all to the new jihad in Afghanistan,

which opened one month later against

the Soviet Union. 33

In Afghanistan both Rahman and al-

Zawahiri worked with the Maktab al-

Khidamat that had been created in 1984

by two other members of the Muslim

Brotherhood, the Palestinian Abdullah

Azzam, and the Saudi Osama bin

Laden. 34 All that The 9/11 Commission

Report has to say about the Maktab’s

financing is that “Bin Laden and his

comrades had their own sources of

support and training, and they received

little or no assistance from the United

States.” 35 But the Pakistani author

Ahmed Rashid makes clear the support

coming from the Saudi royal family,

including Prince Turki (the head of

Saudi intelligence), and also royal

creations like the World Muslim League:

Bin Laden, although not a royal,

was close enough to the royals and

certainly wealthy enough to lead the

Saudi contingent. Bin Laden, Prince

Turki and General [Hameed] Gul

[the head of the Pakistani ISI] were

to become firm friends and allies in

a common cause. The center for the

Arab-Afghans was the offices of

the World Muslim League and the

Muslim Brotherhood in Peshawar

which was run by Abdullah Azam.

Saudi funds flowed to Azam and

the Makhtab al Khidimat or

Services Center which he created

in 1984 to service the new recruits

and receive donations from Islamic

charities. Donations from Saudi

Intelligence, the Saudi Red

Crescent, the World Muslim League

and private donations from Saudi

princes and mosques were

channeled through the Makhtab. A

decade later the Makhtab would

emerge at the center of a web of

radical organizations that helped

carry out the World Trade Center

bombing [in 1993] and the

bombings of U.S. Embassies in

Africa in 1998. 36

Former Ambassador Peter Tomsen

has described how the evolution of the

Makhtab into al-Qaeda was

accomplished with support from the

offices of royally ordained organizations

like the World Muslim League (WML)

and the World Assembly of Muslim

Youth (WAMY):

Bin Laden’s brother-in-law,

Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, headed

the Muslim World League [MWL]

office in Peshawar during the mid-

1980s. In 1988, he moved to

Manila and opened a branch office

of the World Assembly of Muslim

Youth. He made the charity a front

for bin Laden’s terrorist operations

in the Philippines and Asia. Al-

Qaeda operatives, including Khalid

Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of

the 9/11 attacks, and his nephew

Ramzi Yusuf [master bomb maker

of the 1993 WTC bombing],

traveled to Manila in the early

1990s to help Khalifa strengthen al-

Qaeda networks in Southeast Asia

and plan terrorist attacks in the

region. 37

There are many other examples of

WML and WAMY connections to al-

Qaeda. For example Maulana Fazlur

Rehman Khalil, a signatory of Osama

bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa to kill Jews and

Americans, was invited in 1996 to the

34th WML Congress in Mecca and also

spoke there to WAMY.38 Yet there are

only minimal references to Maulana

Fazlur Rehman in the western (as

opposed to the Asian) media, and none

(according to a LexisNexis search in

July 2013) linking him to the WML or

WAMY.

The FBI’s hands-off attitude toward

WAMY in America was in keeping with

its protection of Ali Mohamed.

According to former federal prosecutor

John Loftus and others, there was a

block in force in the 1980s against

antiterrorism enforcement that might

embarrass the Saudis. 39 This block

explains for example the protection

enjoyed by the chair of WAMY in

Virginia, Osama bin Laden’s nephew

Abdullah bin Laden. The FBI opened an

investigation of Abdullah bin Laden in

February 1996, calling WAMY “a

suspected terrorist organization,” but the

investigation was closed down six

months later. 40

In Pakistan WAMY “shared office

space with the Benevolence

International Corporation, an al-Qaeda

charitable front founded by Osama bin

Laden’s brother-in-law Mohammed

Jamal Khalifa.” 41 A decade later,

In 2002, a raid by Bosnian

authorities on the Sarajevo offices

of the Benevolence International

Foundation, a multimillion-dollar

charity, led to the discovery of a

document called the “Golden

Chain,” a list of Al Qaeda

sponsors. According to Craig

Unger, “The donors of the Golden

Chain were not just wealthy

Saudis–they were the crème de la

crème of the great Saudi industrial

and mercantile elite.” The list

included Osama’s brothers who ran

the bin Laden Group, and Khalid

bin Mahfouz, “the banker of the

royal family, and the most powerful

banker in Saudi Arabia.” 42

In the 1980s Khalid bin Mahfouz had

bought up to 30 percent of the stock of

the Bank of Credit and Commerce

International (BCCI), the bank co-

founded by Kamal Adham, the former

Saudi intelligence chief and Safari Club

financier.43

WHAT SAUDI PRINCE HELPED A

PASSPORTLESS OSAMA LEAVE

SAUDI ARABIA?

None of the official or privileged

sources on Ali Mohamed has linked him

to Saudi intelligence activities. But there

is at least one such link: his trip, as

described in the Coleman FBI affidavit,

when in 1991 (still a U.S. Army

reservist) he “travelled to Afghanistan to

escort Usama bin Laden from

Afghanistan to the Sudan.” 44 The FBI

affidavit presents this, without

explanation, as an act in furtherance of

an al-Qaeda “murder conspiracy.” But

Osama’s move to Sudan was

synchronized with a simultaneous

investment in Sudan by his bin Laden

brothers, including an airport

construction project that was largely

subsidized by the Saudi royal family. 45

A great deal of confusion surrounds

the circumstances of bin Laden’s

displacement in 1991–1992, from Saudi

Arabia via Pakistan (and perhaps

Afghanistan) to the Sudan. But in these

conflicted accounts one important fact is

not contested: bin Laden’s trip was

initially arranged by someone in the

royal family. 46 Steven Coll in Ghost

Wars suggests that the royal family

arranged this trip amicably, blaming it

on pressure from the United States:

Peter Tomsen and other emissaries

from Washington discussed the

rising Islamist threat with [Saudi

intelligence chief] Prince Turki in

the summer of 1991. . . . At some of

the meetings between Turki and the

CIA, Osama bin Laden’s name

came up explicitly. The CIA

continued to pick up reporting that

he was funding radicals such as

Hekmatyar in Afghanistan. . . . “His

family has disowned him,” Turki

assured the Americans about bin

Laden. Every effort had been made

to persuade bin Laden to stop

protesting against the Saudi royal

family. These efforts had failed,

Turki conceded, and the kingdom

was now prepared to take sterner

measures. . . . Bin Laden learned of

this when Saudi police arrived at

his cushion-strewn, modestly

furnished compound in Jeddah to

announce that he would have to

leave the kingdom. According to an

account later provided to the CIA

by a source in Saudi intelligence,

the officer assigned to carry out the

expulsion assured bin Laden that

this was being done for his own

good. The officer blamed the

Americans. The U.S. government

was planning to kill him, he told

bin Laden, by this account, so the

royal family would get him out of

the kingdom for his own

protection. The escort put bin

Laden on a plane out of Saudi

Arabia. 47

Coll’s magisterial but privileged book

appeared in February 2004. Six months

later the 9/11 Commission Report

published a quite different account,

implying that by 1991 the Saudi

government was estranged from bin

Laden:

The Saudi government . . .

undertook to silence Bin Laden by,

among other things, taking away his

passport. With help from a

dissident member of the royal

family, he managed to get out of the

country under the pretext of

attending an Islamic gathering in

Pakistan in April 1991. 48

Lawrence Wright claims,

persuasively, that the prince returning

Osama’s passport was no “dissident,”

but Interior Minister Prince Naif, after

bin Laden persuaded him he was needed

in Peshawar “in order to help mediate

the civil war among the mujahideen. ”49

Prince Naif, the most anti-American of

the senior Saudi royals, gave back bin

Laden’s passport on one condition, that

he “sign a pledge that he would not

interfere with the politics of South

Arabia or any Arab country. ”50 This was

a common Saudi practice.

The “Islamic gathering” is almost

certainly a reference to the ongoing

negotiations in Peshawar that eventually

produced the Saudi-backed Peshawar

Accord (finalized in April 1992) to end

the Afghan Civil War. By several well-

informed accounts, Bin Laden did play

an important part in these negotiations,

in furtherance (I would argue) of Prince

Turki’s own policies. 51 Like Sheikh

Rahman before him in 1990, bin Laden

tried, vainly, to negotiate a truce

between the warring mujahedin leaders,

Massoud and Hekmatyar. In these

negotiations (according to Peter Tomsen,

who was there), Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,

the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda

were all united in seeking the same

objective: a united Sunni army (in

opposition to American appeals for Shia

representation) that could retake Kabul

by force.52

Thus I believe it is quite clear that bin

Laden, in his mediation attempts to bring

Hekmatyar into the Peshawar consensus,

was acting in line with official Saudi

and Pakistani interests. Others disagree.

Without documentation, the author of the

Frontline biography of bin Laden

asserts,

Contrary to what is always

reiterated bin Laden has never had

official relations with the Saudi

regime or the royal family. All his

contacts would happen through his

brothers.53 . . .

Specifically he had no relation

with Turki al-Faisal head of Saudi

intelligence. He used to be very

suspicious of his role in

Afghanistan and once had open

confrontation with him in 1991 and

accused him of being the reason of

the fight between Afghan factions.54

Michael Scheuer, once head of the

CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, endorsed

this claim, and reinforced it with the

testimony of Sa’ad al-Faqih (a critic of

the Saudi royal family who has been

accused by the U.S. Treasury of being

affiliated with al-Qaeda) that, “after the

Soviets withdrew ‘Saudi intelligence

[officers] were actually increasing the

gap between Afghani factions to keep

them fighting.’”55

But this claim if true must have been

after Kabul fell to al-Qaedists in 1992,

when Massoud, backed by the favored

Saudi client Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, began

to fight Hekmatyar, the favored client of

Pakistan’s ISI. Before this time the U.S.

State Department’s Afghan policy was to

promote a broad-based opposition to the

rump Communist government in Kabul,

while “side-lining the extremists,”

including both Hekmatyar and Sayyaf.56

In the same period, Pakistan’s ISI

clearly wanted a strong rebel alliance

united behind Hekmatyar, and both the

CIA and the Saudis continued to support

them. As Barnett Rubin reports, “During

this period, political ‘unity’ of some sort

among the mujahidin groups was a major

goal of U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi policy.” 57

And in 1990–1991, as Washington cut its

allocation for the CIA’s covert Afghan

program by 60 percent, Prince Turki

more than made up for the shortfall by

increased contributions from Saudi

Arabia. 58

I conclude that bin Laden’s mediation

efforts in Peshawar in 1991 were in

accordance with Prince Turki’s

preferences, just as was Ali Mohamed’s

effort, in organizing bin Laden’s

subsequent move from Afghanistan and

Pakistan to the Sudan. As Steve Coll

reports, the break between bin Laden

and the Saudi royal family did not

become serious until at least 1993, after

the involvement of bin Laden’s ally

Sheikh Rahman in the first WTC

bombing. 59

CHAPTER 6

Deep State Uses

and Protection of

al-Qaeda Terrorists

THE STATE DEPARTMENT-CIA

SPLIT OVER AFGHANISTAN—

AND OIL

IN 1991 THE SOVIET TROOPS HAD BEEN OUT

OF KABUL FOR TWO YEARS; AND, as

former U.S. Ambassador Tomsen has

reported, the CIA’s objective of a

Pakistan-backed military overthrow in

Kabul was at odds with the official U.S.

policy of support for “a political

settlement restoring Afghanistan’s

independence. ”1 Ambassador Tomsen

himself told the CIA Station Chief in

Islamabad (“Bill”) that, by endorsing

Pakistan’s military attack on Kabul,

he was violating fundamental U.S.

policy precepts agreed to in

Washington by his own agency.

American policy was to cut

Hekmatyar off, not build him up.

Bill looked at me impassively as I

spoke. I assumed his superiors in

Langley had approved the

offensive. The U.S. government

was conducting two diametrically

opposed Afghan policies.2

Steve Coll agrees that “by early 1991,

the Afghan policies pursued by the State

Department and the CIA were in open

competition with each other. . . . The

CIA . . . continued to collaborate with

Pakistani military intelligence on a

separate military track that mainly

promoted Hekmatyar and other Islamist

commanders.” 3

This conflict between the State

Department and CIA was far from

unprecedented. In particular it recalled

the CIA-State conflict in Laos in 1959–

1960, which led to a tragic war in Laos,

and eventually Vietnam. 4 Just as oil

companies had a stake in the Indochina

conflict, so too was the CIA in 1990–

1992 thinking not just of Afghanistan, but

also of the oil resources of Central Asia,

where some of the al-Kifah-trained

“Arab Afghans” were about to focus

their attention.

In Afghanistan, the State Department

represented the will of the National

Security Council and the public state.

The CIA, on the other hand, was not

“rogue” (as has sometimes been

suggested); it was pursuing the goals of

oil companies and their financial

backers—or what I have called the deep

state—in preparing for a launch into the

former Soviet republics of central Asia.

COVERT OPERATIONS AND OIL

IN CENTRAL ASIA

In 1991 the leaders of former Soviet

Union states in Central Asia “began to

hold talks with Western oil companies,

on the back of ongoing negotiations

between Kazakhstan and the US

company Chevron.” 5 The first Bush

administration actively supported the

plans of U.S. oil companies to contract

for exploiting the resources of the

Caspian region, and also for building a

pipeline not controlled by Moscow that

could bring the oil and gas production

out to the West.

In the same year 1991, Richard

Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed

Dearborn, three veterans of CIA Station

Chief Theodore Shackley’s operations in

Laos, and later of Oliver North’s

operations with the Contras, turned up in

Baku under the cover of an oil company,

MEGA Oil. 6 This was at a time when the

first Bush administration had expressed

its support for an oil pipeline stretching

from Azerbaijan across the Caucasus to

Turkey.7 MEGA never did find oil; but it

did contribute materially to the removal

of Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-

Soviet Russian influence, and hence to

the ultimate construction of the Baku-

Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline from

Baku to Ceyhan in Turkey.

As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan,

Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and their

men engaged in military training, passed

“brown bags filled with cash” to

members of the government, and above

all set up an airline on the model of Air

America that soon was picking up

hundreds of mujahedin mercenaries in

Afghanistan.8 (Secord and Aderholt

claim to have left Azerbaijan before the

mujahedin arrived. 9)

Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the

time was still allied with bin Laden, was

“observed recruiting Afghan

mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight

in Azerbaijan against Armenia and its

Russian allies.” 10 Hekmatyar was a

notorious drug trafficker, and, at this

time, heroin flooded from Afghanistan

through Baku into Chechnya, Russia, and

even North America. 11

(In the 1990s, according to Loretta

Napoleoni, an al-Qaedist drug route

from Tajikistan transited Azerbaijan to

reach Chechnya and Kosovo. 12 And in

1998, Clinton came to the support of the

al-Qaeda–backed Kosovo Liberation

Army [KLA]. He did so even though “in

1998, the U.S. State Department listed

the KLA . . . as an international terrorist

organization, saying it had bankrolled its

operations with proceeds from the

international heroin trade and from loans

from known terrorists like Osama bin

Laden. ”13 This was another instance of

willingness to make use of al-Qaedist

assets in pursuit of geostrategic goals.)

BIN LADEN, ALI MOHAMED, AND

THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY

By attempting to negotiate Hekmatyar’s

reconciliation with the other Peshawar

commanders, bin Laden in 1991 was

clearly an important part of the CIA’s

effort to establish a pro-Pakistan regime

in Kabul. So, a year earlier, had been the

blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman:

In 1990, after the assassination of

Abdullah Azzam, Abd al-Rahman

was invited to Peshawar, where his

host was Khalid al-Islambouli,

brother of one of the assassins of

Sadat. . . . On this trip, reportedly

paid for by the CIA, Abd al-

Rahman preached to the Afghans

about the necessity of unity to

overthrow the Kabul regime.14

This presumably was shortly before

Sheikh Abdul Rahman, even though he

was on a State Department terrorist

watch list after being imprisoned for the

murder of Egyptian president Anwar

Sadat, was issued a multiple-entry U.S.

visa in 1990 “by a CIA officer working

undercover in the consular section of the

American embassy in Sudan.” 15 This

was the same CIA-sponsored program

that six years earlier had admitted Ali

Mohamed, “a visa-waiver program that

was . . . designed to shield valuable

assets or those who have performed

valuable services for the country. ”16

And Ali Mohamed himself was,

according to The New York Times, part

of the CIA’s plan for a military solution:

“In the fall of 1992, Mr. Mohamed

returned to fight in Afghanistan, training

rebel commanders in military tactics,

United States officials said.” 17 Before

this, Mohamed had been charged with

the major task of moving bin Laden, his

four wives, and his seventeen children

from Afghanistan to Sudan. The task was

a major one, for Osama moved with his

assistants, “a stable of Arabian horses,

and bulldozers. ”18

Meanwhile Saudi royal support for

this web of radical organizations, in

which Ali Mohamed was a central

organizer and trainer, continued after the

World Trade Center (WTC) bombing of

1993. The Turki-bin Laden connection,

which was cemented by Turki’s chief of

staff and bin Laden’s teacher Ahmed

Badeeb, may have been renewed as late

as 1998:

In sworn statements after 9/11,

former Taliban intelligence chief

Mohammed Khaksar said that in

1998 the prince sealed a deal under

which bin Laden undertook not to

attack Saudi targets. In return,

Saudi Arabia would provide funds

and material assistance to the

Taliban. . . . Saudi businesses,

meanwhile, would ensure that

money also flowed directly to bin

Laden. Turki would deny after 9/11

that any such deal was done with

bin Laden. One account has it,

however, that he himself met with

bin Laden—his old protégé from

the days of the anti-Soviet jihad—

during the exchanges that led to the

deal. 19

ROYAL SAUDI FINANCING FOR

BIN LADEN, INCLUDING HIS

MOVE TO THE SUDAN

Anthony Summers also transmits insider

reports

that at least two Saudi princes had

been paying, on behalf of the

kingdom, what amounted to

protection money since 1995. The

former official added, “The deal

was, they would turn a blind eye to

what he was doing elsewhere. ‘You

don’t conduct operations here, and

we won’t disrupt them

elsewhere.’”

American and British official

sources, speaking later with Simon

Henderson, Baker Fellow at the

Washington Institute for Near East

Policy, named the two princes in

question. They were, Henderson

told the authors, Prince Naif, the

interior minister, and Prince Sultan.

The money involved in the alleged

payments, according to

Henderson’s sources, had amounted

to “hundreds of millions of

dollars.” It had been “Saudi official

money—not their own.” 20

It would appear moreover that Saudi

royal money may have helped pay for

bin Laden’s move to the Sudan in 1991–

1992: the move organized by Ali

Mohamed, possibly in collaboration

with bin Laden’s family. There is hotly

contested evidence that Osama

participated with his brothers in the

construction of the Port Sudan airport, a

project underwritten with funds from the

Saudi royal family.21 According to

Lawrence Wright, “the Saudi Binladin

Group got the contract to build an airport

in Port Sudan, which brought Osama

frequently into the country to oversee the

construction. He finally moved to

Khartoum in 1992.” 22

Not contested, but largely overlooked,

is the evidence of how bin Laden

financed his move, through investing $50

million in the Sudanese al-Shamal

Islamic bank—a bank that also had

support from both the bin Laden family

and the Saudi royal family. As the

Chicago Tribune reported in November

2001,

According to a 1996 State

Department report on bin Laden’s

finances, bin Laden co-founded the

Al Shamal bank with a group of

wealthy Sudanese and capitalized it

with $50 million of his inherited

fortune. . . .23

According to public records,

among the investors in the Al

Shamal Islamic Bank is a Geneva-

based financial services

conglomerate headed by Prince

Mohamed al-Faisal al-Saud,

[brother of Prince Turki], son of the

late King [Faisal al-] Saud and a

cousin [i.e., nephew] of the current

Saudi monarch, King Fahd.

The Al Shamal bank, which

opened for business in 1990,

admits that Osama bin Laden held

three accounts there between 1992

and 1997, when he used Sudan as

his base of operations before

fleeing to Afghanistan. But the bank

insists in a written statement that

bin Laden “was never a founder or

a shareholder of Al Shamal Islamic

Bank.”

Told of the bank’s statement, the

State Department official replied

that “we stand by” the assertion that

bin Laden put $50 million into the

bank.

Al Shamal does acknowledge

that among its five “main founders”

and principal shareholders is

another Khartoum bank, the Faisal

Islamic Bank of Sudan.24 According

to public records, 19 percent of the

Faisal Islamic Bank is owned by

the Dar Al-Maal Al-Islami Trust,

headed by Saudi Prince

[Mohammed al-Faisal] al-Saud. 25

The Dar Al-Mal Al-Islami or DMI

Trust, “based in the Bahamas and with

its operations center in Geneva,” was

one of a spate of banks, mostly

dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood,

that were set up with Western guidance

and assistance—in DMI’s case the

assistance came from Price Waterhouse

and eventually Harvard University. 26

DMI was one of the two main banks that,

according to Jane’s Intelligence Review,

had been funding the Maktab and also

the International Islamic Relief

Organization (IIRO), about which I say

more below. 27

The $3.5 billion DMI Trust, whose

slogan is “Allah is the purveyor of

success,” was founded 20 years

ago to foster the spread of Islamic

banking across the Muslim world.

Its 12-member board of directors

includes Haydar Mohamed Bin-

laden, according to a DMI

spokesman, a half-brother of

Osama bin Laden. . . .

Though small, the Al Shamal

Islamic Bank enabled bin Laden to

move money quickly from one

country to another through its

correspondent relationships with

some of the world’s major banks,

several of which have been

suspended since Sept. 11.

The Al Shamal bank was

identified as one of bin Laden’s

principal financial entities during

the trial earlier this year [2001] of

four Al Qaeda operatives convicted

in the 1998 bombings of two U.S.

embassies in Africa.28

One might have expected this early

and revealing insight into bin Laden’s

finances to have been developed in the

spate of privileged bin Laden and al-

Qaeda books that appeared in the years

after 2001. In fact I have located only

one brief inconsequential reference, in

Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: “Osama

had reorganized his personal banking at

the Al-Shamal Bank in Khartoum, but his

accounts gradually dried up.” 29

There is of course no mention of the

Al-Shamal Bank in The 9/11

Commission Report.

U.S. AND SAUDI PROTECTION

FOR OSAMA BIN LADEN’S

BROTHER-IN-LAW, MOHAMMED

JAMAL KHALIFA

It seems clear that the 1980s official

U.S. government block against

antiterrorism actions that might

embarrass the Saudis was still in force

in America in 1995. We see this in the

extraordinary federal protection

extended to Mohammed Jamal Khalifa,

Osama bin Laden’s best friend and

brother-in-law.

On December 16, 1994, the San

Francisco FBI arrested Khalifa, in the

presence of the Syrian American

Mohamed Loay Bayazid, a sometime

president of the Benevolence

International Foundation. 30 Khalifa’s

arrest (Bayazid was not detained) took

place in Morgan Hills (not far from Ali

Mohamed’s home). Khalifa’s business

card had been discovered in a search

one year earlier of Sheikh Rahman’s

residence, after which he had been

named as an unindicted coconspirator in

the Landmarks case. Soon afterward, a

State Department cable described him as

“a known financier of terrorist

operations and an officer of an Islamic

NGO in the Philippines that is a known

Hamas front. He is under indictment in

Jordan in connection with a series of

cinema bombings earlier this year.” 31

Khalifa, in other words, was like Ali

Mohamed involved in terrorist

operations on an international level. He

was an important source of information

and talked freely to the FBI agents who

arrested him. In his possession they

found “documents that connected Islamic

terrorist manuals to the International

Islamic Relief Organization, the group

that he had headed in the Philippines. ”32

And in his notebook they found evidence

linking him directly to Ramzi Yousef,

who at the time was the FBI’s most-

wanted terrorist for his role in the 1993

WTC bombing.

But as Peter Lance narrates, “The

Feds never got a chance to question

him.” Instead, in January 1995, a

decision was made by Secretary of State

Warren Christopher and supported by

Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick

to whisk Khalifa from the United States

to Jordan for trial, where he was soon

“acquitted of terrorism charges and

allowed to move to Saudi Arabia.” 33

There “Saudi officials greeted him at the

airport.” 34

“I remember people at CIA who

were ripshit at the time” over the

decision, says Jacob L. Boesen, an

Energy Department analyst then

working at the CIA’s

Counterterrorism Center. “Not even

speaking in retrospect, but

contemporaneous with what the

intelligence community knew about

bin Laden, Khalifa’s deportation

was unreal.” 35

Even more unreal was the decision of a

court in a civil case to return the

contents of his luggage, including his

notebook and other computer files, to

Khalifa before his deportation. 36

I believe that Peter Lance, after all his

meticulous scholarship, failed to identify

who was really being protected by this

evasive measure. He writes that Khalifa,

from 1983 to 1991, “had been trusted by

al Qaeda with running the Philippines

branch of the International Islamic Relief

Organization (IIRO), one of their key

NGOs.” 37

But the IIRO was in the hands of a far

greater power than al-Qaeda, which in

any case did not exist in 1983. It was a

charitable organization that had been

authorized in 1979 by Saudi royal

decree, as an affiliate of another key

institution of the royal family, the Rabita

al-Alam al-Islami or World Muslim

League (WML).38 According to former

CIA officer Robert Baer, the IIRO was

run “with an iron hand” by Prince

Salman ibn Abdul-Aziz al Saud (the

brother of Saudi King Abdullah), who

“personally approved all important

appointments and spending. ”39

The creation date of 1979 reflects the

important shift in that year of the Saudi

royal family’s attitude toward the

political Islamism of the Muslim

Brotherhood or Ikhwan (of which

Mohammed Jamal Khalifa was a senior

member). As already noted, 1979 was

the year radical Wahhabis seized the

Grand Mosque at Mecca. In response,

the Saudi family foundations like the

IIRO began to subsidize the emigration

of the Muslim Brotherhood.40

Thus Khalifa’s status in the IIRO was

not anomalous. Besides the bombings in

Jordan, the IIRO has also been linked to

support of terrorists in the Philippines, 41

India, 42 Indonesia,43 Canada, 44 Albania, Chechnya, Kenya, 45 and other countries,

notably Bosnia. 46 In particular Khalifa

personally has been accused of financing

the Philippine terrorist group Abu

Sayyaf (which in 1993 had kidnapped an

American Bible translator).47 Yet “the

U.S. government has not designated

Khalifa as a financial supporter of

terrorism. ”48

U.S. AND ROYAL PROTECTION

FOR AL-QAEDA PLOTTER

KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED

The Saudi royal protection for Jamal

Khalifa was more than matched by the

Qatari royal protection of Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi Yousef’s

uncle and coconspirator in the

Philippines. The 9/11 Commission

Report, which judged KSM to be “the

principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,”

made a muted acknowledgment of this

Qatari protection of him:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—

Yousef’s uncle, then located in

Qatar—was a fellow plotter of

Yousef’s in the Manila air plot and

had also wired him some money

prior to the Trade Center bombing.

The U.S. Attorney obtained an

indictment against KSM in January

1996, but an official in the

government of Qatar probably

warned him about it. Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed evaded capture (and

stayed at large to play a central part

in the 9/11 attacks).49

From other sources, notably Robert

Baer who was then a CIA officer in

Qatar, we learn that the “official” was

Sheikh Abdallah bin Khalid bin Hamad

al-Thani, the Qatari minister of the

Interior and the brother of then Qatari

Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalid al-

Thani.50 According to ABC News,

Mohammed is believed to have fled

Qatar with a passport provided by

that country’s government. He is

also believed to have been given a

home in Qatar as well as a job at

the Department of Public Water

Works. Officials also said bin

Laden himself visited Abdallah bin

Khalid al-Thani in Qatar between

the years of 1996 and 2000.51

The 9/11 Commission Report itself, in

a footnote, notes, “Although KSM claims

that Sheikh Abdallah was not a member,

financier, or supporter of al Qaeda, he

admits that Abdallah underwrote a 1995

trip KSM took to join the Bosnia

jihad. ”52 This admission is hard to

reconcile with the Commission’s official

finding: “It does not appear that any

government other than the Taliban

financially supported al Qaeda before

9/11, although some governments may

have contained al Qaeda sympathizers

who turned a blind eye to al Qaeda’s

fund-raising activities.” 53

In 2013 the Syrian nightmare finally

made U.S. media admit, in the words of

The Atlantic, that Qatar is “a global

financial backer of the Brotherhood. ”54

This admission considerably

complicates the earlier establishment

stereotype of al-Qaedists like KSM as

“nonstate actors.” 55

In Triple Cross, Peter Lance, who

does not mention KSM’s escape from

Qatar, focuses instead on the way that,

later in the same year, U.S. federal

prosecutors kept his name out of the trial

of Ramzi Yousef in connection with the

1993 World Trade Center bombing:

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mike

Garcia and Dietrich Snell

presented a riveting, evidence-

driven case . . . and characterized

the material retrieved from Ramzi’s

Toshiba laptop as “the most

devastating evidence of all.” . . .

While Yousef’s Toshiba laptop . . .

contained the full details of the plot

later executed on 9/11, not a word

of that scenario was mentioned

during trial. . . . Most surprising,

during the entire summer-long trial,

the name of the fourth Bojinka

conspirator, Khalid Shaikh

Mohammed . . . was mentioned by

name only once, in reference to a

letter found in [Yousef’s

apartment]. 56

Lance repeatedly suggests that U.S.

prosecutors in New York, and

particularly Dietrich Snell, were

responsible for minimizing the role of

Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and other

shortcomings, because they were seeking

“to hide the full truth behind the Justice

Department’s failures.” 57 But the matter

of KSM’s escape in 1996, like the

release of Jamal Khalifa, was sensitive

at a much higher level than that of

prosecutors. It was a matter that reached

back into the black hole that is

represented by the ultimate United States

dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and

OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.

In other words, the suppression of

KSM’s name was not surprising at all.

On the contrary, it was totally consistent

with one of the most sensitive and

controversial features of the 9/11 story:

the much-discussed fact that before 9/11

two counterterrorist officers protected

two of the alleged future hijackers from

detection and surveillance by the FBI.

FEDERAL PROTECTION FOR

ALLEGED 9/11 HIJACKERS

Morgenthau’s hypothesis that the CIA

was protecting Saudi criminal assets

received further corroboration in the

wake of 9/11. There is now evidence,

much of it systematically suppressed by

the 9/11 Commission, that before 9/11,

CIA officers Richard Blee and Tom

Wilshire inside the CIA’s Bin Laden

Unit, along with FBI agents such as Dina

Corsi, were protecting from

investigation and arrest two of the

eventual alleged hijackers on 9/11,

Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi

—much as the FBI had protected Ali

Mohamed from arrest in 1993.

There are also indications that al-

Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, like Hampton-El

before them, may have been receiving

funds indirectly from the Saudi Embassy

in Washington:

Between 1998 and 2002, up to

US$73,000 in cashier cheques was

funneled by [Saudi Ambassador

Prince] Bandar’s wife Haifa—who

once described the elder Bushes as

like “my mother and father”—to

two Californian families known to

have bankrolled al-Mihdhar and al-

Hazmi. . . .

Princess Haifa sent regular

monthly payments of between

$2,000 and $3,500 to Majeda

Dweikat, wife of Osama Basnan,

believed by various investigators to

be a spy for the Saudi government.

Many of the cheques were signed

over to Manal Bajadr, wife of

[Basnan’s close friend] Omar al-

Bayoumi, himself suspected of

covertly working for the kingdom.

The Basnans, the al-Bayoumis

and the two 9/11 hijackers once

shared the same apartment block in

San Diego. It was al-Bayoumi who

greeted the killers when they first

arrived in America, and provided

them, among other assistance, with

an apartment and social security

cards. He even helped the men

enroll at flight schools in Florida.58

The Report of the Joint Congressional

Inquiry into 9/11, though very heavily

redacted at this point, supplies

corroborating information, including a

report that Basnan had once hosted a

party for the “Blind Sheikh” Omar

Abdul Rahman.59 In other words, the

Congressional investigation found

indications that those supporting the

Islamist conspirators of 1993 were in

2001 supporting those eventually

accused of 9/11. 60

The 9/11 Commission Report,

overruling FBI reports, simply denied

that Saudi embassy money had supported

the two hijackers. 61 It recognized that

there had been an intelligence failure

with respect to the al-Mihdhar and al-

Hazmi, but treated it as an accident that

might not have occurred “if more

resources had been applied. ”62 This

explanation, however, has since been

rejected by 9/11 Commission Chairman

Tom Kean. Asked if the failure to deal

appropriately with al-Mihdhar and al-

Hazmi could have been a simple

mistake, Kean replied, “Oh, it wasn’t

careless oversight. It was purposeful.

No question about that. . . . The

conclusion that we came to was that in

the DNA of these organizations was

secrecy. And secrecy to the point of ya

don’t share it with anybody.” 63

In 2011 an important book by Kevin

Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

demonstrated conclusively that the

withholding was purposive, and

sustained over a period of eighteen

months. 64 This interference and

manipulation became particularly blatant

and controversial in the days before

9/11. 65

Before reading Fenton’s book, I was

satisfied with Lawrence Wright’s

speculation that the CIA may have

wanted to recruit the two Saudis, and

that “The CIA may also have been

protecting an overseas operation

[possibly in conjunction with Saudi

Arabia] and was afraid that the F.B.I.

would expose it.” 66 However, I am now

persuaded that Lawrence Wright’s

explanation, that the CIA was protecting

a covert operation, may explain the

beginnings of the withholding in January

2000, but cannot explain its renewal,

after a quiescent period, in the days just

before 9/11.

Fenton analyzes a list of thirty-five

different occasions where the two

alleged hijackers were protected in this

fashion, from January 2000 to about

September 5, 2001, less than a week

before the hijackings. 67 In his analysis,

the incidents fall into two main groups.

In the earlier incidents he sees an

intention “to cover a CIA operation that

was already in progress.” 68 However

after “the system was blinking red” in

the summer of 2001, and the CIA

expected an imminent attack, Fenton can

see no other explanation than that “the

purpose of withholding the information

had become to allow the attacks to go

forward. ”69

In support of Fenton’s conclusion,

there is evidence (not mentioned by him)

indicating that in mid-2001 the CIA’s

Counterterrorism Center (CTC), which

was the chief supplier of the CIA

protection, believed an al-Qaeda attack

was imminent, and that al-Mihdhar was

important to it. On August 15, CIA

Counterterrorism Chief Cofer Black told

a secret Pentagon conference, “We’re

going to be struck soon. . . . Many

Americans are going to die, and it could

be in the U.S.” 70 Three weeks earlier,

CTC Deputy Chief Tom Wilshire had

written, “When the next big op is carried

out . . . Khallad [bin Attash] will be at

or near the top . . . Khalid Midhar [sic]

should be [of] very high interest. ”71 Yet

Wilshire (like his superior, Richard

Blee), instead of telling the FBI what he

knew about al-Mihdhar, did the

opposite: he “not only failed to tell

anyone else involved in the hunt [for Al-

Mihdhar] that Almihdhar would likely

soon be a participant in a major al-

Qaeda attack inside the US, but also

supported a dubious procedure which

meant that the FBI was only able to

focus a fraction of the resources it had

on the hunt.” 72

AN ONGOING COVER-UP THAT

DID NOT END WITH 9/11

The homicidal crime suggested by

Fenton’s meticulous research is one both

difficult and painful to contemplate. It

has to be considered in the light of the

earlier instances of protection we have

surveyed:

1. the protection given to Salameh

and Abouhalima in the 1990

Kahane murder, leaving them

free to participate in the 1993

World Trade Center bombing;

2. the failure for two or three years

to process Ali Mohamed’s

documents seized in 1990, which

could have prevented the 1993

World Trade Center bombing;

3. the release of Ali Mohamed from

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

detention in 1993, leaving him

free to participate in the 1998

Nairobi Embassy bombing;

4. the treatment of Ali Mohamed as

an “unindicted coconspirator” in

the 1993 WTC bombing case and

Landmarks case, leaving him

free to participate in the 1998

Nairobi Embassy bombing.

There are other indicators that these

events were part of a single long-term

cover-up, one that is still ongoing. One

of the connectors is Sheikh Abdul

Rahman’s Al-Salaam Mosque in Jersey

City, visited by Ali Mohamed and his

trainees in 1989, and allegedly

frequented by two of the alleged 9/11

hijackers (Mohamed Atta and Marwan

al-Shehhi) in 2000–2001.73

Next door to the Mosque in Jersey

City was the Sphinx Trading Company,

whose incorporator and director,

Waleed Abouel Nour, was like Ali

Mohamed listed as an unindicted

coconspirator in the 1995 Landmarks

conspiracy case. ( The New York Times

later reported that the FBI had identified

Nour as a terrorist.)74

At minimum [sic], two Ali

Mohamed-trained members of the

New York cell—El Sayyid Nosair

and Siddig Ali Siddig—are

confirmed to have kept mailboxes

at Sphinx Trading during the 1990s,

as did the blind Sheikh himself.

A decade later, the mailboxes

were still being used by al Qaeda-

linked terrorists.

Testifying in a sealed proceeding

in 2002, a New Jersey policeman

said the FBI told him that “several

of the hijackers involved in the

September 11th event also had

mailboxes at that location.”

Police searched the office of a

New Jersey businessman

[Mohamed el-Atriss] whose name

appeared on the Sphinx Trading Co.

incorporation papers and found the

names and phone numbers of

several hijackers among his papers.

The businessman eventually

admitted having sold fake

identification cards to two of the

hijackers. 75

One of the fake IDs was given to Khalid

al-Mihdhar. 76

This important inquiry into the

infrastructure of the Ali Mohamed

connection was quickly shut down by the

FBI:

The police officer testified in 2002

that the FBI had shut down the New

Jersey police investigation of these

connections, without explanation

but amid unconfirmed rumors

(reported by the New York Times)

that the businessman was himself an

FBI informant. All terrorism

charges against the businessman

were eventually dropped.77

Just how subordinated official policy

could become to deep state needs was

demonstrated in November 2001, when

Cheney, at the request of Musharraf and

the ISI, approved secret airlifts to ferry

surrounded Pakistani and high-level al-

Qaeda fighters out of Afghanistan, to

safety in Pakistan. (“Cheney took charge.

. . . The approval was not shared with

anyone at State, including Colin Powell,

until well after the event. . . . Clearly the

ISI was running its own war against the

Americans.” )78

THE SAUDI-AMERICAN

PETROLEUM COMPLEX AND THE

DEFENSE OF THE PETRODOLLAR

This ongoing cover-up of a terrorist

infrastructure spanning a decade is

mirrored by the censorship of the Joint

Inquiry findings about Osama Basnan,

involved in the pass-through of Saudi

Embassy funds to al-Mihdhar, and

earlier the host of a party for Sheikh

Abdul Rahman. One factor enabling the

cover-up is the overarching and little

understood U.S.-Saudi relationship. To

understand it we must also consider the

context of petrodollars, OPEC and the

major oil companies.

The export of Saudi oil, paid for by

all customers in U.S. dollars, and in the

U.S. case largely offset by the export of

U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia, is a major

underpinning of America’s petrodollar

economy. As I have documented

elsewhere, its current strength is

supported by OPEC’s requirement

(secured by a secret agreement in the

1970s between the United States and

Saudi Arabia and continuing to this day)

that all OPEC oil sales be denominated

in dollars. 79 Of the Saudi dollar

earnings, $600 billion have been

reinvested abroad, most of it in U.S.

corporations like Citibank (where the

largest shareholder is a member of the

Saudi royal family). 80

This fusion of U.S. and Saudi

governing interests is as much political

as economic. The first oil price hikes of

1972–1973, arranged by Nixon with the

King of Saudi Arabia and the Shah of

Iran, helped pay to arm Iran and Saudi

Arabia as U.S. proxies in the region,

following the withdrawal of British

troops from the region in 1971. 81 The oil

price hikes of 1979–1980, on the other

hand, were assuredly not the intention of

President Carter, a political victim of the

increases. They have however been

credibly attributed to the work of oil

majors like BP, possibly acting in

collusion with Republicans; and had the

result of helping to elect Ronald Reagan

(as well as Margaret Thatcher in

England). 82

I am suggesting that there is a high-

level fusion of interests between the U.S.

and Saudi governments, oil companies

and banks (not to mention facilitating

alliances like the Carlyle Group) that the

CIA tends to represent continuously, and

not just ad hoc for the sake of any one

particular goal. The ongoing protection

given through the years to criminals like

Salameh, Ali Mohamed, al-Mihdhar, and

al-Hazmi should be seen as

consequences of this high-level fusion of

interests. Needless to add, the 99

percent of ordinary American people,

having as a result now suffered a series

of recurring attacks (the first World

Trade Center bombing, the 1998

Embassy bombings, possibly even 9/11

itself), have been losers from this

arrangement.

I am confident that the mystery of U.S.

government protection to terrorists can

be traced in part to this “roof” of

inscrutable governmental, financial, and

corporate relationships between the

United States and Saudi Arabia. There is

a “black hole” at the center of this roof

in which the interests of governments,

petrodollar banks, intelligence agencies,

and multinational oil companies, are all

inscrutably mixed.

This multinational pyramid, with

interests at odds with the American

people’s, is growing stronger. In March

2007 the major U.S. corporation

Halliburton, one of the prime forces

behind U.S. involvement in the Caspian

basin, announced it would “open a

corporate headquarters in the United

Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) city of Dubai

and move its chairman and chief

executive, David J. Lesar, there. ”83 One

can see why. The U.A.E. is a corporate

paradise, with low taxes and unions

forbidden by law. 84

Its petrodollars empower it to counter

trends toward a more democratic

Middle East: for example, the $8 billion

aid promised from the U.A.E. and the

Saudis to el-Sisi after the 2013 military

coup in Egypt now marginalizes the

paltry $1.5 billion annual aid package

from the United States. 85

And in the U.A.E. there will be

increasingly sophisticated infrastructure

for the global reach of the supranational

deep state, immune from popular

oversight. A secret American-led

mercenary army is being put together for

the U.A.E. by Erik Prince, the billionaire

founder of Blackwater, who is now a

U.A.E. resident.86 In 2013 the U.A.E.

also hired Booz Allen, one of the

National Security Agency’s most

important contractors “to replicate the

world’s largest and most powerful spy

agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.” 87

Still at the apex of this pyramid are

probably the banks and the colossi of the

military-industrial-petroleum complex.

What Franklin Roosevelt wrote to Col.

House in 1933 would appear still to be

true: “The real truth . . . is, as you and I

know, that a financial element in the

larger centers has owned the

Government ever since the days of

Andrew Jackson.” 88

That truth appears to have been

reinforced by the introduction of swollen

Saudi oil profits into the American

financial and political system, so that

Citibank’s largest shareholder is now a

Saudi prince. 89 In 1977 Saudi

billionaires Khalid bin Mahfouz and

Ghaith Pharaon teamed up with former

Texas Governor John Connally to buy

the Main Bank in Houston—a bank

distinguished by its “highly unusual”

practice of obtaining and disbursing

“more than ten million dollars a month in

hundred dollar bills.” 90 Khalid bin

Mahfouz also “helped finance the

Houston skyscraper for the Texas

Commerce Bank, in which [Reagan’s

Chief of Staff] James Baker had a

significant stake.” 91 Repeated

investments in the struggling oil

company of the young George W. Bush

(Arbusto, later part of Harken Energy),

led to speculation by “a knowledgeable

Saudi source” that they “may have been

part of the same strategy the Saudis had

of investing in U.S. companies that were

connected to powerful politicians. ”92

CONCLUSION: A NEW WORLD

DISORDER

All these recent developments are

especially disconcerting because of the

visible deterioration of governmental

relations between Washington and the

Gulf states, and the emergence of strong

disagreements concerning the Muslim

Brotherhood and the future of the region

between the Gulf states themselves,

particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Saudi-U.S. relations frayed after the

Bush administration’s adoption of a

neocon agenda of change in the Middle

East, particularly by the plans, which

King Abdullah publicly opposed, for an

Iraqi war in 2003 to topple Saddam

Hussein. 93 (The Saudis would have

welcomed a Sunni coup to overthrow

Saddam, but not a war that, they

accurately foresaw, would erode the

domination of the country by a Sunni

minority.)

This became obvious during the brief

regime of Mohamed Morsi, the elected

Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt.

Following his overthrow in a military

coup, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the

United Arab Emirates pledged $8 billion

in cash and loans ( The Guardian said

$12 billion) to the successor regime of

el-Sisi, countering the strong financial

support that Qatar and Turkey had

earlier given to Morsi. 94 (Qatar, with a

relatively small and easily controlled

population, enjoys a secure agreement to

support the Muslim Brotherhood abroad

in exchange for nondisturbance at home

—the kind of agreement that broke down

after 1979 in a more vulnerable Saudi

Arabia, with ten million migrant

workers.)

In March 2014 Saudi Arabia

designated the Muslim Brotherhood as

terrorist, along with two al-Qaedist

groups (the Nusra Front and the Islamic

State in Iraq and al-Sham) backed by

Qatar in Syria. 95 This was after Prime

Minister Erdogan of Turkey, in alliance

with Qatar, hailed the Muslim

Brotherhood as an ally for creating an

emerging new order in the Middle

East.96

The confusion and bloodletting in the

Middle East has increased in the wake

of America’s Iraq fiasco, and this has

seriously weakened the hopes of

governmental arrangements and

understandings for regional peace and

security. But this same decline

represents a new frontier of

entrepreneurial opportunity for

Blackwater, Booz Allen, and other

liberated fragments of the American

deep state.

Time will tell what this means for a

perilous world.

CHAPTER 7

The U.S. Terror

War

The CIA, 9/11,

Afghanistan, and

Central Asia

The engineering of a series of

provocations to justify military

intervention is feasible and could

be accomplished with the resources

available.

—Report of May 1963 to U.S. Joint

Chiefs of Staff1

BUSH’S TERROR WAR AND THE

FIXING OF INTELLIGENCE

ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, WITHIN HOURS OF

THE MURDEROUS 9/11 ATTACKS, Bush,

Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed

America to what they later called the

“war on terror.” It should more properly,

I believe, be called the “terror war,” one

in which terror has been directed

repeatedly against civilians by all

participants, both states and nonstate

actors. A terror war is one in which the

major role is played by weapons of

indiscriminate destruction, whether they

are IEDs planted by the roadside or

bombs delivered aerially by a high-tech

drone.2

Bush’s war should also be seen as

part of a larger, indeed global, process

in which terror has been used against

civilians in interrelated campaigns by all

major powers, including China in

Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as

well as the United States. 3 Terror war in

its global context should perhaps be seen

as the latest stage of the age-long secular

spread of transurban civilization into

areas of mostly rural resistance—areas

where conventional forms of warfare,

for either geographic or cultural reasons,

prove inconclusive.

Terror war was formally declared by

George W. Bush on the evening of

September 11, 2001, with his statement

to the American nation that “we will

make no distinction between the

terrorists who committed these acts and

those who harbor them.” 4 But the notion

that Bush was in pursuit of actual

terrorists lost credibility in 2003, when

it was applied to Saddam Hussein’s

Iraq, a country known to have been

targeted by terrorists but not to have

harbored them.5 It lost still more

credibility with the 2005 publication in

Britain of the so-called “Downing Street

memo,” in which the head of the British

intelligence service MI6 reported after a

visit to Washington in 2002 that “Bush

wanted to remove Saddam Hussein,

through military action, justified by the

conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But

the intelligence and facts were being

fixed around the policy.” 6 False stories

followed in due course linking Iraq to

WMD, anthrax, and Niger yellowcake

(uranium).

This chapter will demonstrate that

before 9/11 a small element inside the

CIA’s Bin Laden Unit and related

agencies, the so-called “Alec Station

group,” were also busy, “fixing”

intelligence by suppressing it, in a way

that, accidentally or deliberately,

enabled the terror war. They did so by

withholding evidence from the FBI

before 9/11 about two of the eventual

alleged hijackers on 9/11, Khalid al-

Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, thus

ensuring that the FBI could not surveil

the two men or their colleagues.

This failure to share was recognized

in The 9/11 Commission Report, but

treated as an accident that might not have

occurred “if more resources had been

applied. ”7 But as we saw, this

explanation has been rejected by 9/11

Commission Chairman Tom Kean, and

persuasively demolished in Kevin

Fenton’s important book, Disconnecting

the Dots. 8 Fenton described how this

interference and manipulation by the

“Alec Station group” became

particularly blatant and controversial in

the days before 9/11; it led one FBI

agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict

accurately on August 29, less than two

weeks before 9/11, that “someday

someone will die. ”9 I noted in the last

chapter Fenton’s conclusion that, in the

last weeks before 9/11, the Alec Station

group’s “purpose of withholding the

information had become to allow the

attacks to go forward.” 10

Fenton’s judgment would imply that a

homicidal crime was committed by

members of the “Alec Station group,”

even if the crime was one of

manslaughter (unintended homicide)

rather than deliberate and premeditated

murder. 11 One can imagine benign

reasons for withholding the information:

For example, the CIA may have been

tolerating the behavior of the two Saudis

in order to track down their associates.

In this case, we would be dealing with

no more than a miscalculation—albeit a

homicidal miscalculation.

THE TERROR WAR AND THE

RUMSFELD-CHENEY-

WOLFOWITZ PROJECT OF

GLOBAL DOMINION

But in the course of this chapter, I shall

dwell on the activities of the head of the

CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Richard Blee, in

Uzbekistan as well as Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan was an area of concern not

only to Blee and his superior Cofer

Black; it was also in an area of major

interest to Richard Cheney, whose

corporation Halliburton had been active

since 1997 or earlier in developing the

petroleum reserves of Central Asia.

Cheney himself said in a speech to oil

industrialists in 1998, “I cannot think of

a time when we have had a region

emerge as suddenly to become as

strategically significant as the

Caspian. ”12

I shall suggest that the purpose as well

as the result of protecting the two Saudis

may have been to fulfill the objectives of

Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Project for

the New American Century (PNAC)

neocon group for establishing “forward-

based forces” in Central Asia.13 We

shall see that a phone call on 9/11 from

CIA Director Tenet to Stephen Cambone,

a key PNAC figure in the Pentagon,

apparently transmitted some of the

privileged information that never

reached the FBI.

This neocon agenda was partially to

maintain American and Israeli

domination of the region for security

purposes, and (as we shall see) to create

the conditions for future unilateral

preemptive actions against unfriendly

states like Iraq. In particular it was

designed to establish new secure bases

in the Middle East, anticipating Donald

Rumsfeld’s predictable announcement in

2003 that the United States would pull

“virtually all of its troops, except some

training personnel,” out of Saudi

Arabia. 14 But it was partly also to

strengthen American influence in

particular over the newly liberated

states of Central Asia, with their sizable

unproven oil and gas reserves.

Fenton’s alarming conclusion about

CIA actions leading up to the 9/11

attacks makes more sense in the context

of this agenda, and also in the context of

three other revealing anomalies about

Bush’s terror war. The first is the

paradox that this supposed pursuit of al-

Qaeda was conducted in alliance with

the two nations, Saudi Arabia and

Pakistan, that were most actively

supporting al-Qaeda in other parts of

the world. In this chapter we shall see

U.S. and Saudi intelligence cooperating

in such a way as to protect, rather than

neutralize, Saudi agents in al-Qaeda.

The second anomaly is that although

the CIA may have been focused on

crushing al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld and

Cheney were intent from the outset on a

much wider war. In September 2001

there was no intelligence on 9/11 linking

the attacks to Iraq, yet Defense Secretary

Donald Rumsfeld, supported by his

deputy Paul Wolfowitz, was already

observing on September 12 “that there

were no decent targets for bombing in

Afghanistan and that we should consider

bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better

targets. ”15 Rumsfeld’s argument was

supported by a Defense Department

paper prepared for the ensuing Camp

David meetings of September 15–16,

which “proposed that ‘the immediate

priority targets for initial action’ should

be al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq.” 16

Iraq had been a target for Rumsfeld

and Wolfowitz since at least 1998, when

the two men cosigned a PNAC letter to

President Clinton, calling for “the

removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime

from power. ”17 But Iraq was not the only

target in the Cheney-Rumsfeld-

Wolfowitz agenda, which since at least

1992 had been nothing less than global

U.S. dominance, or what former U.S.

Colonel Andrew Bacevich has called

“permanent American global

hegemony.” 18 It was a high priority for

the neocons. Even before Bush had been

elected by the Supreme Court in

December 2000, Cheney was at work

securing key posts for the 1998 letter’s

cosigners (including Richard Armitage,

John Bolton, Richard Perle, along with

other PNAC personnel like Stephen

Cambone) in the White House, State, and

Defense.

The neocon interest in toppling

Saddam has been chronicled in a fairly

extensive literature. Much less attention

has been paid to the fact that the oil

majors, and their friends at the Council

on Foreign Relations, had also been

campaigning, since as early as 1997, for

a “policy review toward Iraq including

military, energy, economic and

political/diplomatic assessments.” 19

The terror war from its outset was

targeted against Iraq. National Security

Adviser Condoleezza Rice on

September 24 “raised the issue of state

sponsorship of terrorism: ‘What is our

strategy with respect to countries that

support terrorism like Iran, Iraq, Libya,

Syria, and Sudan?’”20 In his memoir,

General Wesley Clark reports that the

question had evolved by November into

a Pentagon five-year plan:

As I went back through the

Pentagon in November 2001, one of

the senior military staff officers had

time for a chat. Yes, we were still

on track for going against Iraq, he

said. But there was more. This was

being discussed as part of a five-

year campaign plan, he said, and

there were a total of seven

countries, beginning with Iraq, then

Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran,

Somalia and Sudan. 21

Later Clark spoke to the

Commonwealth Club in San Francisco

about this “policy coup” by a small

group. He reported that in the Pentagon

back in 1991 Wolfowitz had told him:

the United States had “learned that we

can use our military . . . in the middle

east and the Soviets won’t stop us. . . .

and we’ve about five or ten years to

clean up those old soviet client regimes

—Syria, Iran, Iraq—before the next

great superpower comes on to challenge

us. ”22

Also in 2001, former CIA officer

Reuel Marc Gerecht published an article

in The Weekly Standard about the need

for a change of regime in Iran and

Syria. 23 (Gerecht continued for a decade

to warn in The Weekly Standard about

the menace of both nations.)

In the Clinton era Gerecht, like

Cheney and Rumsfeld, had been part of

the Project for the New American

Century, a hawkish group calling both

for action against Iraq in particular and

also more generally for an expanded

defense budget that would “increase

defense spending significantly” in “the

cause of American leadership.” The

PNAC report of September 2000,

Rebuilding America’s Defenses, had

much to say about Gulf oil and the

importance of retaining and

strengthening “forward-based forces in

the region.” 24

It is relevant that by the end of 2001,

in the wake of 9/11 and the terror war,

the United States had already established

new bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and

Kyrgyzstan, and was thus better

positioned to influence the behavior of

the newly liberated governments in the

huge oil and gas region east of the

Caspian. In the course of this chapter we

shall see that the 2001 agreement to use

the first and one of the most important of

these bases, Karshi-Khanabad or K-2 in

Uzbekistan, grew out of an earlier

Pentagon arrangement, supplemented by

a CIA liaison agreement negotiated in

1999 by Richard Blee of the “Alec

Station group,” a central figure in this

chapter. Most Americans are unaware

that on 9/11 United States Special

Forces were already at K-2 on an Uzbek

training mission, and that by September

22, two weeks before a formal U.S.-

Uzbek military agreement, “the CIA was

already flying its teams into the massive

Karshi-Khanabad, or K2, air base in

southern Uzbekistan, where United

States army engineers were repairing the

runway. ”25

A third anomaly is that the terror war

led to a dramatic increase in the resort to

terror, and even torture, by America

itself, sometimes targeting U.S. citizens.

In this context it is relevant that Cheney

and Rumsfeld, through their participation

in the Defense Department’s super-

secret Doomsday Project, had also been

part of Continuity of Government (COG)

planning for undermining the U.S. Bill of

Rights by the warrantless surveillance

and detention of dissenters.26 These

plans, dating back to the fear of

Communists in the McCarthyite 1950s,

have been the underpinnings for the

elaborate plans in the Pentagon and

elsewhere for dealing with antiwar

protests against the Pentagon’s plans for

global domination.

As I have argued elsewhere, the

United States is now spending billions

every year on Homeland Security, in no

small part because of the belief,

articulated by Marine Colonel Oliver

North, that the Vietnam War was lost in

the streets of America, and that this

deterrent to U.S. military operations

needed to be dealt with. 27 Cheney and

Rumsfeld, as part of the so-called

“Doomsday Project for Continuity of

Government” (COG) planning, had been

part of this effort also. 28 In short, 9/11

fulfilled agendas long contemplated by a

small group of officials for radical new

policies both in Central Asia and also

inside America.

The homicidal crime suggested by

Fenton’s meticulous research is one both

difficult and painful to contemplate.

America is in a crisis today because of

the activities of the Banks Too Big to

Fail, which, as has been pointed out,

were also Banks Too Big to Jail—for to

punish them as criminals would

endanger America’s already threatened

financial structure. 29 This chapter, though

detailed, is dealing with something

analogous, what may have been a Crime

Too Big to Punish.

As will be developed in this chapter,

9/11 has other points in common with the

John F. Kennedy assassination.

THE COVER-UP OF 9/11 AND OF

THE CIA’S ROLE IN LETTING IT

HAPPEN

After ten years it is important to reassess

what we know and do not know about

the events that culminated in 9/11,

particularly the actions of the CIA and

the FBI and the denial of critical

information to the 9/11 Commission.

Today, we can confidently say,

1. The most important truths still

remain unknown, in large part

because many of the most

important documents are still

either unreleased or heavily

redacted.

2. The efforts at cover-up continue,

if anything more aggressively

than before.

3. In addition to the cover-up, there

has been what former 9/11

Commission staffer John Farmer

has called either “unprecedented

administrative incompetence or

organized mendacity” on the part

of key figures in Washington. 30

These figures include President

Bush, Vice President Cheney,

Joint Chiefs of Staff Acting

Chairman General Richard

Myers, and CIA Director George

Tenet. They include also

President Clinton’s National

Security Advisor, Samuel

Berger, who prior to testifying on

these matters, went to the

National Archives and removed,

and presumably destroyed, key

relevant documentation. 31 In his

book, Farmer has in effect

endorsed both of these

alternatives.

Farmer’s first alternative, of

“unprecedented administrative

incompetence,” is in effect the

explanation offered by The 9/11

Commission Report, to deal with a)

striking anomalies both on 9/11 itself,

and b) the preceding twenty months

during which important information was

withheld from the FBI by key personnel

in the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit (the so-

called “Alec Station group”). But thanks

to the groundbreaking new book by

Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

we can no longer attribute the anomalous

CIA behavior to “systemic problems,”

or what Tony Summers and Robbyn

Swan rashly call “bureaucratic

confusion. ”32

Building on earlier important books

by James Bamford, Lawrence Wright,

Peter Lance, and Philip Shenon, Fenton

demonstrates beyond a shadow of a

doubt that there was a systematic CIA

pattern of withholding important

information from the FBI, even when the

FBI would normally be entitled to it.

Even more brilliantly, he shows that the

withholding pattern has been

systematically sustained through four

successive post-9/11 investigations:

those of the Congressional Inquiry

chaired by Senators Bob Graham and

Richard Shelby (still partly withheld),

the 9/11 Commission, the Department of

Justice inspector general, and the CIA

inspector general.

Most importantly of all, he shows that

the numerous withholdings, both pre-

and post-9/11, were the work of

relatively few people. The withholding

of information from the FBI was

principally the work of the so-called

“Alec Station group”—a group within

but not identical with the CIA’s Bin

Laden Unit or “Alec Station,” consisting

largely of CIA personnel, though

including a few FBI as well. Key figures

in this group were CIA officer Tom

Wilshire (discussed in The 9/11

Commission Report as “John”), and his

immediate superior at Alec Station,

Richard Blee.

The post-9/11 cover-up of Wilshire’s

behavior was principally the work of

one person, Barbara Grewe, who

worked first on the Justice Department

Inspector General’s investigation of

Wilshire’s behavior, then was

transferred to two successive positions

with the 9/11 Commission’s staff, where,

under the leadership of Executive

Director Philip Zelikow, she was able to

transfer the focus of investigative

attention from the performance of the

CIA to that of the FBI.33 Whether or not

Grewe conducted the interviews of

Wilshire and other relevant personnel,

she “certainly drew on them when

drafting her sections of the

Commission’s and Justice Department

inspector general’s reports.” 34

Grewe’s repositioning from post to

post is a sign of an intended cover-up at

a higher level. So, as we shall see, is

Wilshire’s transfer in May 2001 from

CIA’s Alec Station (the Osama Bin

Laden Unit) to the FBI, where he began a

new phase of interference with the

normal flow of intelligence, obstructing

the FBI from within it. 35

The pattern begins with intelligence

obtained from surveillance of an

important al-Qaeda summit meeting of

January 2000 in Malaysia, perhaps the

only such summit before 9/11. The

meeting drew instant and high-level U.S.

attention because of indirect links to a

support element (a key telephone in

Yemen used by al-Qaeda) suspected of

acting as a communications center in the

1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies. As

Fenton notes, “The CIA realized that the

summit was so important that

information about it was briefed to CIA

and FBI leaders [Louis Freeh and Dale

Watson], National Security Adviser

Samuel Berger and other top officials. ”36

Yet inside Alec Station, Tom Wilshire

and his CIA subordinate (known only as

“Michelle”)37 blocked the effort of an

FBI agent detailed there (Doug Miller)

to notify the FBI that one of the

participants (Khalid al-Mihdhar) had a

U.S. visa in his passport. 38 Worse,

Michelle then sent a cable to other CIA

stations falsely stating that al-Mihdhar’s

“travel documents, including a multiple

entry U.S. visa, had been copied and

passed ‘to the FBI for further

investigation.’” 39 Alec Station also

failed to watch-list the participants in

the meeting, as was called for by CIA

guidelines.40

This was just the beginning of a

systematic, sometimes lying pattern,

where NSA and CIA information about

al-Mihdhar and his traveling companion,

Nawaf al-Hazmi, was systematically

withheld from the FBI, lied about, or

manipulated or distorted in such a way

as to inhibit an FBI investigation of the

two Saudis and their associates. This is

a major component of the 9/11 story,

because the behavior of these two

would-be hijackers was so

unprofessional that, without this CIA

protection provided by the “Alec Station

group,” they would almost certainly

have been detected and detained or

deported, long before they prepared to

board Flight 77 in Washington.41

Fenton concludes with a list of thirty-

five different occasions on which the

two alleged hijackers were protected in

this fashion, from January 2000 to about

September 5, 2001, less than a week

before the hijackings. 42 In his analysis,

the incidents fall into two main groups.

The motive he attributes to the earlier

ones, such as the blocking of Doug

Miller’s cable, was “to cover a CIA

operation that was already in

progress. ”43 However after “the system

was blinking red” in the summer of

2001, and the CIA expected an imminent

attack, Fenton can see no other plausible

explanation than that “the purpose of

withholding the information had become

to allow the attacks to go forward.” 44

Wilshire’s pattern of interference

changed markedly after his move to the

Bureau. When in the CIA, he had moved

to block transmittal of intelligence to the

FBI. Now, in contrast, he initiated FBI

reviews of the same material, but in such

a way that the reviews were conducted

in too leisurely a fashion to bear fruit

before 9/11. Fenton suspects that

Wilshire anticipated a future review of

his files; and was laying a false trail of

documentation to neutralize his

embarrassing earlier performance. 45

I believe we must now accept

Fenton’s finding of fact: “It is clear that

this information was not withheld

through a series of bizarre accidents, but

intentionally. ”46 However, I suggest a

different explanation as to what those

intentions originally were, one which is

superficially much simpler, more benign,

and also more explicative of other parts,

apparently unrelated, of the 9/11

mystery.

THE LIAISON AGREEMENTS

WITH OTHER INTELLIGENCE

AGENCIES

Initially, I believe, al-Mihdhar and al-

Hazmi may have been protected because

they had been sent to America by the

Saudi General Intelligence Directorate

(GID) intelligence service, which would

explain why after their arrival they were

apparently bankrolled indirectly by the

Saudi embassy in Washington. (As we

saw in the last chapter, up to US$73,000

in cashier cheques was funneled by

Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar’s wife

to two Californian families known to

have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-

Hazmi.)47

If the two Saudis were in fact sent by

the GID, they would almost certainly

have been admitted to the United States

under the terms of the liaison agreement

between the GID and the CIA. 48 Prince

Turki bin Faisal, former head of the

GID, has said that he shared his al-

Qaeda information with the CIA, and

that in 1997 the Saudis “established a

joint intelligence committee with the

United States to share information on

terrorism in general and on . . . al Qaeda

in particular. ”49 The 9/11 Commission

Report adds that after a post-millennium

review, the Counterterrorism Center

(which included Alec Station, the Bin

Laden Unit) intended to proceed with its

plan of half a year earlier, “building up

the capabilities of foreign security

services that provided intelligence via

liaison.” 50

This was a Blee specialty. Steve Coll

reports that Richard Blee and his

superior Cofer Black, excited about the

opportunities presented by liaison

arrangements for expanding the scope of

CIA reach in critical regions, had flown

together into Tashkent in 1999, and

negotiated a new liaison agreement with

Uzbekistan. 51 According to Coll and the

Washington Post, this arrangement soon

led, via Tashkent, to a CIA liaison inside

Afghanistan with the Northern

Alliance. 52 Thomas Ricks and Susan

Glasser reported in the Washington Post

that, beginning after the embassy

bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi

in 1998, “The United States and

Uzbekistan have quietly conducted joint

covert operations aimed at countering

Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban regime and

its terrorist allies . . ., according to

officials from both nations. ”53

This involvement in Uzbekistan was

part of a wider regional pattern.

Beginning in 1997, the United States had

begun a series of annual military

maneuvers with Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and

Uzbek forces, as exercises for possible

deployment of combat U.S. forces in the

region.

CENTRAZBAT ’97, as it was

known, was clearly a test of

America’s ability to project power

into the Caspian basin in the event

of a crisis. “There is no nation on

the face of the earth that we cannot

get to,” said General Jack Sheehan .

. . the highest-ranking officer to

attend the exercise. And, lest

anyone doubted the nature of our

interests in the region, a deputy

assistant secretary of defense

accompanying Sheehan, Catherine

Kelleher, cited “the presence of

enormous energy resources” as a

justification for American military

involvement. The 1997 operation

was the first in an annual series

CENTRAZBAT exercises designed

to test the speed with which

Washington could deploy U.S.-

based forces directly to the region

and commence combat operations. 54

In other words, the Pentagon had been

active in Uzbekistan for four years

before the public Rumsfeld-Karimov

agreement of October 2001.

As a former junior Canadian

diplomat, let me observe that a liaison

arrangement would probably have

required special access clearances for

those privy to the arrangement and

sharing the liaison information. 55 This

would explain the exclusion of the FBI

agents who were not cleared for this

information, as well as the behavior of

other noncleared CIA agents who

proceeded to collect and disseminate

information about the two alleged

hijackers. Alec Station needed both to

protect the double identity of the two

Saudis, and to make sure that they were

not embarrassingly detained by the FBI.

Almost certainly the CIA had relevant

liaison arrangements, not just with the

Saudi GID and Uzbekistan, but also with

the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of

Pakistan, as well as the intelligence

services of Egypt, and perhaps Yemen

and Morocco. As noted earlier, it is

possible that Ali Mohamed, a double

agent who the FBI protected from being

detained in Canada, thus allowing him to

help organize the al-Qaeda embassy

bombings of 1998, was permitted under

such arrangements to enter the United

States as an agent of foreign intelligence,

presumably Egyptian.56 Ali Mohamed

figures both in the content and as source

of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) of

August 6, 2001, in which the CIA

warned the President, “Bin Ladin

Determined to Strike in US.” 57

According to Mohamed’s FBI handler,

Jack Cloonan, “all that information came

from Ali,” while the PDB itself

attributes its key finding to what “an

Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative

told an [——] service. ”58 (Ali Mohamed

was definitely EIJ, and this service was

probably Egyptian.)

But when Mohamed, like al-Mihdhar

and al-Hazmi, was inappropriately

admitted to the United States, it was

reportedly not by the CIA, but possibly

by “some other Federal agency.” 59 This

was very possibly a Pentagon agency,

because from 1987 to 1989, Ali

Mohamed “was assigned to the U.S.

[Army] Special Operations Command

[SOCOM] in Fort Bragg, the home of the

Green Berets and the Delta Force, the

elite counterterrorism squad.” 60

SOCOM, which includes the Joint

Special Operations Command (JSOC),

has its own intelligence division; 61 and

SOCOM is the command that first

mounted the Able Danger program in

1999 to track al-Qaeda operatives, and

then, inexplicably, both shut it down

before 9/11 and destroyed its database. 62

In addition SOCOM was working in

Uzbekistan with CIA operatives as a

result of the liaison agreement negotiated

by Cofer Black and Richard Blee of the

Counterterrorist Center (CTC).

For this and other reasons, I suggest

reconceptualizing what Fenton calls the

anomalous “Alec Station group” as an

interagency liaison team (or teams) with

special access clearances, including

Alec Station personnel, collaborating

personnel in the FBI, and possibly

SOCOM. (One of these collaborators

was FBI agent Dina Corsi, who

according to Fenton withheld vital

information from fellow agent Steve

Bongardt even after the NSA had cleared

it for him.)63

BACKGROUND: THE SAFARI

CLUB AND WILLIAM CASEY

These arrangements can be traced in one

form or another, at least back to the

1970s. Then senior CIA officers and ex-

officers (notably Richard Helms), who

were dissatisfied with the CIA cutbacks

instituted under Jimmy Carter’s CIA

director, Stansfield Turner, organized an

alternative network, the so-called

“Safari Club.” Subordinated to

intelligence chiefs from France, Egypt,

Saudi Arabia, Morocco and (under the

Shah) Iran, the Safari Club is said by

Joseph Trento to have been

supplemented in Washington by a

“private intelligence network”

consisting of CIA officers like Theodore

Shackley and Thomas Clines, who had

been marginalized or fired by CIA

Director Turner. 64 As Prince Turki later

explained, the purpose of the Safari Club

was not just to exchange information, but

to conduct covert operations that the CIA

could no longer carry out directly in the

wake of the Watergate scandal and

subsequent reforms. 65

In the 1980s, CIA Director William

Casey made key decisions in the conduct

of the Afghan covert war, not through his

own CIA bureaucracy but with the Saudi

intelligence chiefs, first Kamal Adham

and then Prince Turki. Among these

decisions was the creation of a foreign

legion to assist the Afghan mujahedin in

their war against the Soviets—in other

words, the creation of that support

network that, since the end of that war,

we have known as al-Qaeda. 66 Casey

worked out the details with the two

Saudi intelligence chiefs, and also with

the head of the Bank of Credit and

Commerce International (BCCI), the

Saudi-Pakistani bank in which Adham

and Turki were both shareholders.

In so doing, Casey was in effect

running a second or back-channel CIA,

building up the future al-Qaeda in

Pakistan with the Saudis, even though the

official CIA hierarchy underneath him in

Langley rightly “thought this unwise.” 67

In American War Machine, I situated the

Safari Club and BCCI in a succession of

“second CIA” or “alternative CIA”

arrangements dating back to the creation

of the Office of Policy Coordination

(OPC) in 1948. Thus it is relevant that

CIA Director George Tenet, following

Casey’s precedent, met with Saudi

Ambassador Bandar around once a

month, and would not tell CIA officers

handling Saudi issues what he had

discussed.68

Fenton himself invokes the example of

the Safari Club in proposing the possible

explanation that Blee and Wilshire used

a “parallel network” to track al-Mihdhar

and al-Hazmi inside the United States. In

his words, “Withholding the information

about Almihdhar and Alhazmi only

makes sense if the CIA was monitoring

the two men in the United States itself,

either officially or off the books. ”69 But

a third option would be that the GID was

monitoring their movements, a situation

quite compatible with Saudi Prince

Bandar’s claim that Saudi security had

been “actively following the movements

of most of the terrorists with

precision.” 70

Joseph and Susan Trento heard from a

former CIA officer, once based in Saudi

Arabia, that “Both Hazmi and Mihdhar

were Saudi agents. ”71 If so, they were

clearly double agents, acting (or posing)

as terrorists at the same time they were

acting (or posing) as informants. In

espionage, double agents are prized and

often valuable; but to rely on them (as

the example of Ali Mohamed illustrates)

can also be dangerous.

This was particularly the case for the

CIA with respect to Saudi Arabia,

whose GID supported al-Qaeda

energetically in countries like Bosnia, in

exchange for a pledge (negotiated by

Saudi Interior Minister Naif bin Abdul

Aziz with Osama bin Laden) that al-

Qaeda “would not interfere with the

politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab

country. ”72 Pakistan’s ISI was even more

actively engaged with al-Qaeda, and

some elements of ISI were probably

closer to the ideological goals of al-

Qaeda, than to Pakistan’s nominally

secular government.

But in all cases the handling of illegal

informants is not just dangerous and

unpredictable, but corrupting. To act

their parts, the informants must break the

law; and their handlers, knowing this,

must protect them by failing to report

them, and then, all too often, intercede to

prevent their arrest by others. In this

way, handlers, over and over again,

become complicit in the crimes of their

informants, and later compelled for

personal reasons to cover them up.73

Even in the best of circumstances,

decisions have to be made whether to

allow an informant’s crime to go

forward, or to thwart it and risk

terminating the usefulness of the

informant. In such moments, agencies are

all too likely to make the choice that is

not in the public interest.

A very relevant example is the first

World Trade Center bombing of 1993—

relevant because Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of

9/11, was one of the 1993 plotters as

well. As we saw in chapter 4, the FBI

had an informant, Emad Salem, among

the 1993 plotters; and Salem later

claimed, with supporting evidence from

tapes of his FBI debriefings, that the FBI

deliberately chose not to shut down the

plot. Here is Ralph Blumenthal’s careful

New York Times account of this

precursor to the mystery of 9/11:

Law-enforcement officials [i.e., the

FBI] were told that terrorists were

building a bomb that was

eventually used to blow up the

World Trade Center, and they

planned to thwart the plotters by

secretly substituting harmless

powder for the explosives, an

informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped

the plotters build the bomb and

supply the fake powder, but the

plan was called off by an F.B.I.

supervisor who had other ideas

about how the informer, Emad A.

Salem, should be used, the informer

said.

The account, which is given in

the transcript of hundreds of hours

of tape recordings Mr. Salem

secretly made of his talks with law-

enforcement agents, portrays the

authorities as in a far better

position than previously known to

foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New

York City’s tallest towers. The

explosion left six people dead,

more than 1,000 injured and

damages in excess of half a billion

dollars. Four men are now on trial

in Manhattan Federal Court in that

attack.74

What makes the 1993 plot even more

relevant is that Salem, according to

many sources, was an agent of the

Egyptian intelligence service, sent to

America to spy on the actions of the

Egyptian “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel

Rahman. 75 This raises the possibility that

the FBI supervisor who had “other

ideas” about how to use Emad Salem,

was a member of a liaison team, with

special knowledge he could not share

with other FBI agents. It may have been,

for example, that the Egyptian

intelligence service declined to let

Salem’s cover be blown. This

suggestion is both speculative and

problematic, but it has the advantage of

offering a relatively coherent

explanation for otherwise baffling

behavior.

This explanation does not at all rule

out the possibility that some officials

had more sinister motives for allowing

the bombing to take place and covering

it up afterward. Sheikh Omar Abdel

Rahman was at this very time a key

figure in the sensitive Saudi program,

signed on to by U.S. officials as well, to

supply mujahedin warriors in Bosnia

against Serbia (including some, like

Ayman al-Zawahiri, who were later

accused of the 9/11 plot). 76 It is clear

from both investigative and

prosecutorial behavior that a number of

different U.S. agencies did not want to

disturb Rahman’s activities. Even after

Rahman himself was finally indicted in

the 1995 conspiracy case to blow up

New York landmarks, the U.S.

government continued to protect Ali

Mohamed, a key figure in the conspiracy.

Worse, the performance of the FBI in

allowing the bombing to proceed was

only one of a series of interrelated

bungled performances and missed

opportunities, climaxing with 9/11. The

first was in connection with the murder

in New York of the Jewish extremist

Meir Kahane. The FBI and New York

police actually detained two of the

murderers in that case and then released

them, allowing them to take part in the

World Trade Center bombing of 1993. A

key trainer of the two men was Ali

Mohamed while still in U.S. Special

Forces, whose name was systematically

protected from disclosure by the

prosecuting attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.

Considering all this in the light of the

handling of Ali Mohamed, we have to

conclude that there is something

profoundly dysfunctional going on, and

has been going on since before 9/11,

indeed under both political parties. The

conditions of secrecy created by special

clearances have not just masked this

dysfunctionality; they have, I would

argue, helped create it. The history of

espionage demonstrates that secret

power, when operating in the sphere of

illegal activities, becomes, time after

time, antithetical to public democratic

power.77 The more restricted the group

of special planners with special

clearances, the less likely are their

decisions to conform with the dictates of

international and domestic law, still less

with common morality and common

sense.

Add to these conditions of

unwholesome secrecy, the fundamentally

unhealthy, indeed corrupt, relationship of

U.S. intelligence agencies to those of

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This has

been profoundly antidemocratic both at

home and in Asia. The U.S. dependency

on Saudi oil has in effect subsidized a

wealth-generated spread of Islamic

fundamentalism throughout the world,

while what the 99.9 percent of ordinary

Americans pay for oil and gas generates

huge sums, which Saudis then recycle

into the financial institutions of the one

tenth of 1 percent at the pinnacle of Wall

Street.

In like manner, America’s fraught

relationship with the ISI of Pakistan has

resulted in a dramatic increase in

international heroin trafficking by the

two agencies’ Afghan clients.78 In short

the bureaucratic dysfunction we are

talking about in 9/11 is a symptom of a

larger dysfunction in America’s

relationship with Saudi Arabia, with

Pakistan, and through them with the rest

of the world.

LIAISON AGREEMENTS AND THE

PROTECTION OF AL-MIHDHAR

AND AL-HAZMI

Even without the suggestive precedent of

the 1993 WTC bombing, it is legitimate

to posit that liaison agreements may have

inhibited the roundup of Khalid al-

Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Let us

consider first Fenton’s finding of fact: “It

is clear that this information [about the

two men] was not withheld through a

series of bizarre accidents, but

intentionally. ”79 This finding I consider

rock hard. But we cannot be so confident

about his explanation: that “the purpose

of withholding the information had

become to allow the attacks to go

forward. ”80

I believe that in fact there are a

number of possibilities about the

intention, ranging from the relatively

innocent (the inhibitions deriving from a

liaison agreement) to the nefarious.

Before considering these, let us

deconstruct the notion of “letting the

attacks go forward.” Clearly, if the

alleged hijackers were not detained at

the airport gates, people would probably

have been killed—but how many?

Recall that in the Operation Northwoods

documents, which envisaged planning

“false flag” attacks to justify a U.S.

military intervention in Cuba, the Joint

Chiefs wrote “We could develop a

Communist Cuban terror campaign” in

which “we could sink a boatload of

Cubans.” 81 Would the loss of four

planeloads of passengers have been a

qualitatively different tragedy?

Of course 9/11 became a much greater

tragedy when three of the planes hit the

two World Trade Center towers and the

Pentagon. But it is possible that the

liaison minders of the two Saudis did

not imagine that their targets were

capable of such a feat. Recall that their

flying lessons, even in a Cessna, were

such a fiasco that the lessons were

quickly terminated. Their instructor told

them “that flying was simply not for

them.” 82

Let me suggest that there are three

separable ingredients to the 9/11 attacks:

the alleged hijackings, the strikes on the

buildings, and the astonishing collapse

of the three WTC buildings. It is at least

possible that the Alec Station liaison

team, as a group, contemplated only the

first stage, without ever imagining the

two stages that ensued.

A minimal, least malign, initial

explanation for the withholding of

information about two of the alleged

hijackers would be the hypothesis I

proposed in the case of Emad Salem—

the restricted access created by the

special clearance for a liaison

agreement. But just as in 1993, the secret

power created behind the wall of

restrictive clearances may have been

exploited for ulterior purposes. The

dangerous situation thus created—of

potential would-be-hijackers being

protected from detention at a time of

expected attack—may have inspired

some to exploit the resulting conditions

of secrecy as an opportunity to plan an

incident to justify war. One important

analogy with the 1964 false Second

Tonkin Gulf Incident that was used to

justify attacking North Vietnam is the

same presence of a powerful faction—in

2001 the PNAC clique inside

government—that was bent on unilateral

military action. 83

One clue to this more sinister

intention is that the pattern of

withholdings detailed by Fenton is not

restricted exclusively to the two Saudis

and their CIA station handlers. There are

a few concatenating withholdings by

other agencies—above all the Able

Danger info that was destroyed at

SOCOM and the withholding—

apparently by the NSA—of an important

relevant intercept, apparently about the

alleged hijackers and Moussaoui. 84

If the NSA was withholding

information from relevant officials, it

would recall the role of the NSA at the

time of the second Tonkin Gulf incident

in August 1964. Then the NSA, at a

crucial moment, forwarded fifteen

pieces of signals intelligence (SIGINT)

that indicated—falsely—that there had

been a North Vietnamese attack on two

U.S. destroyers. At the same time NSA

withheld 107 pieces of SIGINT that

indicated—correctly—that no North

Vietnamese attack had occurred.85 NSA’s

behavior at that time was mirrored at the

CIA: both agencies were aware of a

powerful consensus inside the Johnson

administration that had already agreed

on provoking North Vietnam, in hopes of

creating an opportunity for military

response. 86

We know from many accounts of the

Bush administration that there was also a

powerful pro-war consensus within it,

centered on Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the

so-called “cabal” of PNAC (the Project

for the New American Century) that

before Bush’s election had been

lobbying vigorously for military action

against Iraq. We know also that

Rumsfeld’s immediate response to 9/11

was to propose an attack on Iraq, and

that planning for such an attack was

indeed instituted on September 17. 87 It is

worth considering whether some of

those protecting the alleged hijackers

from detention did not share these

warlike ambitions. 88

DID RICHARD BLEE HAVE AN

ULTERIOR MOTIVE FOR

WITHHOLDING INFORMATION?

Fenton speculates that one of those

seeking a pretext for an escalated war

against al-Qaeda may have been Richard

Blee. We saw that Blee, with Cofer

Black, negotiated an intelligence-sharing

liaison agreement with Uzbekistan. By

2000 SOCOM had become involved,

and “U.S. Special Forces began to work

more overtly with the Uzbek military on

training missions.” 89 In the course of

time the Uzbek liaison agreement, as we

saw, expanded into a subordinate liaison

with the Northern Alliance in

Afghanistan. Blee, meeting with

Massoud in October 1999, agreed to

lobby in Washington for more active

support for the Northern Alliance. 90

After the USS Cole bombing in Aden

in 2000, Blee was pushing to expand the

Uzbek military mission still further into

a joint attack force in conjunction with

the Northern Alliance forces of

Massoud. There was considerable

objection to this while Clinton was still

president, partly on the grounds that

Massoud, with Russian and Iranian

support, was fighting Pakistani-backed

Taliban forces, and partly because he

was known to be supporting his forces

by heroin trafficking. 91 But in the spring

of 2001 a meeting of department

deputies in the new Bush administration

revived the plans of Blee and Black

(supported by Counterterrorism chief

Richard Clarke) for large-scale covert

aid to Massoud.92 On September 4, one

week before 9/11, the Bush Cabinet

authorized the drafting of a new

presidential directive, NSPD-9,

authorizing a covert action program

along these lines in conjunction with

Massoud. 93

In the new Bush administration Blee

was no longer a minority voice, and six

weeks after 9/11 he would be named the

new CIA station chief in Kabul. 94 Fenton

reports that in this capacity Blee became

involved in the rendition of al-Qaeda

detainees, and suggests that the motive

may have been to obtain, by torture, a

false confession (by Ibn Shaikh al-Libi)

to Iraqi involvement with al-Qaeda. This

false confession then became part of the

“fixing” of evidence, and “formed a key

part of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s

embarrassing presentation to the UN to

support the invasion of Iraq.” 95

DID SOCOM HAVE AN ULTERIOR

MOTIVE FOR CLOSING DOWN

ABLE DANGER?

What ensued after 9/11 went far beyond

Blee’s program for paramilitary CIA

involvement with the Northern Alliance.

The CIA component in Afghanistan was

soon dwarfed by the forces of SOCOM:

George Tenet reported that by late 2001

the U.S. force in Afghanistan consisted

of about 500 fighters, including “110

CIA officers, 316 Special Forces

personnel, and scores of Joint Special

Operations Command raiders creating

havoc behind enemy lines.” 96

In the Bush administration Stephen

Cambone, who earlier had collaborated

with Rumsfeld and Cheney in signing the

PNAC’s statement, Rebuilding

America’s Defenses, became one of the

active promoters of using SOCOM

special forces to operate covertly

against al-Qaeda, not just in Afghanistan,

but “anywhere in the world.” 97

It is possible that anything Blee may

have done in Alec Station to prepare the

way for 9/11 was only one part of a

larger interagency operation, in which an

equivalent role was played by

SOCOM’s shutting down of the Able

Danger project. This might help explain

a handwritten notation around 10 p.m. on

9/11 by Stephen Cambone, then one of

Cheney’s PNAC appointees under

Rumsfeld in the Pentagon, after a phone

call with George Tenet:

AA 77—3 indiv[iduals] have been

followed since Millennium & Cole

1 guy is assoc[iate] of Cole

bomber

2 entered US in early July

(2 of 3 pulled aside &

interrogated?)98

The “guy” here is probably al-

Mihdhar, and the “Cole bomber”

probably Khallad [or Tawfiq] bin

Attash, a major al-Qaeda figure

connected not just to the Cole bombing

but also to the 1998 embassy attacks.

One wants to know why Tenet was

sharing with a hawk in the Pentagon

information that has apparently never

been shared by anyone outside the CIA

since. And is it a coincidence that

Cambone, like Blee, oversaw a program

—in this case staffed by SOCOM

special operations personnel—using

torture to interrogate detainees in

Afghanistan? 99

Just as Blee was reportedly a special

protégé of George Tenet at CIA, so

Cambone was notorious for his fierce

loyalty first to Dick Cheney and later to

Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. It is

not known whether he was associated

with the Continuity of Government

(COG) planning project where Rumsfeld

and Cheney, among others, prepared for

the warrantless surveillance and

detention measures that (as I argued in

chapter 3) were implemented beginning

on the morning of 9/11 and still in force

today. Nor is it known if he was

associated in any way with Cheney’s

Counterterrorism Task Force in the

Spring of 2001, which has been alleged

to have been a source for the war games,

including rogue plane attacks, which

added to the disarray of the U.S.

response, on 9/11. 100

DEEP EVENTS AS A REPEATED

PATTERN OF U.S. ENGAGEMENT

IN WAR

I want to conclude with a little historical

perspective on the dysfunction we have

been looking at. In a sense 9/11 was

unprecedented—the greatest mass

murder ever committed in one day on

U.S. soil. In another sense it represented

an example of the kind of signature event

with which we have become only too

familiar since the Kennedy

assassination. I have called these events

deep events—events deeply rooted in

illegal covert activity in various

branches of U.S. intelligence and with a

predictable accompanying pattern of

official cover-ups backed up by amazing

media malfunction and dishonest best-

selling books. Some of these deep

events, like the Kennedy assassination,

Tonkin Gulf, and 9/11, should be

considered structural deep events,

because of their permanent impact on

history.

It is striking that these structural deep

events—the JFK assassination, Tonkin

Gulf, and 9/11—should all have been

swiftly followed by America’s

engagement in ill-considered wars. The

reverse is also true: all of America’s

significant wars since Korea—Laos,

Vietnam, Afghanistan (twice: once

covertly and now overtly), and Iraq—

have all been preceded by structural

deep events. As I wrote in American

War Machine, a J-5 Staff Report of

1963 reported to the Joint Chiefs, “The

engineering of a series of provocations

to justify military intervention is feasible

and could be accomplished with the

resources available.” 101 Tonkin Gulf,

9/11, and even the Kennedy

assassination itself can all be seen as

events that were indeed “engineered,”

along the guidelines set out in 1962 in

the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposals for

Operation Northwoods. 102

In two recent books I have been

slowly persuaded, against my own

initial incredulity, to list more than a

dozen significant parallels between the

Kennedy assassination and 9/11. Thanks

to Kevin Fenton’s brilliant research, I

can list a further analogy. The CIA files

on Lee Harvey Oswald, more or less

dormant for two years, suddenly became

hyperactive in the six weeks before the

Kennedy assassination.103 Fenton has

demonstrated a similar burst of activity

in FBI files on the two Saudis in the

weeks before 9/11—a burst initiated by

Tom Wilshire, at a time suspiciously

close to when the alleged hijackers

settled on a final date for their attack.

Then in both cases there were also

strange delays, leaving the files open at

the time of the deep events.104

THE IMPACT OF 9/11 ON U.S. AND

INTERNATIONAL LAW

Throughout this chapter we have seen

two different and indeed antithetical

levels of U.S. foreign policy at work. On

the surface level of public diplomacy we

see a commitment to international law

and the peaceful resolution of

differences. On a deeper level,

represented by a longtime Saudi

connection and covert arrangements to

control international oil, we see the

toleration and indeed protection of

terrorists in fulfillment of both Saudi and

American secret goals. We should see

the actions in 2000–2001 of the “Alec

Station group,” with respect to the two

alleged hijackers al-Mihdhar and al-

Hazmi, in the context of this longtime

Saudi connection, as well as of the

secret consensus in 2001—just as

earlier in 1964—that America’s oil and

security needs (along with those of

Israel) required a new American

mobilization for war.

Horrendous as it was, the murder of

over 2,000 civilians on 9/11 was not the

only major crime of that day. The 9/11

events also initiated a series of ongoing

onslaughts on both international and

domestic U.S. law. Law and freedom go

together, and both had been significantly

enhanced by the founding documents of

the United States in the eighteenth

century. The world benefited; written

constitutions soon appeared on every

continent; and the Young Europe

movements, inspired by America’s

example, began the long difficult process

toward today’s European Union.

Starting in 2001, both law and

freedom have been progressively

eroded. International comity, which

depends on each state not doing to others

what they would not want done to them,

has been supplanted, at least for a while,

by U.S. unilateral military engagement

without constraint, acting without fear of

retribution. Drone killings in far corners

of the world have now become routine,

causing more than an estimated 2,000

Pakistani deaths (the vast majority of

them untargeted civilians) and over 75

percent of them under President

Obama. 105 The preemptive war against

Iraq, despite being proven both

unwarranted and counterproductive, has

been followed by the preemptive

bombing of Libya, and the prospect of

still further campaigns against Syria and

Iran.

Writing as a Canadian, let me say that

I believe in American exceptionalism,

and that at one time America was truly

exceptional in its unprecedented

replacement of authoritarian with limited

constitutional government. Today

America is still exceptional, but for its

percentage of citizens who are

incarcerated, for its disparity in wealth

and income between rich and poor (a

ratio exceeded among large nations only

by China), and for its indiscriminate use

of lethal power abroad.

Only the last of these trends began

with 9/11. But 9/11 itself should be seen

as a dialectical outcome of America’s

imperial expansion and simultaneous

decay—a process inevitably afflicting

those superstates that amass and retain

more power than is necessary for the

orderly management of their own affairs.

POSTSCRIPT (2014)

With the election of Obama in 2008,

many hoped that Wolfowitz’s PNAC

agenda—“we’ve about five or ten years

to clean up those old soviet client

regimes—Syria, Iran, Iraq”—would

now be history. But Obama has since

intervened militarily in Libya, come

close to doing so in Syria, and has now

recently been using the National

Endowment for Democracy to affect the

political future of Ukraine, a country that

historically is part of Russia itself.

There is great resentment in Moscow,

not confined to the Putin government,

that when Gorbachev removed Soviet

troops from Eastern Europe, NATO

troops then moved into the same area.

Gorbachev has repeated more than once

his charge that “the Americans promised

that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the

boundaries of Germany after the Cold

War.” 106 Jack Mat-lock, U.S. ambassador

to Moscow at the time, has also said that

the West gave a “clear commitment” not

to expand. 107 When I visited in Moscow

in 2012 I heard from many Russians

(even some thought in the West to be

relatively “liberal”) their sense that

NATO was consolidating its

encirclement of Russia from Estonia to

Iraq to Afghanistan. 108

In May 2014, as I send this book to its

publisher, Putin is endorsing the idea of

roundtable discussions to defuse the

ominous crisis in Ukraine. Obama

meanwhile has reportedly resolved to

focus on “isolating . . . Russia by cutting

off its economic and political ties to the

outside world . . . effectively making it a

pariah state.” 109 At a recent informed

university discussion it was reported

that some in Washington still hope to

include Ukraine itself in NATO.

One has to be reminded of Tom

Hayden’s charge, noted in chapter 2, that

a “state within the state”—that is, the

deep state itself, and not just its neocon

friends in PNAC—may be responsible

for Obama’s failure to follow the

guidelines of his friendly speeches.110

FURTHER POSTSCRIPT

In the next chapter we will return to the

theme of two types of power in U.S.

history, in order to see how, in the two

decades embracing the Vietnam War, the

growing unchecked power of the deep

state contested and repeatedly overcame

the democratically elected authority of

the White House.

Three presidents—Kennedy, Nixon,

and Carter—took steps to challenge the

growing power of the CIA; and in

diverse ways all three saw their

political careers terminated in deep

events: assassination, Watergate, and the

October Surprise. (Less dramatically,

the careers of Johnson and Ford were

also ended.) The deep state was also

affected. The tenures of no less than

seven Directors of Central Intelligence

(DCIs) were terminated in these two

decades, and three of them (Dulles,

Helms, and Bush) were reportedly

terminated after controversies with their

presidents. (A fourth, the relatively

liberal Colby, may have been sacked

after he incurred the displeasure of some

in the deep state.)

This was a new stage in a process of

emergent deep state power, climaxing in

the Reagan Revolution that ended four

decades of power-sharing between

American capital and American labor.

The two decades opened with presidents

seeking détente and coexistence with the

Soviet Union. Thanks to deep state

manipulations, that trend was reversed.

Dulles, Helms, and Bush may have been

sacked; but their faction triumphed.

CHAPTER 8

Deep Power Takes

Its Toll on U.S.

Presidents, 1961–

1980

THE DEEP STATE, DEEP EVENTS,

AND VIOLENCE

IN FEBRUARY 2011, AT A WASHINGTON

PRESS CONFERENCE, SECRETARY OF State

Hillary Clinton announced new U.S.

government measures to promote

freedom of speech throughout the world.

At the back of the hall, and wearing a T-

shirt with the slogan “Veterans for

Peace,” Raymond McGovern, a former

senior CIA analyst turned nonviolent

antiwar activist, conducted a silent, brief

protest: he turned his back on Clinton

and faced the wall.1 Two burly men, one

of them in plain clothes, pounced on

McGovern and wrestled him out of the

room. Once out of sight, they beat him so

mercilessly that he had wounds over his

body and his clothes were bloodied.

After being handcuffed and detained at a

police station for three hours and then

released, he had to be treated for his

wounds at a hospital. There he was

informed that, as the victim of an assault,

it was his responsibility to inform—the

Washington police! 2

As I wrote in chapter 1, this episode

encapsulates a very old tension in

America between two types of power—

persuasive and violent. McGovern’s

example of nonviolent persuasive

protest is part of a storied American

tradition dating back to Henry Thoreau’s

arrest in protest of James Polk’s

Mexican-American War. The violent

response is part of an equally American

tradition, from the Ku Klux Klan and the

Battle of Wounded Knee down to Bull

Connor and the Birmingham police in

1963. Both traditions, the persuasive and

the violent, are profoundly American. 3

I wish in this chapter to recapitulate

what I said in chapter 1, with a new

thesis: that a significant shift in the

relationship between public and deep

state power occurred in the 1960s and

1970s, culminating in the Reagan

Revolution of 1980. In this period five

presidents sought to curtail the powers

of the deep state. And as we shall see,

the political careers of all five were cut

off in ways that were unusual. One

president, Kennedy, was assassinated.

Another, Nixon, was forced to resign.

To some extent the interplay of these

two forms of power and political

organization is found in all societies. As

we saw in chapter 1, the two were

defined by Hannah Arendt in the 1960s

as “persuasion through arguments”

versus “coercion by force.” Arendt,

following Thucydides, traced these to

the common Greek way of handling

domestic affairs, which was persuasion

(πείθειν) as well as the common way of

handling foreign affairs, which was

force and violence (βία).” 4 The two

represent not just different techniques of

government but different cultures and

mindsets, in fundamental tension with

each other. 5

This tension increases, and

predictably tips toward violence, if a

well-organized open community expands

beyond its own borders and is

increasingly occupied with the business

of supervising an empire. It is repeatedly

the case that progressive societies (like

America) expand. As their influence

expands, their democratic institutions,

based at bottom upon persuasive power

among equals, are supplemented by new,

often secret, institutions of top-down,

violent power for the control of alien

populations abroad, often speaking

different and unfamiliar languages. The

more the society expands, the more these

institutions of violent power encroach

upon and supplant the original

democracy.

As a result these nations also

experience deeper and deeper politics,

much of it a contest between these two

types of power. One special feature of

American deep politics since World War

II is that much of it has been

characterized by a series of

conspiratorial deep events, emblematic

of the ongoing conflict between these

two forms of power and their

corresponding mindsets. One is the

acknowledged public mindset of

openness, egalitarianism, and

democracy. The other is the global

dominance mindset committed to

maintaining and expanding American

hegemony. In domestic policy we often

analyze the two cultures as liberals

versus conservatives; in foreign policy,

doves versus hawks. (Yet American

liberals when they reach power, such as

Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, have

also been deeply entwined in the

militarization of American politics and

its global expansion.)

But with the expansion since 9/11 of

extra-constitutional agencies like the

NSA, it is time to supplement these

horizontal distinctions with a vertical

one: between those agencies constrained

by constitutional checks and balances

(the public state) and those not so

constrained (the deep state). Although

the deep state as we have defined it has

always existed, its recent radical

expansion has brought it into occasional

conspiratorial conflict with the public

state—even with the President.

The tension between persuasive and

violent power has increased

incrementally in recent U.S. history,

from the years after World War II

through to September 11, 2001. We have

seen the emergence to dominance of

what used to be called the “military-

industrial complex,” and what in my

2010 book I called the “American war

machine.” This is a major change. When

Eisenhower warned against the military-

industrial complex in 1961, the values,

institutions, and resources that

comprised it were still subordinate

elements in American society. Today it

not only dominates both parties, but is

also financing threats to both these

parties from even further to the right.

That change has been achieved partly

by money, but partly also with the

assistance of deep events: events, such

as the Kennedy assassination, Watergate,

the 1980 October Surprise, Iran-Contra,

and 9/11, which repeatedly have

involved lawbreaking and/or violence,

have been mysterious to begin with, and

whose mystery has been compounded by

systematic falsifications in media and

internal government records.6

In saying that these deep events have

contributed collectively to a major

change in American society, I am not

attributing them all to a single agent or

“secret team.” Rather I see them as

flowing in part from the sociodynamic

processes of violent power itself, power

associated with and deployed in the

service of the global expansion of

American military might, which (as

history has shown many times) has the

effect to transform both societies with

surplus power and the individuals

exercising that power.7 Insofar as these

power processes govern America

without deriving from its Constitution,

we can say that they derive from the

milieu of the American deep state.

In discussing the deep events of

Dallas, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and

9/11, I will argue that, while the

mysteries of these deep events cannot at

present be fully dispelled by historical

analysis (given the absence of

documentation), analysis does point to a

pattern linking them. In American War

Machine I wrote,

The historical succession of deep

events—such as Dallas, Watergate,

and 9/11—has impacted more and

more profoundly on America’s

political situation. More

specifically, . . . major foreign wars

are typically preceded by deep

events like the Tonkin Gulf

incidents, 9/11, or the 2001 anthrax

attacks. This suggests that what I

call the war machine in Washington

[the forces striving for global U.S.

dominance, including elements both

inside and outside government, both

inside and outside the United

States] may have been behind them.

. . . Since 1959, virtually all of

America’s major foreign wars have

been wars 1) induced preemptively

by the U.S. war machine and/or 2)

disguised as responses to

unprovoked enemy aggression, with

disguises repeatedly engineered by

deception deep events, involving in

some way elements of the global

drug connection.8

These deceptions were not designed to

deceive America’s enemies, but first and

foremost to deceive the American

people, to accept the unilateral initiation

by America of illegal wars.

These successive, deception plots,

including the repeated falsified

appearances of external attacks or

threats (from North Vietnam, Panama, or

Iraq) have been part of a larger picture. I

will suggest that for at least a half-

century the conflict between the two

mindsets has given rise to a series of

conspiratorial deep events, emanating

from the hidden recesses of the

American war machine, all designed to

deceive and coerce the American people

so as to sustain or further military

expansion. I will go further, and argue

that this continuity underlies yet other

significant deep events that led, not to

the start of yet another external war, but

to the progressive militarization and

political repression of domestic

American society.

I will document this conflict between

the two mindsets, in one way or another,

revealing how it underlies all the major

deep events in recent American history:

Dallas, Tonkin Gulf, Watergate, the 1980

Republican October Surprise, Iran-

Contra, and finally 9/11. These events

were needed to achieve American

acceptance of both militarized domestic

security and successive preemptive

foreign wars. The neocons of the Project

for the New American Century (PNAC)

virtually acknowledged this when they

wrote that their program for American

dominance was unlikely to be adopted

soon, “absent some catastrophic and

catalyzing event—like a new Pearl

Harbor. ”9

MILITARY AND CIA RESENTMENT

(1961–1980)

We can trace what has happened over

fifty years through the dramatic change in

presidential attitudes toward the Soviet

Union. Kennedy, Johnson, and above all

Nixon believed in détente with the

Soviet Union. Starting under Ford and

Carter, and climaxing with Reagan,

elements in the United States set out to

help destroy what Reagan called “the

evil empire.” Saudi Arabian wealth and

influence approved of this change and

may have been a factor in achieving it.10

The last major achievement of the

dove faction was Kennedy’s peaceful

resolution of the Cuban Missile crisis in

1962. But the Joint Chiefs had been

eager to engage with the Soviet Union,

and some of them were furious that

Kennedy denied them this chance. Air

Force Chief General Curtis LeMay

“called the settlement ‘the greatest

defeat in our history,’ and urged a

prompt invasion. ”11 Earlier LeMay had

called Kennedy’s blockade tactic

“almost as bad as the appeasement at

Munich,” and had threatened to take his

dissent public. 12

There are abundant corroborations for

this alarming standoff between the

President and his Joint Chiefs. Daniel

Ellsberg, who worked in the Pentagon in

1964, told David Talbot that after the

Cuban Missile settlement “there was

virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon

circles . . . a mood of hatred and rage.

The atmosphere was poisonous,

poisonous. ”13 Disagreements over how

vigorously to pursue the Vietnam War

later divided President Johnson from

many of his generals, split his party, and

finally persuaded LBJ not to run for

reelection.

These resentments survived into the

Nixon era. Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt,

Jr., came close to accusing Nixon and

Kissinger of treason and Kissinger of

being a Soviet sympathizer. 14 A book

coauthored by retired admiral Chester

Ward and published in 1975 charged that

Kissinger was not just a Soviet

sympathizer but a conscious Soviet

agent.15 (With the rise under George W.

Bush and Obama of neocons with

aggressive agendas, the Joint Chiefs

have tended in contrast to play a

restraining role.)16

We have to consider that it was no

accident that deep events, the Kennedy

assassination and Watergate, cut off the

presidencies of both Kennedy and

Nixon, both bitterly resented by their

generals, and also the only presidents

not to serve full terms in the postwar

era. Less conspicuously, their

successors, Ford and Carter, were also

afflicted by deep divisions within their

respective administrations. Following

the wishes of Congress, “Gerald Ford

and Jimmy Carter carried out the largest

number of revisions to presidential

directives since Eisenhower, carefully

rewriting each of the [COG] emergency

documents.” 17 Not coincidentally, each

of them faced divisions among their

supporters; and they became the first and

second incumbent presidents to be

defeated for reelection since Herbert

Hoover in 1932.18

The military figures who protested

against presidential restraints on their

proposals were not alone in Washington,

there was also CIA resistance to

presidential efforts to control the agency.

The most striking example is perhaps the

1980 election campaign that launched

the Reagan Revolution. Robert Parry has

demonstrated that this election was

preceded by a number of illegal actions

—climaxing in the Republican October

Surprise—in which both veterans and

active employees of the deep state—no

longer the obedient servant of the public

state—played a significant role. The

events of the Republican October

Surprise have been characterized—by

myself among others—as an escalated

reprise of dirty tricks between

Republicans and Democrats.19 It is

closer to the truth to see them as Robert

Parry has done, as in part a CIA revolt

(in alliance with Israel and the Safari

Club) against Jimmy Carter and his

house-cleaning CIA Director Stansfield

Turner. Parry reported that Miles

Copeland told him, “‘the CIA within the

CIA’—the innermost circle of powerful

intelligence figures . . . believed Carter

and his naïve faith in American

democratic ideals represented a grave

threat to the nation. ”20

The antagonism between CIA

operatives and the White House did not

begin with Carter. It was so acute right

after the Bay of Pigs and the firing of

CIA Director Dulles that Kennedy told

one of the highest officials of his

administration that he wanted “to

splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces

and scatter it to the winds.” 21 In 1972

Nixon fired Helms after the Watergate

break-in because he believed Helms

“was out to get him”; and he gave orders

to Helms’s replacement, James

Schlesinger, “to turn the place inside

out. ”22

Neither Kennedy nor Nixon finished

their terms, let alone their intention to

bring the CIA under control. But their

successive firings of Dulles and Helms

left a toxic resentment inside the CIA,

especially after Nixon’s CIA Director

James Schlesinger then purged more that

five hundred analysts and more than one

thousand people in all from the

clandestine service. 23 CIA veteran

Arabist Archibald Roosevelt, who was

a significant player along with former

CIA Director Bush in the October

Surprise, believed that Nixon’s

appointees as CIA Director—James

Schlesinger and William Colby—“had

both . . . betrayed their office by

pandering to politicians.” 24

CIA resentment and concern was not

just directed against presidents. The

CIA’s Operations Division was also

determined to fight a number of

limitations imposed on it in the mid-

1970s by the responses of a Democratic

Congress to the recommendations of the

Senate Select Committee chaired by

Senator Frank Church. As a result, even

before Carter’s election, a number of the

CIA’s allied intelligence services—in

France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and

Morocco—had allied in the so-called

“Safari Club” to serve as an alternative

source of funding and financing of covert

operations. 25 In this they used the

resources and networks of the drug-

laundering Bank of Credit and

Commerce International (BCCI). CIA

assets like Adnan Khashoggi and Bruce

Rappaport, assisted by officially retired

CIA personnel like Miles Copeland and

Jerry Townsend, were part of this global

BCCI network. And, as we saw in

chapter 2, former Saudi intelligence

chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, a key

figure in the Safari Club, once admitted

candidly that the Safari Club, operating

at the level of the deep state, was

expressly created to overcome the

efforts of Carter and Congress to rein in

the CIA.26

But as we saw in chapter 2, the efforts

of former CIA officers to elect Reagan

were only part of a larger effort to

ensure the defeat of Carter in 1980. An

even more important factor in Carter’s

defeat was the prior manipulation of oil

prices by the U.S. oil majors, to engineer

an artificially elevated oil price

increase.27

The plight of Jimmy Carter in 1979–

1980 epitomizes how weak a president

can become when he loses the mandate

of heaven from the American deep state.

First Carter expressed his determination

not to admit the deposed Shah of Iran

into the United States, knowing very

well that this might result in the seizure

of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. 28 But

soon thereafter Carter was coerced by

the Rockefellers and their man in the

White House, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to

do just that. 29 (Carter, in caving in to

David Rockefeller’s demands, asked,

“What are you guys going to recommend

that we do when they take our embassy

and hold our people hostage?”)30 In the

remaining months of his presidency, his

popularity was battered by his failure to

free the Tehran hostages, along with (as

previously mentioned) the long waits at

gas stations and convenience stores,

generated by a largely artificial gas

shortage.31 We can see Carter as a victim

of the top-down power of the deep state,

which would mean that Carter himself,

like Kennedy and Nixon before him, was

not on top.

Carter’s defeat by Reagan in 1980

ended two tumultuous decades in which

one president (along with his candidate

brother) was assassinated, the next

chose not to run for re-election, the next

was forced to resign, and the two last,

despite their incumbencies, failed to be

re-elected.

Let me state very clearly that I am not

blaming all this political confusion on

the professional bureaucracies of either

the military or the CIA. But as I have

been trying to demonstrate, both of these

—the military and the CIA—have

constituencies among the dark forces of

the deep state; and because of their

proximity to these other forces, they (and

particularly the CIA) have not hesitated

on occasion to pursue policies directly

at odds with policies that presidents

were attempting to impose.

It is not the purpose of this book to try

to resolve or even to discuss at length

the deep events of the Kennedy

assassination, Watergate, and the

October Surprise. But in all three cases

we have seen for years the withholding

of relevant documents, misrepresentation

of basic facts by the mainstream media,

and systemic resistance to proper

investigation of what really happened.

In the next chapter I shall argue that

unknown elements in the deep state were

responsible for these deep events. And I

shall draw particular attention to the

presence in all of them of personnel

connected to the emergency planning

network of the Doomsday Project.

POSTSCRIPT

The door was opened to the Reagan

Revolution, and the emergence of two-

party agreement on a so-called

“Washington consensus” in economics,

by which we can mean here the

increasing deregulation of the private

sector and privatization of the public

sector. A crucial step in this was

Reagan’s decisive end to four decades

of power-sharing between labor and

capital, by decisively crushing the 1981

strike of the Professional Air Traffic

Controllers Organization (PATCO). This

completed the transformation of the

Republican Party of the 1950s (when the

Goldwater conservatives were a fringe

right-wing minority) into that of the

1980s (when Goldwater was now to the

left of the new conservative majority).

The era of the Council on Foreign

Relations and the Committee for

Economic Development had been

replaced by the era of the Heritage

foundation and the American Enterprise

Institute.

Money, including much new money

generated by the Vietnam War, was

largely responsible for this change. But

as I noted in American War Machine (p.

38), the CIA played a hand in promoting

Chicago School neoliberalism for

application in Chile after the Pinochet

takeover in 1973. Since 1981, this

program of deregulation has been

increasingly applied at home. The result

has been a major reversal of the

capitalist reforms dating back to FDR in

the 1930s and to Theodore Roosevelt

before him. Instead we have seen

restored the disparities of wealth and

income that characterized the “gilded

age” of the late nineteenth century. I am

not arguing that these unhealthy and

dysfunctional disparities were

consciously intended. On the contrary I

shall argue in the next chapter that it was

an overreaction arising from the

anxieties of the very wealthy in the

1960s and 1970s, an anxiety urgently

shared by other elements in the deep

state, that control of the country was

slipping away from them.

And as we shall see in chapter 12, the

deep state also played an important and

perhaps decisive role in ending détente.

Seeing its role challenged by a series of

post-Watergate reforms, the American

and indeed the nascent global deep state

(represented by the Safari Club and the

Pinay Circle) rallied to revive the covert

processes of the Cold War under a new

name, the so-called “war on terror.” As I

have recounted in The Road to 9/11 (pp.

50–61), the “pivotal shift” of the so-

called Halloween Massacre of 1975,

overseen by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick

Cheney in the Ford White House,

resulted in a new defense secretary

(Rumsfeld) and a new CIA Director,

George H. W. Bush, followed by a

somber new reassessment of the “Soviet

threat” that helped elect Reagan, and has

since been responsible for the massive

U.S. defense budget.

Since its success with the Reagan

Revolution, the deep state has served

chiefly to consolidate a compliant status

quo, rather than to change it. But the

hegemony of the deep state, emergent in

the Vietnam War decades, was not

finally established until 9/11 and the

implementation of COG.

CHAPTER 9

The Doomsday

Project and Deep

Events

JFK, Watergate, Iran-

Contra, and 9/11

I know the capacity that is there to

make tyranny total in America, and

we must see to it that this agency

[the National Security Agency] and

all agencies that possess this

technology operate within the law

and under proper supervision, so

that we never cross over that abyss.

That is the abyss from which there

is no return.

—Senator Frank Church (1975)

IN THIS CHAPTER I WILL DISCUSS FOUR

MAJOR AND BADLY UNDERSTOOD events—

the John F. Kennedy assassination,

Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. I will

analyze these deep events as part of a

deeper political process linking them, a

process that has helped build up

repressive power in America at the

expense of democracy.

In recent years I have sometimes

referred to a “dark force” behind these

events, and sometimes to a “deep state,”

operating both within and outside the

public state. 1 In this chapter I want to

identify part of that dark force, a part

that has operated for five decades or

more at the edge of the public state. This

part of the dark force has a name not

invented by me: the Doomsday Project,

the Pentagon’s name for the emergency

planning “to keep the White House and

Pentagon running during and after a

nuclear war or some other major

crisis. ”2

My point is a simple and important

one, to show that the Doomsday Project

of the 1980s, and the earlier emergency

planning that developed into it, have

been an operational factor in the

background of all the deep events I shall

discuss.

More significantly, they have been a

factor behind all four of the disturbing

developments that now threaten

American democracy. The first of these

four is what has been called the

conversion of our economy into a

plutonomy—with the increasing

separation of America into two classes,

into the haves and the have-nots, the 1

percent and the 99 percent. The second,

already discussed, is the increase in

secret top-down power of America’s

shadow government, the deep state. The

third is America’s increasing

militarization, and above all its

inclination, which has become more and

more routine and predictable, to wage or

provoke wars in remote regions of the

globe. It is clear that the operations of

this American war machine have served

the 1 percent.3

The fourth is the important and

increasingly deleterious impact on

American history of structural deep

events (SDEs): mysterious events, like

the JFK assassination, the Watergate

break-in, or 9/11, which violate the

American social structure, have a major

impact on American society, repeatedly

involve lawbreaking or violence, and in

many cases proceed from an unknown

dark force.

There are any number of analyses of

America’s current breakdown in terms

of income and wealth disparity, also in

terms of America’s increasing

militarization and belligerency. What I

shall argue in this chapter is I think new:

that both the income disparity—or what

has been called our “plutonomy”—and

the belligerency have been fostered

significantly by deep events.

We must understand that the income

disparity of America’s current economy

was not the result of market forces

working independently of political

intervention. In large part it was

generated by a systematic and deliberate

ongoing political process dating from the

anxieties of the very wealthy in the

1960s and 1970s that control of the

country was slipping away from them.

This was the time when future

Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in

a 1971 memorandum, warned that

survival of the free enterprise system

depended on “careful long-range

planning and implementation” of a well-

financed response to threats from the

left.4 This warning was answered by a

sustained right-wing offensive,

coordinated by think tanks and funded

lavishly by a small group of family

foundations. 5 We should recall that all

this was in response to serious riots in

Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere, and

that increasing calls for a revolution

were coming from the left (in Europe as

well as America). I will focus on the

right’s response to that challenge, and on

the role of deep events in enhancing their

response.

What was important about the Powell

memorandum was less the document

itself than the fact that it was

commissioned by the United States

Chamber of Commerce, one of the most

influential and least discussed lobbying

groups in America. And the

memorandum was only one of many

signs of that developing class war in the

1970s, a larger process working both

inside and outside government

(including what Irving Kristol called an

“intellectual counterrevolution”), which

led directly to the so-called “Reagan

Revolution.” 6

It is clear that this larger process has

been carried on for almost five decades,

pumping billions of right-wing dollars

into the American political process.

What I wish to show is that deep events

have also been integral to this right-wing

effort, from the John F. Kennedy

assassination in 1963 to 9/11. The

events of 9/11 resulted in the

implementation of “Continuity of

Government” (COG) plans (which in the

Oliver North Hearings of 1987 were

called plans for “the suspension of the

U.S. Constitution”). 7 These COG plans,

building on earlier COG planning, had

been carefully developed since 1982 in

the so-called Doomsday Project, by a

secret group appointed by Reagan. The

group was composed of both public and

private figures, including Donald

Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

I shall try to show that in this respect

9/11 was only the culmination of a

sequence of deep events reaching back

to the Kennedy assassination if not

earlier, and that the germs of the

Doomsday Project can be detected

behind all of them.

More specifically, I shall try to

demonstrate the following about these

deep events:

1. Prior bureaucratic misbehavior

by the CIA and similar agencies

helped to make both the Kennedy

assassination and 9/11 happen.

2. The consequences of each deep

event included an increase in

coercive, repressive power for

these same agencies, at the

expense of persuasive,

democratic power; 8

3. There are symptomatic overlaps

in personnel between the

perpetrators of each deep event

and the next;

4. One sees in each of these events

the involvement of elements of

the international drug traffic—

suggesting that our current

plutonomy is also to some degree

a narconomy.

5. In the background of each event

(and playing an increasingly

important role) one sees the

Doomsday Project—the

alternative emergency planning

structure with its own

communications network,

operating as a shadow network

outside of regular government

channels.

BUREAUCRATIC MISBEHAVIOR

AS A FACTOR CONTRIBUTING TO

BOTH THE JFK ASSASSINATION

AND 9/11

Both the JFK assassination and 9/11

were facilitated in part by the way the

CIA and FBI manipulated their files

about alleged perpetrators of each event

(Lee Harvey Oswald in the case of what

I shall call “JFK,” and the alleged

hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf

al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of

this facilitation was the decision on

October 9, 1963, of an FBI agent,

Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald

from the FBI watch list for surveillance.

This was shortly after Oswald’s arrest in

New Orleans in August and his reported

travel to Mexico in September.

Obviously these developments should

normally have made Oswald a candidate

for increased surveillance. 9

This misbehavior is paradigmatic of

the behavior of other agencies,

especially the CIA, in both JFK and

9/11. Indeed Gheesling’s behavior fits

very neatly with the CIA’s culpable

withholding from the FBI, in the same

month of October, information that

Oswald had allegedly met in Mexico

City with a suspected KGB agent,

Valeriy Kostikov.10 This also helped

ensure that Oswald would not be

surveilled. Indeed former FBI Director

Clarence Kelley in his memoir later

complained that the CIA’s withholding of

information was the major reason why

Oswald was not under surveillance on

November 22, 1963. 11

A more ominous provocation in 1963

was that of Army Intelligence, one unit

of which in Dallas did not simply

withhold information about Lee Harvey

Oswald, but manufactured false

intelligence in a way that seemed

designed to provoke a retaliation against

Cuba. I call such provocations “phase-

one stories,” efforts to portray Oswald

as a Communist conspirator (as opposed

to the later “phase-two stories,” also

false, portraying him as a disgruntled

loner). A conspicuous example of such

phase-one stories was a cable from the

Fourth Army Command in Texas,

reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman

who was also in an Army Intelligence

Reserve unit: “Assistant Chief Don

Stringfellow, Intelligence Section,

Dallas Police Department, notified 112th

INTC [Intelligence] Group, this

Headquarters, that information obtained

from Oswald revealed he had defected

to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying

member of Communist Party.” 12

This cable was sent late on November

22 directly to the U.S. Strike Command

at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base

poised for a possible retaliatory attack

against Cuba. 13

The cable was not an isolated

aberration. It was supported by other

false phase-one stories from Dallas

about Oswald’s alleged rifle, and

specifically by concatenated false

translations of Marina Oswald’s

testimony, to suggest that Oswald’s rifle

in Dallas was one he owned in Russia.14

These last false reports, apparently

unrelated, can also be traced to a Dallas

Army Intelligence Reserve unit.15 For the

interpreter who first supplied the false

translation of Marina’s words, Ilya

Mamantov, was selected by a Dallas

oilman, Jack Crichton, and Deputy

Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin. 16

Crichton and Lumpkin were also the

Chief and the Deputy Chief of the 488th

Army Intelligence Reserve unit in

Dallas. 17 Crichton was an extreme right-

winger in the community of Dallas

oilmen: He was a trustee of the H. L.

Hunt Foundation, and a member of the

American Friends of the Katanga

Freedom Fighters, a group organized to

oppose Kennedy’s policies in the Congo.

We have to keep in mind that some of

the Joint Chiefs were furious that the

1962 Missile Crisis had not led to an

invasion of Cuba, and that in 1963,

under new Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)

Chairman Maxwell Taylor, the Joint

Chiefs, in May 1963, still believed “that

US military intervention in Cuba is

necessary. ”18 This was six months after

Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in

October 1962, had given explicit

assurances to Khrushchev, albeit highly

qualified, that the United States would

not invade Cuba.19 This did not stop the

J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the JCS

Directorate of Plans and Policy) from

producing a menu of “fabricated

provocations to justify military

intervention.” 20 (One proposed example

of “fabricated provocations” envisioned

violence: “using MIG type aircraft flown

by US pilots to . . . attack surface

shipping or to attack US military.” 21)

The deceptions about Oswald coming

from Dallas were immediately post-

assassination; thus they do not by

themselves establish that the

assassination itself was a provocation-

deception plot. They do however reveal

enough about the anti-Castro mindset of

the Army Intelligence Reserve units in

Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably

similar to that of the J-5 the preceding

May—the mindset that produced a menu

of “fabricated provocations” to attack

Cuba. (According to Crichton there were

“about a hundred men in the unit and

about forty or fifty of them were from the

Dallas Police Department.”)22

It can hardly be accidental that we see

this bureaucratic misbehavior from the

FBI, CIA, and military, the three

agencies with which Kennedy had had

serious disagreements in his truncated

presidency.23 Later in this chapter I shall

link Dallas oilman Jack Crichton to the

1963 emergency planning that became

the Doomsday Project.

ANALOGOUS BUREAUCRATIC

MISBEHAVIOR IN THE CASE OF

9/11

Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000–2001,

again flagrantly withheld crucial

evidence from the FBI: evidence that, if

shared, would have led the FBI to

surveil two of the alleged hijackers,

Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-

Hazmi. This sustained withholding of

evidence provoked an FBI agent to

predict accurately in August 2001 that

“someday someone will die.” 24 After

9/11 another FBI agent was even more

bitter: “They [CIA] didn’t want the

bureau meddling in their business—

that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI. . . .

And that’s why September 11 happened.

That is why it happened. . . . They have

blood on their hands. They have three

thousand deaths on their hands” 25 The

CIA’s withholding of relevant evidence

before 9/11 (which it was required by

its own rules to supply) was matched in

this case by the NSA. 26

Without these withholdings, in other

words, neither the Kennedy

assassination nor 9/11 could have

developed in the manner in which they

did. As I wrote in American War

Machine, it would appear that

Oswald (and later al-Mihdhar) had

at some prior point been selected

as designated subjects for an

operation. This would not initially

have been for the commission of a

crime against the American polity:

on the contrary, steps were

probably taken to prepare Oswald

in connection with an operation

against Cuba and al-Mihdhar [I

suspect] for an operation against al-

Qaeda. But as [exploitable] legends

began to accumulate about both

figures, it became possible for

some witting people to subvert the

sanctioned operation into a plan for

murder that would later be covered

up. At this point Oswald (and by

analogy al-Mihdhar) was no longer

just a designated subject but also

now a designated culprit. 27

As we have seen, Kevin Fenton, in his

exhaustive book Disconnecting the

Dots, reached the same conclusion with

respect to 9/11: “By the summer of

2001, the purpose of withholding the

information had become to allow the

attacks to go forward.” 28 He also

identified the person chiefly responsible

for the misbehavior: CIA officer Richard

Blee, Chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit.

While Clinton was still president, Blee

had been one of a faction inside CIA

pressing for a more belligerent CIA

involvement in Afghanistan, in

conjunction with the Afghan Northern

Alliance. 29 This then happened

immediately after 9/11, and Blee himself

was promoted to become the new Chief

of Station in Kabul.30

In like fashion, CIA and NSA

withholding of evidence in the Second

Tonkin Gulf Incident contributed to war

against North Vietnam. The details of

this withholding can be found in my

American War Machine, pages 200–02.

But Tonkin Gulf is similar to the

Kennedy assassination and 9/11, in that

manipulation of evidence helped lead

America—in this case very swiftly—

into war.

By now, historians such as Fredrik

Logevall have agreed with the

assessment of former undersecretary of

state George Ball that the U.S. destroyer

mission in the Tonkin Gulf, which

resulted in the Tonkin Gulf incidents,

“was primarily for provocation. ”31 The

planning for this provocative mission

came from the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, the same unit that in 1963 had

reported concerning Cuba that “the

engineering of a series of provocations

to justify military intervention is

feasible.” 32

The NSA and CIA suppression of the

truth on August 4, 1964, was in the

context of an existing high-level (but

controversial) determination to attack

North Vietnam. In this respect the Tonkin

Gulf incident is remarkably similar to

the suppression of the truth by the CIA

and NSA leading up to 9/11, when there

was again a high-level (but

controversial) determination to go to

war.

INCREASES IN REPRESSIVE

POWER AFTER DEEP EVENTS

All of the deep events discussed here

have contributed to the cumulative

increase of Washington’s repressive

powers. It is clear for example that the

Warren Commission used the JFK

assassination to increase CIA

surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in

Deep Politics, this was the result of

the Warren Commission’s

controversial recommendations that

the Secret Service’s domestic

surveillance responsibilities be

increased (WR 25–26). Somewhat

illogically, the Warren Report

concluded both that Oswald acted

alone (WR 22), . . . and also that

the Secret Service, FBI, CIA,

should coordinate more closely the

surveillance of organized groups

(WR 463). In particular, it

recommended that the Secret

Service acquire a computerized

data bank compatible with that

already developed by the CIA.33

This pattern would repeat itself four

years later with the assassination of

Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four

hours between Bobby’s shooting and his

death, Congress hurriedly passed a

statute—drafted well in advance (like

the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and

the Patriot Act of 2001)—that still

further augmented the secret powers

given to the Secret Service in the name

now of protecting presidential

candidates. 34 This was not a trivial or

benign change: from this swiftly

considered act, passed under Johnson,

flowed some of the worst excesses of

the Nixon presidency. 35

The change also contributed to the

chaos and violence at the Chicago

Democratic Convention of 1968. There

were army intelligence surveillance

agents, seconded to the Secret Service,

present both inside and outside the

convention hall. Some of them equipped

the so-called “Legion of Justice thugs

whom the Chicago Red Squad turned

loose on local anti-war groups.” 36

In this way the extra secret powers

conferred after the Robert F. Kennedy

assassination contributed to the

disastrous turmoil in Chicago that

effectively destroyed the old Democratic

Party representing the labor unions: The

three Democratic presidents elected

since then have all been significantly

more conservative.

When we turn to Watergate and Iran-

Contra, both of these events were seen in

the media as setbacks to the repressive

powers exercised by Richard Nixon and

the Reagan White House, not as

expansions of them. On the surface level

this is true: both events resulted in a

number of legislative reforms that would

appear to contradict the thesis of an

expanding repressive power.

We need to distinguish here between

the two years of the Watergate crisis,

and the initial Watergate break-in. The

Watergate crisis saw a president forced

into resignation by a number of forces,

involving both liberals and

conservatives. But the key figures in the

initial Watergate break-in itself—Hunt,

McCord, G. Gordon Liddy, and their

Cuban allies—were all far to the right of

Nixon and Kissinger. And the end result

of their machinations was not finalized

until the so-called Halloween Massacre

in 1975, when Kissinger was ousted as

National Security Adviser and Vice

President Nelson Rockefeller was

notified he would be dropped from the

1976 Republican ticket. This major

shake-up was engineered by two other

right-wingers: Donald Rumsfeld and

Dick Cheney in the Gerald Ford White

House.37

That day in 1975 saw the permanent

defeat of the so-called Rockefeller or

liberal faction within the Republican

Party, to be replaced by the conservative

Goldwater-Casey faction that would

soon capture the nomination and the

presidency for Ronald Reagan. 38 This

little-noticed palace coup, along with

other related intrigues in the mid-1970s,

helped achieve the conversion of

America from a welfare capitalist

economy, with gradual reductions in

income and wealth disparity, into a

financialized plutonomy where these

trends were reversed. 39

Again in Iran-Contra we see a deeper

accumulation of repressive power under

the surface of liberal reforms. At the

time not only the press but even

academics like myself celebrated the

termination of aid to the Nicaraguan

Contras, and the victory there of the

Contadora peace process. Not generally

noticed at the time was the fact that,

while Oliver North was removed from

his role in the Doomsday Project, that

project’s plans for surveillance,

detention, and the militarization of the

United States continued to grow after his

departure. 40

Also not noticed was the fact that the

U.S. Congress, while curtailing aid to

one small drug-financed CIA proxy

army, was simultaneously increasing

U.S. support to a much larger coalition

of drug-financed proxy armies in

Afghanistan.41 While Iran-Contra

exposed the $32 million that Saudi

Arabia, in collaboration with CIA

Director William Casey, had supplied to

the Contras, not a word was whispered

about the $500 million or more that the

Saudis had supplied in the same period

to the Afghan mujahedin. 42 In this sense

the drama of Iran-Contra in Congress

can be thought of as a misdirection play,

directing public attention away from

America’s much more intensive

engagement in Afghanistan—a covert

policy that has since evolved into

America’s longest war.

We should expand our consciousness

of Iran-Contra to think of it as Iran-

Afghan-Contra. And if we do, we must

acknowledge that in this complex and

misunderstood deep event the CIA in

Afghanistan exercised again the

paramilitary capacity that Stansfield

Turner had tried to terminate when he

was CIA Director under Jimmy Carter.

This was a victory in short for the

faction of men like Richard Blee, the

protector of al-Mihdhar as well as the

advocate in 2000 for enhanced CIA

paramilitary activity in Afghanistan. 43

PERSONNEL OVERLAPS

BETWEEN THE SUCCESSIVE

DEEP EVENTS

I will never forget The New York Times

front page story on June 18, 1972, the

day after the Watergate break-in. There

on page one were photographs of the

Watergate burglars, including one of

Frank Sturgis alias Frank Fiorini, whom

I had already written about two years

earlier in my unpublished book

manuscript about the JFK assassination,

“The Dallas Conspiracy.” 44

Sturgis was no nonentity; a former

contract employee of the CIA, he was

also well connected to the mob-linked

former casino owners in Havana.45 My

early writings on the Kennedy case

focused on the connections between

Frank Sturgis and an anti-Castro Cuban

training camp near New Orleans in

which Oswald had shown an interest. I

also noted Sturgis’s involvement in false

“phase-one” stories portraying Oswald

as part of a Communist Cuban

conspiracy; these stories were an

explicit reason why Johnson wanted a

Warren Commission (with its official

finding that there was no conspiracy at

all). 46

In spreading these “phase-one” stories

in 1963, Sturgis was joined by a number

of Cubans who were part of the CIA-

supported Central American army of

Manuel Artime. Artime’s base in Costa

Rica was closed down in 1965,

allegedly because of its involvement in

drug trafficking.47 In the 1980s some of

these Cuban exiles later became

involved in drug-financed support

activities for the Contras. 48

The political mentor of Artime’s

Movimiento de Recuperación

Revolucionaria (MRR) movement was

future Watergate plotter Howard Hunt;

and Ar-time in 1972 would pay for the

bail of the Cuban Watergate burglars.

The drug money-launderer Ramón

Milián Rodríguez has claimed to have

delivered $200,000 in cash from Artime

to pay off some of the Cuban Watergate

burglars. Later, in support of the

Contras, he managed two Costa Rican

seafood companies, Frigorificos and

Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug

money. 49

It is alleged that Hunt and McCord

had both been involved with Artime’s

invasion plans in 1963. 50 I believe it

was no accident that the organization of

Hunt’s protégé Artime became mired in

drug trafficking. I have argued elsewhere

that Hunt had been handling a U.S. drug

connection since his 1950 post as OPC

(Office of Policy Coordination) chief in

Mexico City. 51

But McCord not only had a past in the

anti-Castro activities of 1963, he was

also part of the nation’s emergency

planning network that would later figure

so prominently in the background of

Iran-Contra and 9/11. McCord was a

member of a small Air Force Reserve

unit in Washington attached to the Office

of Emergency Preparedness (OEP),

assigned “to draw up lists of radicals

and to develop contingency plans for

censorship of the news media and U.S.

mail in time of war.” 52 His unit was part

of the Wartime Information Security

Program (WISP), which had

responsibility for activating

“contingency plans for imposing

censorship on the press, the mails and

all telecommunications (including

government communications) [and]

preventive detention of civilian ‘security

risks,’ who would be placed in military

‘camps.’”53 In other words, the plans that

became known in the 1980s as the

Doomsday Project, the Continuity of

Government planning on which Dick

Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked

together for twenty years before 9/11.

A COMMON DENOMINATOR FOR

STRUCTURAL DEEP EVENTS:

PROJECT DOOMSDAY AND COG

McCord’s participation in an emergency

planning system dealing with

telecommunications suggests a common

institutional denominator in the

backgrounds of almost all the deep

events we are considering. Oliver North,

the Reagan-Bush point man on Iran-

Contra planning, was also the National

Security Council action officer for

Project 908 planning, and thus he had

access to the nation’s top-secret

Doomsday communications network.54

North’s network, known as Flashboard,

“excluded other bureaucrats with

opposing viewpoints . . . [and] had its

own special worldwide antiterrorist

computer network, . . . by which

members could communicate exclusively

with each other and their collaborators

abroad.” 55

Flashboard was used by North and his

superiors for extremely sensitive

operations that had to be concealed from

other hostile parts of the Washington

bureaucracy. These operations included

the illegal shipments of arms to Iran, but

also other activities, some still not

known, perhaps even against Olof

Palme’s Sweden. 56 Flashboard,

America’s emergency network in the

1980s, was the name in 1984–1986 of

the full-fledged Continuity of

Government (COG) emergency network

that was secretly planned for twenty

years, at a cost of billions, by a team

including Dick Cheney and Donald

Rumsfeld. On 9/11 the same network

was activated anew by the two men who

had planned it for so many years. 57

(Since I first advanced the hypothesis

that the COG communications network

was involved in all our structural deep

events, I have found further

corroborations for it. For example, John

Dean, perhaps the central Watergate

figure, had participated in COG

activities when serving as the associate

deputy attorney general. 58 And an army

reserve officer, Norman Katz, revealed

in October 2013 that, because of his

work in COG communications, he was

summoned to Washington in November

1963, in connection with President

Kennedy’s trip to Dallas.59)

All this Doomsday planning can be

traced back to 1963, when Jack

Crichton, head of the 488th Army

Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was

also part of it. This was in his capacity

as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil

Defense, which worked out of an

underground Emergency Operating

Center. As Russ Baker reports,

“Because it was intended for ‘continuity

of government’ operations during an

attack, [the Center] was fully equipped

with communications equipment.” 60 A

speech given at the dedication of the

Center in 1961 supplies these additional

details:

This Emergency Operating Center

[in Dallas] is part of the National

Plan to link Federal, State and local

government agencies in a

communications network from

which rescue operations can be

directed in time of local or

National emergency. It is a vital

part of the National, State, and

local Operational Survival Plan. 61

Crichton, in other words, was also

part of what became known in the 1980s

as the Doomsday Project, like James

McCord, Oliver North, Donald

Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney after him.

But in 1988 its aim was significantly

enlarged—no longer to prepare for an

atomic attack, but now to plan for the

effective suspension of the American

Constitution in the face of any

emergency. 62 This change in 1988

allowed COG to be implemented in

2001. By this time the Doomsday Project

had developed into what the Washington

Post called “a shadow government that

evolved based on long-standing

‘continuity of operations plans.’” 63

It is clear that the Office of

Emergency Preparedness (OEP, known

from 1961–1968 as the Office of

Emergency Planning, and from 1982 to

1994 as the National Program Office or

Project 908) supplied a common

denominator for key personnel in

virtually all of the structural events I

have discussed. This is a long way from

establishing that the OEP itself (in

addition to the individuals I have

discussed) was involved in generating

any of these events. But I believe that the

alternative communications network

housed first in the OEP (and later part of

Project 908) played a significant role in

at least three of them: the JFK

assassination, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.

This is easiest to show in the case of

9/11, where it is conceded that the

Continuity of Government (COG) plans

of the Doomsday Project were

implemented by Cheney on 9/11,

apparently before the last of the four

hijacked planes had crashed. 64 The 9/11

Commission could not locate records of

the key decisions taken by Cheney on

that day, suggesting that they may have

taken place on the “secure phone” in the

tunnel leading to the presidential bunker

—with such a high classification that the

9/11 Commission was never supplied

the phone records. 65 My guess is this

was a COG network phone.

It is almost certain that the “secure

phone” in the White House tunnel

belonged to the Secret Service, and

therefore was part of the secure network

of the White House Communications

Agency (WHCA). If so, it represents a

striking link between 9/11 and the JFK

assassination. The WHCA boasts on its

website that the agency was “a key

player in documenting the assassination

of President Kennedy. ”66 However it is

not clear for whom this documentation

was conducted, for the WHCA logs and

transcripts were in fact withheld,

inexcusably, from first the Warren

Commission and later the House Select

Committee on Assassinations. 67

The Secret Service had installed a

WHCA portable radio in the lead car of

the presidential motorcade.68 This in turn

was in contact by police radio with the

pilot car ahead of it, carrying Dallas

Police Department (DPD) Deputy Chief

Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence

Reserve unit. 69 Records of the WHCA

communications from the motorcade

never reached the Warren Commission,

the House Select Committee on

Assassinations, or the Assassination

Records Review Board (ARRB). 70 Thus

we cannot tell if they would explain

some of the anomalies on the two

channels of the Dallas Police

Department. They might for example

have thrown light upon the unsourced

call on the Dallas Police tapes for a

suspect who had exactly the false height

and weight (5 feet 10 inches, 165

pounds) recorded for Oswald in his FBI

and CIA files.71

As of June 2014 we were still living

under the State of Emergency

proclaimed after 9/11 by President Bush.

At least some COG provisions are still

in effect, and were even augmented by

Bush through Presidential Directive 51

of May 2007. Commenting on PD-51, the

Washington Post reported at that time,

“After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned

about 100 senior civilian managers

[including Cheney] to rotate secretly to

[COG] locations outside of Washington

for weeks or months at a time to ensure

the nation’s survival, a shadow

government that evolved based on long-

standing ‘continuity of operations

plans.’”72

Presumably this “shadow

government” finalized such long-

standing COG projects as warrantless

surveillance, in part through the Patriot

Act, whose controversial provisions

were already being refined by Cheney

and others well before the bill reached

Congress on October 12. 73 Other COG

projects implemented included the

militarization of domestic surveillance

under NORTH-COM, and the

Department of Homeland Security’s

Project Endgame—a ten-year plan to

expand detention camps at a cost of

$400 million in fiscal year 2007 alone. 74

For a half century American politics

have been constrained and deformed by

the unresolved matter of the Kennedy

assassination. According to a memo of

November 25, 1963, from Assistant

Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach,

it was important then to persuade the

public that “Oswald was the assassin,”

and that “he did not have

confederates. ”75 Obviously this priority

became even more important after these

questionable propositions were

endorsed by the Warren Report, the U.S.

establishment, and the mainstream press.

It has remained an embarrassing priority

ever since for all succeeding

administrations, including Obama’s.

There is or was for example an official

in Obama’s State Department (Todd

Leventhal), whose official job included

defense of the lone nut theory against so-

called “conspiracy theorists.” 76

If Oswald was not a lone assassin,

then it should not surprise us that there is

continuity between those who falsified

reports about Oswald in 1963, and those

who distorted American politics in

subsequent deep events beginning with

Watergate. Since the deep event of 1963,

the legitimacy of America’s political

system has become vested in a lie—a lie

that subsequent deep events have helped

to protect. 77

The usefulness of the Doomsday

Project’s alternative communications

network, the NCS, suggests a

commonality among structural deep

events on the operational level. In the

next chapter I shall suggest that many of

them share a commonality on a deeper

level, the level of funding from the same

off-the-books financial sources.

CHAPTER 10

The American

Deep State, Deep

Events, and Off-

the-Books

Financing

THIS CHAPTER WILL DISCUSS HOW RECENT

STRUCTURAL DEEP EVENTS (SDEs) have

been financed, time after time, from a

single deep-state source. But it will help

to preface my rather complex argument

with a summary of how thinking about

deep politics has led me to awareness of

the importance of deep events, and these

in turn to the mostly undocumented

presence of the deep state.

I have been writing about deep

politics since 1993, when I gave the

example of how the United States after

World War II sent American mafia

figures to fight communism in Italy,

thereby contributing to a corrupted

politics that was soon out of control—

reminiscent of the influence the mafia

once possessed in cities like Marseille,

or Chicago. 1

Since then I have written about deep

events, by which I mean mysterious

events—like the JFK assassination, the

Watergate break-in, or 9/11 that

repeatedly involve lawbreaking or

violence, and are embedded in fact in

deep politics. Some of these may be

low-level, as when data is filched from

a personal computer, or mid-level, like

the murder of Karen Silkwood. But what

I have called “structural deep events”

are large enough to affect the whole

fabric of society, with consequences that

enlarge covert government, and are

subsequently covered up by systematic

falsifications in media and internal

government records.

We still live in the official state of

emergency imposed after the last great

deep event—9/11; and this has left us in

a deconstitutionalized era of warrantless

surveillance, warrantless detentions, and

militarized homeland security. In this

chapter, the deep events I refer to will

all be structural deep events.

I have come to believe that most

structural deep events (or SDEs) are

interrelated, and that the study of any one

of them helps understand others. Their

interrelationship leads to two levels of

history in America, and two levels of

historical narrative: official or archival

history, which ignores or marginalizes

deep events, and a second level—called

“deep history” by its practitioners or

“conspiracy theory” by its critics—

which incorporates them.

Others have perceived these

interconnections. Back in 1987 Alfonso

Chardy wrote, accurately, that the

October Surprise Group of 1980—or

what Miles Copeland called the “CIA

within the CIA” that “concluded that

Carter had to be removed from the

presidency”—was the “genesis” of the

“secret government” that in 1985–1986

used Continuity of Government planning

to engineer Iran-Contra. 2 Nixon himself,

in the “smoking gun” tape that led to his

resignation, said to his chief of staff Bob

Haldeman that the Watergate break-in

was sensitive because it related to a

previous deep event, “the whole Bay of

Pigs thing”; Haldeman later speculated

with good reason in his memoir that “in

all those Nixon references to the Bay of

Pigs, he was actually referring to the

Kennedy assassination.” 3 Without

blaming all of these deep events on any

single group, such as Copeland’s “CIA

within the CIA,” one can still investigate

whether some such group might have

contributed to some or all of them.

My study of the interrelationship

between deep events has itself deepened

over four decades. It began on a

superficial level by noticing the overlap

of apparently marginal personnel

between the deep events of the John F.

Kennedy assassination and Watergate;

and again between Watergate and Iran-

Contra.

In chapter 9 I gave the example of

Frank Sturgis (alias Fiorini), the

Watergate burglar whom I had already

written about two years earlier in my

unpublished book manuscript about the

JFK assassination, “The Dallas

Conspiracy.” In 1986 my attention was

drawn to the deep events of Iran-Contra

when I noticed the involvement in

Contra support activities of anti-Castro

Cubans in Miami, some of them drug

traffickers and some known to Sturgis,

who had previously been investigated in

connection with deep events ranging

from the JFK assassination, to

Watergate, to the shooting down in 1976

of a Cuban civilian airliner. 4 Some of

these in turn worked in Contra support

operations with veterans of Theodore

Shackley’s drug-financed CIA

operations in Laos like Richard Secord. 5

Secord in turn became involved with

MEGA Oil’s airline for mujahedin in

Azerbaijan, along with Gary Best, who

was also a veteran of North’s Contra

support effort, and before that of efforts

to support UNITA in Angola. 6

Since 9/11 my study of structural deep

events has progressed from such

overlaps of personnel to three deeper

levels, which I call the “operational,”

by which I mean a common modus

operandi; the “institutional,” by which I

mean a shared agency of implementation;

and the “financial,” by which I mean a

common source of funding.

I was myself startled to recognize

more than a dozen common operational

modalities between two outwardly

dissimilar events: the JFK assassination

and 9/11. Among the most striking are

the following:

1. the almost instant identification

of what I call the “designated

culprits,” Lee Harvey Oswald

and the nineteen alleged

hijackers;

2. the hidden intelligence

backgrounds of the designated

culprits; and

3. the protection by the FBI and

CIA of the designated culprits in

the weeks before the events, to

ensure that they would not be

placed under surveillance or

taken off the streets. 7

I touched on this in chapter 9, at some

length in my 2008 book The War

Conspiracy, and also elsewhere. But I

will repeat a passage here about the last

item—protection. In chapter 9, I refer to

the CIA’s culpable withholding

from the FBI, in . . . October

[1963], information that Oswald

had allegedly met in Mexico City

with a suspected KGB agent,

Valeriy Kostikov. This . . . helped

ensure that Oswald would not be

placed under surveillance. . . .

Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000–

2001, again flagrantly withheld

crucial evidence from the FBI:

evidence that, if shared, would

have led the FBI to surveil two of

the alleged hijackers, Khalid al-

Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. This

sustained withholding of evidence

provoked an FBI agent to predict

accurately in August, 2001, [three

weeks before 9/11] that “someday

someone will die.” . . . The CIA’s

withholding of relevant evidence

before 9/11 (which it was required

by its own rules to supply) was

matched in this case by the NSA.8

On the institutional level, it is

striking that in every structural deep

event since the JFK assassination we

find some involvement of the National

Communications System (NCS), the

shadow Doomsday Project network

created to ensure continuity of

government (COG) in the event of an

atomic attack. The NCS was formally

established by a JFK Presidential

Memorandum on August 21, 1963. By

1969 at least $175 million had been

spent “to increase the survivability of

national communications resources” in a

nuclear attack. 9 In July 1979 the system

was tested under Carter, in the first

known instance of the exercise GLOBAL

SHIELD. By the Reagan era, as we shall

see in chapter 11, the NCS had

mushroomed into an $8 billion

communications and logistics program

for an alternative emergency

communications network. 10

As we saw in chapter 9, this

alternative network played a central role

in Iran-Contra, when Oliver North,

arranging for the arms shipments to Iran

that eventually cost him his job, used the

nation’s top secret COG communications

network. North’s network, known as

Flashboard, “excluded other bureaucrats

with opposing viewpoints . . . [and] had

its own special worldwide antiterrorist

computer network, . . . by which

members could communicate exclusively

with each other and their collaborators

abroad.” 11 North was also actively

developing plans, which originated with

Hoover, for emergency detentions on a

large scale. 12

So, before him, was James McCord,

famous for having participated in the

burglary that precipitated the 1972

Watergate crisis. As we saw in chapter

9, McCord was a member of a small Air

Force Reserve unit assigned “to draw up

lists of radicals and to develop

contingency plans . . . in time of war.”

His unit was part of the Wartime

Information Security Program (WISP),

which had responsibility for activating

“contingency plans for imposing

censorship on the press, the mails and

all telecommunications (including

government communications) [and]

preventive detention of civilian ‘security

risks,’ who would be placed in military

‘camps.’”13

But 9/11 is the deep event in which

the COG network played a most central

role. In The Road to 9/11, I advance

reasons to believe that Cheney and

Rumsfeld, during the short period that

morning when they were inexplicably

not in their command posts, were instead

using the COG network to finalize

emergency measures, soon to include the

first ever implementation that same

morning of COG measures.14

This is the more remarkable because,

for two decades before 9/11, Rumsfeld

and Cheney had both been part of a

small secret committee planning with the

assistance of Oliver North—even in the

1990s when neither man was in the

government—for extreme COG

measures, including, allegedly,

“suspension of the Constitution. ”15 In the

Iran-Contra Hearings, North was asked

about planning to suspend the

Constitution, but the Chairman would not

allow discussion in an open session. 16

THE AMERICAN DEEP STATE

In chapter 2, I described an ambiguous

symbiosis between two different aspects

of the American deep state:

1. the Beltway agencies of the

shadow government, like the CIA

and NSA, which have been

instituted by the public state and

now overshadow it, but also

including private corporations

like Booz Allen Hamilton

(Edward Snowden’s employers)

and SAIC. Seventy percent of

intelligence budgets are now

outsourced to private companies

like Booz Allen Hamilton

(owned by the Carlyle Group)

and SAIC, the company that, as I

wrote in American War

Machine, helped get the United

States to fight in Iraq.

2. the much older power of Wall

Street, referring chiefly to the

powerful banks and law firms

located there, but also to the

cartels and other corporate

alliances established there, and

Wall Street’s think tank, the

Council on Foreign Relations.

In the 1950s Wall Street, as we saw,

was a dominating complex. It included

not just banks and other financial

institutions but also the oil majors whose

cartel arrangements were successfully

defended against the U.S. government by

the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and

Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers.

Confident that they knew better how to

run the world that those whom John

Foster Dulles called “highly insular and

nationalistic” politicians, 17 the seven

major oil companies or Seven Sisters—

five American and two British—still

operated as a cartel after World War II.

Thus when Premier Mossadeq of Iran

took steps in 1951–1952 to nationalize

the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now

BP), the oil majors were able to

organize a largely successful boycott of

Iranian oil exports. They could not

however persuade Truman to use the

CIA against Mossadeq, and had to wait

until Truman was succeeded by

Eisenhower in 1953. With the Dulles

brothers installed as heads of State and

CIA, CIA planning for a coup to restore

the shah began immediately, with

Eisenhower approving in June.

Mossadeq’s removal from power is

remembered as a CIA operation, with

the oil cartel (when mentioned at all)

playing a subservient role. However the

chronology suggests that it was CIA that

came belatedly in 1953 to assist an

earlier oil cartel operation, rather than

vice versa. In terms of the deep state, the

oil cartel or deep state initiated in 1951

a process that the American public state

only authorized two years later.

This shows how the deep state and its

overworld are, and to some degree

always have been, supranational. In the

1950s, for example, if Allen Dulles as

CIA Director wanted to fly a U-2 over

Russia on a certain day, and Eisenhower

said no, Dulles would simply turn to his

British counterparts in MI6 to get

permission from Macmillan, and Dulles

would get his way. 18

THE CIA, THE POWER OF THE

PURSE, AND OFF-THE-BOOKS

FUNDS

Conventional political analysis claims

that the CIA is limited by the

constitutional system of checks and

balances that Congress controls by its

power of the purse. Note Lauren Fox’s

important caveat: “Congress maintains

the power of the purse, which gives

lawmakers the ability to defund specific

programs the federal agency holds dear,

but the CIA maintains the documents and

information Congress needs to see to

effectively conduct oversight in the first

place.” 19

Fox, however, ignores the fact that,

since its outset, the CIA has always had

access to large amounts of off-the-books

or offshore funds to support its

activities. Indeed, the power of the purse

has usually worked in an opposite sense,

since those in control of deep-state,

offshore funds supporting CIA activities

have for decades also funded members

of Congress and of the executive—not

vice versa. The last six decades provide

a coherent and continuous picture of

historical direction being provided by

this deep-state power of the purse,

trumping and sometimes reversing the

conventional state.

Let us resume describing some of the

CIA’s sources of offshore and off-the-

books funding for its activities. The

CIA’s first covert operation was the use

of “over $10 million in captured Axis

funds to influence the [Italian] election

[of 1948].” 20 (The fundraising had begun

at the wealthy Brook Club in New York;

but Allen Dulles, then still a Wall Street

lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at

first had preferred a private funding

campaign, to authorize the operation

through the National Security Council

and the CIA. )21

Dulles, together with George Kennan

and James Forrestal, then found a way to

provide a legal source for off-the-books

CIA funding, under the cover of the

Marshall Plan. The three men “helped

devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall

Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to

conduct political warfare. It let the

agency skim millions of dollars from the

plan.” 22

At the time of the Marshall Plan slush

fund in Europe, the CIA also took steps

which resulted in drug money to support

anticommunist armies in the Far East. In

my book American War Machine I tell

how the CIA, using former Office of

Strategic Services (OSS) operative Paul

Helliwell, created two proprietary firms

as infrastructure for a Kuomintang

(KMT) army in Burma, an army which

quickly became involved in managing

and developing the opium traffic there.

The two firms were Sea Supply Inc. in

Bangkok and CAT Inc. (later Air

America) in Taiwan. Significantly, the

CIA split ownership of CAT Inc.’s plane

with KMT bankers in Taiwan. This

allowed the CIA to deny responsibility

for the flights when CAT planes, having

delivered arms from Sea Supply to the

opium-growing army, then returned to

Taiwan with opium for the KMT. Even

after the CIA officially severed its

connection to the KMT Army in 1953,

its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc.

supplied arms for a CIA-led

paramilitary force, PARU, that also was

financed, at least in part, by the drug

traffic. 23

Profits from Thailand filtered back, in

part through the same Paul Helliwell, as

donations to members from both parties

in Congress. Thai dictator Phao

Sriyanon, a drug trafficker who was then

alleged to be the richest man in the

world,

hired lawyer Paul Helliwell . . . as

a lobbyist in addition to [former

OSS chief William] Donovan [who

in 1953–1955 was U.S.

Ambassador to Thailand]. Donovan

and Helliwell divided the Congress

between them, with Donovan

assuming responsibility for the

Republicans and Helliwell taking

the Democrats.24

The most dramatic use of off-the-

books drug profits to finance foreign

armies was seen in the 1960s CIA-led

campaign in Laos. There the CIA

supplied airstrips and planes to support

a 30,000-man drug-financed Hmong

army. At one point Laotian CIA station

chief Theodore Shackley even called in

CIA aircraft in support of a ground battle

to seize a huge opium caravan on behalf

of the larger Royal Laotian Army. 25

FUNDS FROM ARMS CONTRACTS

In the 1960s and especially the 1970s,

America began to import more and more

oil from the Middle East. But the

negative effect on the U.S. balance of

payments was offset by increasing arms

and aviation sales to Iran and Saudi

Arabia. Contracts with companies like

Northrop and especially Lockheed (the

builder of the CIA’s U-2) included

kickbacks to arms brokers, like Kodama

Yoshio in Japan and Adnan Khashoggi in

Saudi Arabia, who were also important

CIA agents. Lockheed alone later

admitted to the Church Committee that it

had provided $106 million in

commissions to Khashoggi between

1970 and 1975, more than ten times what

it had paid to the next most important

connection, Kodama.26

These funds were then used by

Khashoggi and Kodama to purchase pro-

Western influence. But Khashoggi,

advised by a team of ex-CIA Americans

like Miles Copeland and Edward Moss,

distributed cash, and sometimes

provided women, not just in Saudi

Arabia, but also around the world—

including cash to President Nixon in the

United States. 27

Khashoggi in effect served as a

“cutout,” or representative, in a number

of operations forbidden to the CIA and

the companies he worked with.

Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously

absent from the list of military

contractors who contributed illicitly to

Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But

there was no law prohibiting, and

nothing else to prevent their official

representative, Khashoggi, from cycling

$200 million through the bank of Nixon’s

friend Bebe Rebozo. 28

MOSS, KHASHOGGI, THE SAFARI

CLUB, AND THE INTERNATIONAL

OVERWORLD

As we saw in chapter 2, the power

exerted by Khashoggi was not limited to

his access to funds and women. By the

1970s, Khashoggi and his aide Edward

Moss owned the elite Safari Club in

Kenya.29 The exclusive club became the

first venue for another and more

important Safari Club: an alliance

between Saudi and other intelligence

agencies that wished to compensate for

the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of

President Carter’s election and Senator

Church’s post-Watergate reforms. 30

Khashoggi’s activities involving

corruption by sex and money, after they

too were somewhat curtailed by Senator

Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear

to have been taken up quickly by the

Bank of Credit and Commerce

International (BCCI), a Muslim-owned

bank where Khashoggi’s friend and

business partner Kamal Adham, the

Saudi intelligence chief and a principal

Safari Club member, was a part-owner.31

In the 1980s BCCI, and its allied

shipping empire owned by the Pakistani

Gokal brothers, supplied financing and

infrastructure for the CIA’s (and Saudi

Arabia’s) biggest covert operation of the

decade, support for the Afghan

mujahedin.

To quote from a British book

excerpted in the Senate BCCI Report,

BCCI’s role in assisting the U.S. to

fund the Mujaheddin guerrillas

fighting the Soviet occupation is

drawing increasing attention. The

bank’s role began to surface in the

mid-1980’s when stories appeared

in the New York Times showing

how American security operatives

used Oman as a staging post for

Arab funds. This was confirmed in

the Wall Street Journal of 23

October 1991 which quotes a

member of the late General Zia’s

cabinet as saying “It was Arab

money that was pouring through

BCCI.” The Bank which carried the

money on from Oman to Pakistan

and into Afghanistan was National

Bank of Oman, where BCCI owned

29%.32

It is reported in two books that the

BCCI money flow through the Bank of

Oman was handled in part by the

international financier Bruce Rappaport,

who for a decade, like Khashoggi, kept a

former CIA officer on his staff. 33

Rappaport’s partner in his Inter

Maritime Bank, which interlocked with

BCCI, was E. P. Barry, who earlier had

been a partner in the Florida money-

laundering banks of Paul Helliwell. 34

SECRET CLAUSES IN ARMS

CONTRACTS

The activities of the Safari Club were

exposed after Iranians in 1979 seized the

records of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

But BCCI support for covert CIA

operations, including Iran-Contra,

continued until BCCI’s criminality was

exposed at the end of the 1980s.

Meanwhile, with the election of

Ronald Reagan in 1980, Washington

resumed off-budget funding for CIA

covert operations under cover of arms

contracts to Saudi Arabia. But after

Congress in 1977 made it illegal for

American corporations to make

payments to foreign officials, this was

no longer achieved through kickbacks to

CIA assets like Khashoggi. Instead

arrangements were made for payments to

be returned, through either informal

agreements or secret codicils in the

contracts, by the Saudi Arabian

government itself. Two successive arms

deals, the airborne warning and control

system (AWACS) deal of 1981 and the

al-Yamamah deal of 1985, considerably

escalated the amount of available slush

funds.

1. The AWACS Deal

In 1981 Vice President Bush and

Saudi Prince Bandar, working together,

won congressional approval for massive

new arms sales of AWACS aircraft to

Saudi Arabia. In the $5.5 billion

package, only 10 percent covered the

cost of the planes. Most of the rest was

an initial installment on what was

ultimately a $200 billion program for

military infrastructure through Saudi

Arabia. 35

It also supplied a slush fund for secret

ops, one administered for over a decade

in Washington by Prince Bandar, after he

became the Saudi Ambassador (and a

close friend of the Bush family,

nicknamed “Bandar Bush”). In the words

of researcher Scott Armstrong, the fund

was

“the ultimate government-off-the-

books.” . . . Not long after the

AWACS sale was approved, Prince

Bandar thanked the Reagan

administration for the vote by

honoring a request by William

Casey that he deposit $10 million

in a Vatican bank to be used in a

campaign against the Italian

Communist Party. Implicit in the

AWACS deal was a pledge by the

Saudis to fund anticommunist

guerrilla groups in Afghanistan,

Angola, and elsewhere that were

supported by the Reagan

Administration.36

The Vatican contribution, for the

CIA’s longtime clients, the Christian

Democratic Party, of course continued a

CIA tradition dating back to 1948.

2. The al-Yamamah Deal

After a second proposed major U.S.

arms sale met enhanced opposition in

Congress in 1985 from the Israeli lobby,

Saudi Arabia negotiated instead a

multibillion-pound long-term contract

with the United Kingdom—the so-called

“al-Yamamah deal.” Once again

overpayments for the purchased

weapons were siphoned off into a huge

slush fund for political payoffs,

including “hundreds of millions of

pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to

the United States, Prince Bandar bin

Sultan.” 37 According to Robert Lacey,

the payments to Prince Bandar were said

to total one billion pounds over more

than a decade. 38 The money went through

a Saudi Embassy account in the Riggs

Bank, Washington. According to Trento,

the Embassy’s use of the Riggs Bank

dated back to the mid-1970s, when, in

his words, “the Saudi royal family had

taken over intelligence financing for the

United States.” 39 More accurately, the

financing was not “for the United

States,” but for the supranational deep

state, involving both Saudi and

American officials.

OFFSHORE FUNDING AND THE

CONTINUITY OF DEEP EVENTS

This leads me to the most original and

important thing I have to say. I believe

that these secret funds from BCCI and

Saudi arms deals—first Khashoggi’s

from Lockheed, and then Prince

Bandar’s from the AWACS and al-

Yamamah deals—are the common

denominator in all of the major structural

deep events (SDEs) that have afflicted

America since the supranational Safari

Club was created in 1976.

I am referring specifically to

1. the covert U.S. intervention in

Afghanistan (which started about

1978 as a Safari Club

intervention, more than a year

before the Russian invasion):

“Each year the Saudis sent their

part of the money to their

embassy in Washington. The

Saudi ambassador in

Washington, Bandar bin Sultan,

then transferred the funds to a

Swiss bank account controlled

by the CIA.” 40 The bank in

question may have been BCCI,

which “handled transfers of

funds [for the mujahedin] through

its Pakistani branches and acted

as a collection agency for war

matériel and even for the

mujahedin’s pack animals.” 41

2. the 1980 October Surprise,

which together with an increase

in Saudi oil prices and

artificially induced shortages

helped assure Reagan’s election

and thus give us the Reagan

Revolution.

3. Iran-Contra in 1984–1986, and

4. last but by no means least—9/11.

That is why I believe it is important to

analyze these events at the level of the

supranational deep state.

Let me just cite a few details.

1. The 1980 October Surprise

According to Robert Parry, Alexandre

de Marenches (the principal founder of

the Safari Club) arranged for William

Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to

meet with representatives of the Iranian

and Israeli governments in Paris in July

and October 1980, where Casey

promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S.

armaments, in exchange for a delay in

the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran

until Reagan was in power. Parry

suspects a role of BCCI in both the

funding of payoffs for the 1980 secret

deal and the subsequent flow of Israeli

armaments to Iran. 42 In addition, John

Cooley considers de Marenches to be

“the Safari Club player who probably

did most to draw the US into the Afghan

adventure.” 43

2. The Iran-Contra Scandal

(Including the Funding of the

Contras, the Illegal Iran Arms Sales,

and Support for the Afghan

Mujahedin)

There were two stages to Iran-Contra.

For twelve months in 1984–1985, after

meeting with Casey, King Fahd of Saudi

Arabia, in the spirit of the AWACS deal,

supported the Nicaraguan Contras via

Prince Bandar through a BCCI bank

account in Miami.44 But in April 1985,

after the second proposed arms sale fell

through, National Security Advisor

Robert McFarlane, fearing AIPAC

opposition, terminated this direct Saudi

role. Then Khashoggi, with the help of

Miles Copeland, devised a new scheme

in which Iranian arms sales involving

Israel would fund the contras. The first

stage of Iran-Contra was handled by

Prince Bandar through a BCCI account

in Miami; the second channel was

handled by Khashoggi through a different

BCCI account in Monte Carlo.

The Kerry-Brown Senate Report on

BCCI also transmitted allegations from a

Palestinian-American businessman, Sam

Bamieh, that Khashoggi’s funds from

BCCI for arms sales to Iran came

ultimately from King Fahd of Saudi

Arabia, who “was hoping to gain favor

with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.” 45

The Iran-Contra investigation

revealed that BCCI operations, deriving

from Khashoggi’s before them, were

marked by the ability to deal behind the

scenes with both the Arab countries and

also Israel. 46

Khashoggi and BCCI together,

moreover, with the assistance of

Khashoggi’s case agent Miles Copeland,

initiated what we remember as the Iran-

Contra arms scandal. According to

Theodore Draper, in his exhaustive study

of Iran-Contra, “A chance encounter

between Adnan Khashoggi and

Manucher Ghorbanifar effectively set the

Iran affair in motion. As Khashoggi told

the story to the French writer Michel

Clerc, the meeting took place in

Hamburg in April 1985. ”47

Draper notes furthermore that the deal

soon involved three Israelis, Yaacov

Nimrodi, Adolph (Al) Schwimmer, and

David Kimche, for whom “Khashoggi

was no newcomer.” Together with

Israeli Defense Minister Sharon, the

three had “met with President Nimeiri of

the Sudan [in May 1982] at a safari

resort in Kenya owned by Khashoggi”—

that is, the Safari Club. 48 But

Khashoggi’s connection to Schwimmer

went even further back: the two men had

been introduced in Las Vegas by

Schwimmer’s partner in gunrunning to

the infant state of Israel, Hank

Greenspun. 49

Draper’s account of the Hamburg

meeting fails however to note that Miles

Copeland and his assistant Larry Kolb

were (according to their own accounts)

also present. Copeland writes that he

and Khashoggi met with the Iranian arms

dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, after

which Copeland wrote up an Iran arms

sales proposal. Copeland claims this

had nothing to do with either Contras or

hostages, but was intended as a “second

paper to McFarlane . . . as an appendix

to the ‘Marshall Plan’ paper. So far as

[Khashoggi] was personally concerned,

he was attracted to [Ghorbanifar’s]

proposal only to the extent to which it

could be tied into plans for overall

Middle Eastern peace.” 50

Copeland’s aide Larry Kolb agrees

that Copeland, Khashoggi, Schwimmer,

and he were all present with

Ghorbanifar and others at the 1985

Hamburg meeting. There, according to

Kolb, Khashoggi

said that in recent meetings in

Washington, he’d been told that if

the American government was

going to participate in this venture .

. . it would have to be structured in

such a way that there would be no

trail of arms . . . leading from the

United States to Iran. So, Adnan

said . . . it had been arranged that

the actual goods could come from

the Israeli government . . . and be

transported directly from Israel to

Iran. . . .

But arms trading and spare parts

and hostages took up very little of

the conversation that day. Most of

the time was spent thinking, and

talking, . . . about a strategic

opening between the United States

and Iran—as a means of blunting

Soviet attempts to dominate the

world’s third largest oil producer. 51

Later he and Copeland wrote up the

meeting in a paper “titled ‘Adnan

Khashoggi’s Views on the Possibilities

of a Strategic Initiative Between the

United States and Iran,’” that “wasn’t

about an arms deal. ”52 They gave it to

Khashoggi to present to McFarlane. “We

had no idea then that . . . months later a

wild-ass Marine colonel would force

the whole thing out into the open by

stealing Adnan [Khashoggi]’s fifteen-

million-dollar bridge loan which funded

the sale and sending the money to the

Nicaraguan Contra rebels.” 53

The Congressional investigation of the

Iran-Contra Affair agrees with Kolb that

“Khashoggi suggested that Ghorbanifar

try to develop access to the United

States and its arms through Israel. ”54

And the Senate investigation of BCCI

also reports:

Both Saudi businessman Adnan

Khashoggi and Iranian arms

merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar

were central agents of the United

States in selling arms to Iran in the

Iran/Contra affair. According to the

official chronologies of the

Iran/Contra committees, Khashoggi

acted as the middleman for five

Iranian arms deals for the United

States, financing a number of them

through BCCI. . . . According to his

own and other published accounts,

he provided some $30 million in

loans altogether. . . . Both

Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar banked

at BCCI’s offices in Monte Carlo,

and for both, BCCI’s services were

essential.55

Both Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi have

been presented as mavericks interested

in arms sales for their own individual

profit. However the participation of

Copeland suggests that, once again, what

Copeland called “friends in Langley”

may have been interested in engaging

them in an operation to which both the

Secretaries of State and of Defense were

resolutely opposed.

3. 9/11

As noted in chapter 6, when the two

previously noted alleged hijackers or

designated culprits, al-Mihdhar and al-

Hazmi, arrived in San Diego, a Saudi

named Omar al-Bayoumi both housed

them and opened bank accounts for them.

Soon afterward Bayoumi’s wife began

receiving monthly payments from a

Riggs bank account held by Prince

Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa bint

Faisal.56 In addition, Princess Haifa sent

regular monthly payments of between

$2,000 and $3,500 to the wife of

Bayoumi’s close associate Osama

Basnan. In all, “between 1998 and 2002,

up to US $73,000 in cashier cheques

was funneled by Bandar’s wife Haifa . .

. —to two Californian families known to

have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-

Hazmi.” 57

Although these sums in themselves are

not large, they may have been part of a

more general pattern of support for

alleged 9/11 hijackers. 58 Author Paul

Sperry claims there was possible Saudi

government contact with at least four

other of the alleged hijackers in Virginia

and Florida. For example, “9/11

ringleader Mohamed Atta and other

hijackers visited a home owned by Esam

Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the

nephew of King Fahd. ”59

But it is wrong to think of Bandar’s

accounts in the Riggs Bank as uniquely

Saudi. Recall that Prince Bandar’s

payments were said to have included “a

suitcase containing more than $10

million” that went to a Vatican priest for

the CIA’s longtime clients, the Christian

Democratic Party.60 And some, as we

have just seen, involved former CIA

officer Miles Copeland. In 2004, the

Wall Street Journal reported that the

Riggs Bank, which was by then under

investigation by the Justice Department

for money laundering, “has had a

longstanding relationship with the

Central Intelligence Agency, according

to people familiar with Riggs operations

and U.S. government officials.” 61

Meanwhile President Obiang of

Equatorial Guinea “siphoned millions

from his country’s treasury with the help

of Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. ”62

For this a Riggs account executive,

Simon Kareri, was indicted. But Obiang

enjoyed State Department approval for a

contract with the private U.S. military

firm M.P.R.I., with an eye to defending

offshore oil platforms owned by

ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess. 63

Behind the CIA relationship with the

Riggs Bank was the role played by the

bank’s overseas clients in protecting

U.S. investments, and particularly (in the

case of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial

Guinea), the nation’s biggest oil

companies.

CONCLUSION: THE AMERICAN

DEEP STATE TODAY

The issue of Saudi Embassy funding of

at least two (and possibly more) of the

alleged 9/11 hijackers (or designated

culprits) is so sensitive that, in the 800-

page Joint Congressional Inquiry Report

on 9/11, the entire twenty-eight-page

section dealing with Saudi financing was

very heavily redacted. 64 A similar

censorship occurred with the 9/11

Commission Report: According to

Philip Shenon, several staff members

felt strongly that they had demonstrated a

close Saudi government connection to

the hijackers, but a senior staff member

purged almost all of the most serious

allegations against the Saudi

government, and moved the explosive

supporting evidence to the report’s

footnotes. 65

It is probable that this cover-up was

not designed for the protection of the

Saudi government itself, so much as of

the supranational deep state connection

described in this chapter, a milieu where

American, Saudi, and Israeli elements

all interact covertly. One sign of this is

that Prince Bandar himself, sensitive to

the anti-Saudi sentiment that 9/11

caused, has been among those calling for

the U.S. government to make the

redacted twenty-eight pages public. 66 (I

attach great importance to Bandar’s

demand: I suspect that the 28 pages may,

as he knows, indicate a U.S.-sanctioned

Saudi joint operation on 9/11 that is

clearly different from the piggy-backed

plot to bring down the WTC towers and

cause thousands of deaths.)

This limited exposure of the nefarious

use of funds generated from Saudi arms

contracts has not moved Congress to

limit these contracts. On the contrary, in

2010, the second year of the Obama

administration,

The Defense Department . . .

notified Congress that it wants to

sell $60 billion worth of advanced

aircraft and weapons to Saudi

Arabia. The proposed sale, which

includes helicopters, fighter jets,

radar equipment and satellite-

guided bombs, would be the largest

arms deal to another country in U.S.

history if the sale goes through and

all purchases are made.67

The sale did go through; only a few

congressmen objected. 68

It is clear that for some decades the

bottom-upward processes of democracy

have been increasingly supplanted by the

top-downward processes of the deep

state. But the deeper strain in history, I

would like to believe, is in the opposite

direction: the ultimate diminution of

violent top-down forces by the bottom-

up forces of an increasingly integrated

civil society.69

Ultimately, however, whether we see

a correction or not will depend, at least

in part, on how much people care.

POSTSCRIPT

This chapter attempts to correct a major

deficiency of my last book, American

War Machine, in which I chronicled the

rise of the military-industrial complex

without reference to Saudi Arabia. In

that book I did not, as in earlier books,

refer to the underlying triangle of U.S.

purchases of Arab oil, U.S. sales of

weapons to Arab countries, and Arab

investments in the United States,

particularly in Texas. (Cf. The Road to

9/11, pp. 175–79.)

The growing relevance to the

American deep state of Saudi wealth, as

just outlined in this chapter, may help

explain a little-noticed paradox of

American history: how the once

marginal anticommunism of Goldwater

Republicans, Texas oilmen, the World

Anti-Communist League, and the John

Birch Society displaced the once

dominant coexistence politics of

Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

We should not forget that in 1969–70

South Yemen established close relations

with the Soviet bloc, turning South

Yemen for a while into the major Soviet

staging point for infiltration into the

region. This was a source of major

anxiety for the Saudi monarchy, and, I

can only guess, of big oil as well.

In The Road to 9/11 (pp. 52–61), I

analyzed the pivotal deep events of the

1970s that ended détente—the

Halloween Massacre and the Team B

report—in the context of those pressing

for an increase in the U.S. defense

budget. The role in these events of

oilman George H. W. Bush (who had

once, with a CIA veteran, maintained an

offshore drilling platform in the Persian

Gulf) now makes me suspect that big oil

may have been a factor as well.

CHAPTER 11

America’s

Unchecked

Security State

The Continuity of

COG Planning, 1936–

2001

Dear Bess. . . . Hoover would give

his right eye to take over [from the

Secret Service] and all

Congressmen and Senators are

afraid of him. I’m not and he knows

it. If I can prevent [it] there’ll be no

NKVD or Gestapo in this country.

Edgar Hoover’s organization

would make a good start toward a

citizen spy system. Not for me.

—President Harry S Truman, 19471

J. EDGAR HOOVER, JOSEPH

MCCARTHY, AND OUR

DOOMSDAY MANIA

BOTH SCHOLARS AND ORDINARY

AMERICANS NOW LOOK BACK WITH RELIEF

on McCarthyism and “the anticommunist

hysteria of the early 1950s”2 in the belief

that we have outgrown such paranoia

and disregard for law and human rights.

But the personal excesses of McCarthy

were surface manifestations of deeper

illegal institutional procedures, mostly

initiated by J. Edgar Hoover, which

never really ended, and indeed have

since proliferated to the point of being

omnipresent. Hoover targeted leftists;

the NSA targets everybody.

This has been especially true since the

implementation of Continuity of

Government (COG) measures on 9/11,

measures that for two decades had been

refined in the Pentagon’s “Doomsday

Project,” by an extragovernmental (and

arguably unconstitutional) secret

committee including Donald Rumsfeld

and Dick Cheney.3 As Patrick Thronson

has observed in a law journal article,

“continuity-of-government procedures . .

. confer powers on the President—such

as the unilateral suspension of habeas

corpus—that appear fundamentally

opposed to the American constitutional

order.” 4 Yet some of these measures

were then hastily made law in the USA

PATRIOT Act of 2001, in support of the

so-called “war on terror. ”5

In The 9/11 Commission Report we

read, “Congress responded, in the

immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the

Patriot Act.” 6 But the Patriot Act, which

Congress (nudged by false-flag anthrax

attacks) passed without time to read it,

did not begin as a response to 9/11. Like

the infamous Tonkin Gulf Resolution of

1964, with which it deserves to be

compared, its contents had been

developed well before the event to

which it “responded”—in this case

slowly and patiently over decades,

starting in the 1950s. In other words, it

was the product of an almost continuous

level of secret emergency planning,

going back to J. Edgar Hoover, which I

shall show to have underlain both 9/11

and Iran-Contra, and perhaps even

Watergate.

As Len Colodny and Tom Schachtman

have noted,

Among the most striking features of

the PATRIOT Act was its

resurrection of the long-discredited

Huston Plan of 1970. The new bill

permitted the FBI, CIA, and other

agencies to engage in activities that

had so horrified Attorney General

John Mitchell that he convinced

Nixon to rescind the plan four days

after it was promulgated. Mitchell

considered unconstitutional the

Huston Plan’s provisions for

warrantless wiretapping, opening

of mail, “black-bag” burglaries by

U.S. agents, surveillance of various

sorts, and preventive detention. 7

And the “threat” which the Huston

Plan had addressed (in the same year as

the shootings of students at Kent State

and Jackson State) was an internal one:

the danger that antiwar and other popular

movements might force a lasting foreign

policy change on Nixon and his

successors: a change preventing

America from waging future aggressive

wars. (At one stage the Huston Plan

envisaged the creation of camps in

Western states for the detention of

antiwar protesters.)

Two of the provisions that Mitchell

found unconstitutional—warrantless

surveillance and preventive detention—

can be found not just in the Patriot Act of

2001, the COG provisions of the 1980s,

and the Huston Plan of 1970, but still

further back—in the review of

emergency detention plans ordered by

LBJ after the March 1967 March on the

Pentagon, 8 and in the McCarran Internal

Security Act of 1950 (eventually

overturned). 9 Ultimately the plans derive

from secret powers that Hoover illegally

arrogated to himself, despite explicit

prohibitions from different attorneys

general.10

At this point one can narrate two

different histories of these secret or deep

powers. On the public level, the

emergency detention provisions of the

Mc-Carran Act were never used; and

they were repealed in 1971, as Hoover’s

reputation finally withered and Congress

became more responsive to antiwar

dissenters. 11 But on a deeper level,

Congress had achieved far less than they

believed.

“Attorney General John Mitchell

approved FBI Director Hoover’s

recommendation that the FBI continue

investigating individuals ‘who pose a

threat to the internal security of the

country’ for inclusion in an

‘administrative’ index for anticipated

future detention.” 12 In other words, the

only practical consequence of the

congressional repeal was that Hoover’s

existing Security Index for the detention

of individuals now had a new name. 13

Also on a deeper level, the planning

for detention continued, almost without a

break, until it was finally put into effect

on 9/11. In like fashion other illicit

powers initiated by Hoover were either

developed or implemented, first by the

Nixon White House and later under

Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey

and Oliver North. On the public level,

again, thanks largely to the congressional

investigations of Watergate and Iran-

Contra, these proliferations were

checked. But I hope to show that, while

both Nixon and North were ousted, the

plans for illegality they encouraged

continued, almost continuously, on a

deeper level.

This chapter argues that these deep

powers are illegal, unchecked, and for

the most part unwarranted. Some of them

may indeed be needed, because

America’s dangers both at home and

abroad today do in fact call for unusual

and perhaps unprecedented responses.

The 2013 horror of the Boston Marathon

bombings makes this all too clear. But

the Boston tragedy was not solved by the

grandiose excess of locking down an

entire city, but by legal and public

methods of police work. The case

illustrates one main thesis of this

chapter: that the deep powers assembled

by the unchecked American security

state are vastly in excess of what is

needed, to the point of being

counterproductive.

Deep powers have not been designed

to meet real threats today, but are the

result of past unchecked bureaucratic

proliferation since the 1950s, mostly

after the real Soviet threat to U.S.

security had passed.14 They were refined

with sustained energy by COG planners

in the 1980s, when the “Soviet threat”

had become a phantom resurrected only

in the propaganda mills of William

Casey’s CIA.

The key to the renewed planning was

the specter of Soviet-inspired terrorism.

The notion that the Soviet Union was

behind global terrorism was a successful

campaign issue in the 1980 election.15 It

was then forced on CIA professional

analysts in 1981 by CIA Director Casey,

citing a single book, Claire Sterling’s

The Terror Network, which is now

almost universally discredited. 16 Yet the

hysterical CIA estimates at that time of

the Soviet threat soon became

permanently embodied in the hysterical

provisions of the Doomsday Project,

especially after their implementation in

2001. A thesis of this book is that these

unchecked measures, far from being a

response to 9/11 and al-Qaeda, actually

contributed (perhaps blindly), to the

events that now are used to justify them.

And when we compare the 1950s to

what is happening in 2014, we must

recognize that America in 2014 is caught

up in a new hysteria, or collective

insanity, which is far more over-

reaching and dangerous to personal

liberty than the hysteria of either Joe

McCarthy or William Casey.

Warrantless surveillance and detention,

in particular, exist today on a scale that

would have been inconceivable then.

And, as before, on a scale vastly beyond

both the law and what is actually needed

for our security.

As in the case of McCarthyism, the

people are not the original sources of

this hysteria, but receptacles and

responders to a hysteria generated by

their leaders. There were many reasons

for this hysteria in the Cold War, some of

them not at all irrational. But central to

the origin of Hoover’s illegal un-

checked powers was his

autointoxication with his own power.

Lord Acton wrote: “Power tends to

corrupt, and absolute power corrupts

absolutely. ”17 Even in the absence of

absolute power, we can still say,

“Power tends to intoxicate, and

unchecked power intoxicates

irrevocably.” Since World War II we

have seen the conspicuous examples of

Truman’s Secretary of Defense James

Forrestal and later senior CIA officer

Frank Wisner: Both these men went

insane, had to be removed from office,

and subsequently committed suicide.

Less dramatic were the cases of

McCarthy and President Nixon: Neither

man was ever certified insane, but both

lost power rapidly when they succumbed

to the follies of their manic or paranoid

power over-reaches. 18

I will argue that the same model of

manic or paranoid self-destruction

applies, less conspicuously, to other

figures, less important in public history

than in this present narrative of

unchecked power—men such as

Assistant FBI Director “Crazy” Bill

Sullivan, CIA counterintelligence chief

James Angleton, Oliver North, and most

recently Vice President Cheney and

Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald

Rumsfeld. 19 All these men abused their

assigned powers irrationally, to such an

extent that their excesses resulted in all

of them but Cheney being driven from

office. 20 (An important, instructive, but

more debatable example is that of

Hoover himself. Hoover survived for

decades as long as he was restrained in

his exercise of power, but both his sanity

and his invulnerability were visibly

weakening before his death.)

It is a tribute to the long-term sanity

and homeostasis of the American

political system that all these men—the

central figures in this chapter—lost clout

to a greater or lesser degree after this

inevitable autointoxication from

unchecked power. Unfortunately the

process I am describing is not a wholly

self-correcting one. All of these men

(except Cheney and Hoover) were

ousted. But the hysteria they had

generated not only survived, but in every

case became more securely grounded in

excessive secret institutional

arrangements: the modern unchecked

security state. 21

What shall we call the new hysteria? I

was once tempted to call it Cheneyism,

after the man who with Donald Rumsfeld

planned for almost twenty years for the

resurrection of these unconstitutional

practices before implementing them on

the morning of 9/11. But the new hysteria

has outlasted Cheney, and is by now far

more institutionalized than the eccentric

vagaries of either McCarthy or even his

puppet master, J. Edgar Hoover. But

even at this deeper structural level, we

see a recurring cycle of manic

institutional repressiveness (notably

under Richard Nixon) followed by

efforts of saner retrenchment (the post-

Watergate reforms of the late 1970s

instituted chiefly by the Senate Church

Committee). Since 9/11 the institutional

proliferation of secret, self-defeating

repressive powers has become manic

again, much as our economy in the same

decade has passed through recurring

periods of manic exuberant bubbles,

followed by recession. 22

I call our new hysteria the “Doomsday

Mania,” after the Doomsday Project that

(as we saw in chapter 3) was the

Pentagon’s name for the twenty years of

COG planning to suspend parts of the

U.S. Constitution. The Doomsday

Project was escalated under Reagan in

1982 as emergency planning “to keep the

White House and Pentagon running

during and after a nuclear war or some

other major crisis. ”23 Expanded by the

end of the Reagan presidency to cover

planning for any emergency, the planning

was entrusted to a secret committee

including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick

Cheney, even when both men were no

longer in the U.S. government.24

Composed mostly of fellow

Republicans, even under Clinton, at least

one section of the committee became

what a former Pentagon official

described as in effect “a secret

government-in-waiting.” 25

From its outset in 1982 to its

implantation on 9/11, the Doomsday

Project was indeed apocalyptic in its

baseless determination that America

faced a terrorist crisis so dire that the

Constitution might need to be partly set

aside. A decade before 9/11, its far-

reaching arrangements were expanding

the groundwork of Oliver North, to

create what CNN in 1991 already

described as a “shadow government . . .

about which you know nothing.” 26

Much less noticed was the revival of

warrantless arrest and deportation

practices unknown in America since the

Palmer Raids of 1919:

Under Cheney’s direction, the

United States moved to restore the

powers of secret intelligence that

had flourished for fifty-five years

under J. Edgar Hoover. . . . In top

secret orders, they revived the

techniques of surveillance that the

FBI had used in the war on

communism.

The FBI arrested more than

1,200 people within eight weeks of

the attacks. Most were foreigners

and Muslims. None, so far as could

be determined, was a member of

al-Qaeda. Some were beaten and

abused. 27 . . . Hundreds were

imprisoned for months under a

“hold until cleared” policy

imposed on the FBI by Attorney

General Ashcroft. . . . Ashcroft also

ordered the indefinite detention of

at least seventy people, including at

least twenty American citizens. . . .

Thirty were never brought before a

tribunal. Four were eventually

convicted of supporting terrorism. 28

The post-9/11 Doomsday Mania has

also been marked by the widespread use

of torture in interrogations, and also by

targeted assassinations, even of U.S.

citizens. As we shall see, such practices

were also used in the Hoover era, but

sparingly. President Obama has ordered

an end to torture practices, but has

radically increased the use of drones for

targeted assassinations—a tactic once

explicitly forbidden by presidential

order.

In a sense drone killings today are not

secret, but the Obama administration

consistently lies about the program,

leading Glenn Greenwald to comment,

“People who exercise power inevitably

abuse it when they can wield it in secret.

They inevitably lie about what they do

when they can act in the dark.” 29 Even

before Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake

revealed that the NSA is engaged in a

domestic data-mining program that is so

extensive, former NSA insiders fear it

could help “create an Orwellian state.” 30

Americans are left with a vague sense

that their country has changed, but are

mostly (as in the era of McCarthyism)

either too caught up in the Doomsday

Mania to recognize its paranoia, or else

frozen in a state of semitraumatized

denial (much like the “good Germans” of

the 1930s). 31 The minority who oppose

the present mania mostly feel either

powerless, or uncertain as to what first

step must be taken to end it. 32

Meanwhile we are living under a

government that in certain respects is

increasingly lawless and out of control.

It is true that the government is facing

new challenges of a type never

experienced before, and that some

emergency measures are justifiable in

this crisis. But clearly the breakdown of

legal restraints is counterproductive in

the badly named “war on terror.” To

give just one example, the number of al-

Qaedist warriors in the world has

increased, as Tim Weiner notes, after

“the images from Abu Ghraib became a

recruiting poster across the world.” 33

This example of counterproductive,

unchecked illegality is not just an

anecdote, but only one example of how

the so-called “war on terror” has done

more to generate and perpetuate terror

than to contain it.34

Weiner believes that the Doomsday

Mania has in some respects abated since

the 2001 G. W. Bush administration,

because the FBI under Obama has now

adopted a 460-page set of guidelines

calling for “rigorous obedience to

constitutional principles and

guarantees.” 35 But David Shipler,

another Times reporter, has dismissed

recent headlines about the breaking of

“lethal terrorist plots,” saying that they

were in fact “dramas . . . facilitated by

the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and

informers posed as terrorists offering a

dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a

disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary

training. ”36

Meanwhile there are no comparable

moves toward curbing the NSA’s

controversial data-mining of Americans,

or the most illegal and

counterproductive programs of all—the

Special Forces killer squads and drone

attacks, which in August 2012 killed a

respected moderate Yemeni cleric, along

with the al-Qaeda representatives with

whom he was negotiating. 37

Even within government, there are

increasing numbers of people who

recognize that the secret powers of other

agencies also need to be similarly

brought back under legal control. But

many congressional attempts to address

the problem of state illegality can be

considered to have actually aggravated it

by regularizing illegal practices in a

statute. A prominent example was the

National Defense Authorization Act

(NDAA) of 2012, which authorized the

President, at his urging, to detain U.S.

citizens indefinitely.38

What is needed instead is a

redirection of the U.S. government away

from mania and illegality, such as that

which ended the McCarthy era. But to so

deal with the remaining illegalities of

the Doomsday Mania, it will be helpful

to understand their illegal origins in

steps taken by J. Edgar Hoover, at first

against explicit orders from his

superiors, the attorneys general. Though

there is never any single cure to

widespread social problems, it is high

time, I believe, for a first step toward

normalcy to be taken: to end the source

of illegal powers, namely—the state of

emergency proclaimed after 9/11. And to

take that step I agree with Madison that

we must understand how we got here:

“A people who mean to be their own

governors must arm themselves with the

power that knowledge gives.”

The purpose of this chapter is to show

how we got here: how the emergency

surveillance and detention measures

contemplated by the Doomsday Project

date back to much earlier emergency

measures that Hoover had assumed

before World War II, some of them

illegal, and some of them despite orders

from an attorney general to desist.

THE SOURCE OF HOOVER’S

ILLICIT POWER: THE FBI’S

INTELLIGENCE DIVISION

By the 1960s Hoover had become one of

the most powerful political figures in

America, thanks chiefly to his ability to

use the FBI’s notorious Division Five

(successively named the National

Defense Division, the Security Division,

and the Domestic Intelligence Division)

to intimidate, blackmail, or destroy the

careers of people who were not accused

of any crime, but who he deemed to be

dangerous.

Hoover had first exercised such

powers during the Red Scare of 1919,

when, as head of the Justice

Department’s General Intelligence

Division, he had without trial deported

hundreds of aliens (along with Emma

Goldman, who was arguably an

American citizen) in the so-called

“Palmer Raids. ”39 Hoover had acted at

times without consulting or informing

President Wilson, in collaboration with

a huge army of volunteer spies, the

American Protective League, which had

been organized by business executives. 40

Hoover did not by any means act alone;

to help put down a national steel

industry strike at this time, the U.S.

Army imposed martial law in certain

areas.41

One should acknowledge that Hoover

himself briefly played a different role,

professionalizing the Bureau of

Investigation, and accepting for about a

decade the directive given him by

Attorney General Harlan Stone on May

13, 1924: “The activities of the Bureau

are to be limited strictly to

investigations of violations of law.” 42

Although he had been a major player in

the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920, Hoover

now (for over a decade) dismantled his

General Intelligence Division,

concentrated on solving personal crimes

already committed, such as bank

robberies, and never again involved the

Bureau in anything like the Palmer

Raids. On the contrary, in 1941 he was a

leading opponent within the government

of the decision (which originated with a

local Army field commander) to round

up and intern Japanese Americans. 43

This wholesale internment program

overrode Hoover’s own proposal for the

selective detention of those Japanese

already identified on the FBI’s Custodial

Detention list (described below). It

represented, in effect, an unexpected

Army rebuff to Hoover.

Instead, the Bureau of Investigation,

which in 1935 became the Federal

Bureau of Investigation, pursued

bootleggers, bank robbers, and other

gangsters, from John Dillinger to Al

Capone. But noncriminal intelligence

files on the general public became the

hallmark of the FBI after 1936, when

Roosevelt told Hoover he was interested

in “‘obtaining a broad picture’ of the

Communist and Fascist movements” in

America. 44

Roosevelt was responding to a

troubling message from Hoover about

American right-wing activity at the

highest level. In 1935 Marine Corps

Major General Smedley Butler reported

to Hoover that he had been approached

by two representatives of Wall Street to

lead a right-wing coup d’état against

President Roosevelt. Curt Gentry writes

that “Hoover informed Butler that since

there was no evidence that a federal

criminal statute had been violated, he

did not have the authority to order an

investigation.” 45 We see here a key to

Hoover’s political astuteness: his

refusal ever to involve himself in

disputes among those whose power was

equal to or greater than his own. (We see

this again in his refusal, for years, to

involve the FBI in the investigation of

either organized crime or the

international drug traffic.)

However Hoover sought and obtained

authority from FDR to reestablish an

Intelligence Division, after a second

report from General Butler: that the

indigenous American Fascist, Father

Charles Coughlin, had “approached

General Butler and urged him to lead an

armed expedition into Mexico, its

purpose to oppose the Cárdenas

government and restore the church.” 46

This time Hoover reported Butler’s

information to Roosevelt; and obtained

from the President, on August 24, 1936,

a verbal go-ahead to conduct

investigations on a wide range of

domestic political activities, right and

left.47 With this go-ahead, Hoover

reestablished an Intelligence Division,

which eventually evolved into the source

of his power over others, including law-

abiding Americans.48 According to Marc

Aronson,

That secret conversation was the

moment when Hoover’s life story

changed American history. He was

given real authority to protect the

nation, which he slowly but surely

transformed into the right to play by

his own rules, even if that totally

undermined the laws and principles

of the democracy he was

protecting. 49

Because no law or written document

had conferred this power on him,

Hoover was free to rely increasingly on

illegal methods to collect intelligence,

ranging from bugs, mail-openings, and

wiretaps, to break-ins.50 He knew very

well that information gathered illegally

could not be used in prosecutions. But

Hoover’s aim was to use information,

not for prosecution, but to intimidate and

control all sectors of society, especially

those with other forms of power.

His method of dealing with Father

Coughlin is a good example of this.

Hoover kept a sharp eye on the

outspoken priest, who by 1940 was

probably America’s most powerful pro-

Nazi anti-Semite, with a radio show

reaching possibly thirty million

listeners. In January 1940 the FBI raided

an office of the Christian Front, a group

supported by Coughlin, for plotting to

overthrow the government. Two years

later Coughlin was silenced and his

radio show went off the air.

Coughlin’s subsequent silence, which

lasted for decades, is usually attributed

to an order from his bishop, after a deal

negotiated with Attorney General

Biddle. 51 But after Coughlin’s death in

1979, his psychiatrist revealed that what

silenced the priest had not been

sudden obedience to his bishop,

whom he had successfully defied

for several years. That cover story

was circulated in May 1942 by

church authorities. . . . Coughlin felt

the effects of . . . J. Edgar Hoover

[who] had proof of Coughlin’s

homosexual activity. That proof,

communicated in the verbal

exchange between Hoover and

Coughlin, was sufficient to silence

Coughlin’s public voice until May

24, 1972. . . . Hoover had died just

three weeks earlier, on May 2,

1972. 52

Hoover’s silencing of Coughlin

demonstrates that he used his

intelligence files, not just against the left,

but against any force threatening the

somewhat corrupt status quo maintained

by his own secret powers.

Armed in 1936 with Roosevelt’s

verbal authorization, Hoover proceeded

to amass a list of files on tens of

thousands of Americans. He was not

timid in selecting targets. In 1946,

bypassing Attorney General Tom Clark

whom he knew would be disapproving,

Hoover reported in a memo to Truman

via George Allen, a wealthy

businessman who was a friend, that

“There is an enormous Soviet espionage

ring in Washington,” including “a

number of high officials”—specifically

including Undersecretary of State Dean

Acheson and former Assistant Secretary

of War John J. McCloy. 53

When Truman proved uninterested in

Hoover’s dire warnings, Hoover turned

instead to the House Un-American

Activities Committee (HUAC) and the

Senate Internal Security Subcommittee

(SISS), sharing his files above all with

two selected spokesmen, young

Congressman Richard Nixon of HUAC

in 1947, and later Senator Joseph

McCarthy of the SISS in 1950. 54 Armed

with information from Hoover to capture

headlines, first Nixon and later Ronald

Reagan were launched into careers of

public prominence that led them to the

White House. 55 Both men, in different

ways, would then contribute to the

further institutionalization of the covert

intelligence powers first developed by

Hoover.

Hoover eventually collected

information on all those with political

influence, from members of Congress to

the very wealthy; and he retained

personal control over this information in

his files to protect his position. For

example he reportedly had “343 closely

held case files on the business activities

of Joseph P. Kennedy, starting with the

bootlegging years and including

coverage of several illegal—treasonous,

even—transactions brought off while

Kennedy was Ambassador to the Court

of Saint James.” 56

By all accounts, Hoover’s wealth of

such information is what enabled him to

retain his office as Director for life, and

perhaps influence other major political

decisions. 57

HOOVER’S POWERS AND THE

STRENGTHENING OF THE

AMERICAN DUAL STATE

The election of Eisenhower in 1952

enhanced Hoover’s status in Washington,

and also that of his projects.

Hoover’s men . . . oversaw internal

security purges throughout the

government, destroying lives and

careers over suspicions of

disloyalty or homosexuality. . . .

With the full backing of Secretary

of State John Foster Dulles, an FBI

agent [personally approved by

Hoover] named R. W. “Scott”

McLeod took a job as internal

security chief at State. His political

purges of Washington and

embassies and consulates overseas

used FBI methods, including

wiretaps, to force liberals and

suspected leftists out of the foreign

service. 58

Between May 1953 and June

1955 only 8 persons were

dismissed as security risks but 273

submitted their resignations. . . .

The result was a self-censorship

which undoubtedly had an effect on

American foreign policy, few

daring to express their opinions

freely for fear they would be

accountable to McLeod and,

eventually, McCarthy, with whom

he shared the findings of his

investigations. Through McLeod

and his cadre, Hoover was tapped

into every part of the State

Department. Aides say he knew

many of [John Foster] Dulles’s

decisions even before the President

did. 59

The victims particularly affected were

old “China hands,” like John Paton

Davies, who had offended the China

lobby by their negative assessments of

Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang.

Thus was officially instituted a system

whereby one part of government, the

FBI, gained the power to install its

agents in another, for the purpose of

affecting its policies by purging its

personnel. The resulting demoralization

and re-orientation of State long outlasted

the fall of McCarthy. It led to two

decades of unreal China policy,

accompanied by a long-lasting inability

of State to oppose reckless CIA and

Pentagon escalations of anticommunist

violence in Southeast Asia. State

Department veteran James C. Thomson,

after resigning in 1966 over the Vietnam

War, wrote an important article blaming

America’s errors and failures in

Southeast Asia on the purging of

expertise in the McCarthy era, along

with Democratic Party remembrance of

the “loss of China” charges. 60

Criticizing this state of affairs from

the perspective of someone who had

witnessed the SS purges in Nazi

Germany, political science professor

Hans Morgenthau in 1955 deplored the

condition of a similar “dual state” in

America, in which the “authorities

charged by law” were subordinated to a

hostile right-wing clique with “an

effective veto over the decisions of the

former. ”61

Swedish professor Ola Tunander,

expanding on Morgenthau’s critique,

called the second state a “deep state.” 62

Following him in 2007 and 2008, I also

defined the deep state somewhat

restrictively, as an unrepresentative

“restricted locus of top-down power,”

or as a parallel “hard-edged coalition,”

consisting primarily of the covert

agencies (like the CIA) that are

“responsive . . . to the overworld, but

with little or no other public

constituency. ”63

As noted earlier, I now use the term

“deep state” for the larger aggregation of

extralegal powers inside and outside

government that Hoover helped

consolidate, including not just covert

agencies like the FBI, but also their

media allies and other allied elements

both in the wealthy overworld and the

criminal underworld. In short my “deep

state” is roughly the “deep political

system” I defined in 1993 as “one which

habitually resorts to decision-making

and enforcement procedures outside as

well as inside those publicly sanctioned

by law and society.” 64 Since 1963 this

system has included at least some

elements responsible for covering up the

assassination of a President.

HOOVER AND THE ORIGINS OF

COG’S EMERGENCY DETENTION

PLANNING

In November 1939, after the outbreak of

war in Europe, Hoover began to compile

a list of individuals to be closely

monitored and/or detained in the event

of a national emergency or war. In June

1940 he sought and gained the approval

of Attorney General Robert Jackson for

this list, known as the Custodial

Detention List. (Late in life, Jackson

appears to have regretted the powers

that Hoover accumulated.)65

The Custodial Detention list played

no role in the wholesale displacement in

1942 of Japanese and coastal Italians,

which Hoover opposed.66 In 1943

Attorney General Francis Biddle

decided that the Custodial Detention List

had outlived its usefulness and that there

was no statutory authorization for it. His

order to Hoover to close the list was

unambiguous: “The [Justice] Department

fulfills its proper function by

investigating the activities of persons

who may have violated the law. It is not

aided in this work by classifying persons

as to dangerousness. ”67 But, as the

Church Committee reported, “upon

receipt of this order, the FBI Director

did not abolish the FBI’s list. Instead, he

changed its name from Custodial

Detention List to Security Index. ”68

Hoover’s decision to disregard

Biddle’s order, leaving his detention

program planning without legal

authorization, “remained secret until

after his death.” 69 The plans, along with

Hoover’s illegal intelligence

acquisitions and his use of organized

crime as a source for them, were

cornerstones in his conversion of the

FBI into a powerful bureau that was both

publicly funded and in part outside the

domain of public law. This in turn

became the key element in his

aggregation of powers into the “deep

state.”

In particular the detention list

survived a second and third effort to

abolish it. When the Security Index was

ordered closed in 1971, the names were

again transferred, to a new

Administrative Index (ADEX). This new

ADEX was in turn terminated in 1978

under Jimmy Carter and his Attorney

General Griffin Bell.70 But the list was

not destroyed, and remained available

for use by the new Reagan

administration, when in 1982 a secret

committee including Rumsfeld and

Cheney began planning for mass

detentions under the rubric of Continuity

of Government (COG) planning.

HOW HOOVER’S DETENTION

PLANS BECAME PART OF

NATIONAL EMERGENCY (COG)

PLANNING

According to Tim Weiner, it was on July

7, 1950, at the crest of the hysteria

fomented by the Korean War and by

hearings in HUAC and SISS, that

Hoover for the first time formally

briefed the White House and the NSC

his plans for “the mass detention of

political suspects in military stockades,

a secret prison system for jailing

American citizens, and the suspension of

the writ of habeas corpus.” 71 He also

revealed that he had had since 1939 a

list of about twelve thousand

individuals, nearly all of them U.S.

citizens, who under his plan could be

rounded up summarily on the issuance of

a single “master warrant. ”72 (According

to Weiner, Hoover had also approved a

plan, never fully implemented, “to put

every one of the roughly eighty thousand

members of the Communist Party of the

United States on the FBI’s secret

Security [i.e., detention] Index.”)73

Hoover’s plan was soon paralleled in

Congress by the passage (over Truman’s

veto) of the McCarran Internal Security

Act in the same year 1950, whose Title

II authorized the attorney general in

times of emergency to round up and hold

individuals in detention centers.

Congress, in passing the Emergency

Detention Act, was unaware that Hoover

had already assumed this power.

Moreover the Act established certain

protections of individual human rights,

which Hoover and some Department of

Justice officials considered

“unworkable.” “Accordingly, Attorney

General J. Howard McGrath directed

the FBI to ignore the congressionally

mandated standards and instead base

current and future detention investigation

on the administration’s secretly

authorized program. ”74 In this decision

we see a sign of America’s emerging

dual state, in which some U.S. agencies

are directed secretly to ignore the law.

The October 1950 entry of China into

the Korean War moved Truman, on

December 16, 1950, to proclaim “a

national emergency, which requires that

the military, naval, air, and civilian

defenses of this country be strengthened

as speedily as possible.” 75 Truman’s

proclamation of a national emergency

authorized publicly the military buildup

authorized secretly two days earlier in

NSC 68/4 of December 14—in the same

way that Bush’s proclamation of a

national emergency on September 14,

2011, became the public authority for the

COG measures implemented secretly by

Cheney and Rumsfeld (during Bush’s

absence from Washington) on 9/11. 76

The Chinese intervention also

persuaded Truman to threaten Beijing

with possible use of atomic weapons. 77

As the Soviet Union now possessed its

own bomb, Truman initiated COG

planning to deal with a possible

counterattack. 78 Thus in a sense it can be

said that today’s manic planning for

Doomsday is a by-product of the Korean

War.

Truman’s proclamation of a national

emergency lasted until 1977. Under

Eisenhower “A series of atomic attack

simulations, entitled ‘Operation Alert,’

were implemented from 1955 to 1960, . .

. to test ‘the capability of all levels of

government to operate following an

attack.’” 79 These exercises generated a

growing number of Presidential

Emergency Action Documents, or

PEADs, which have been since defined

by FEMA as “final drafts of Presidential

messages, proposed legislation

proclamations, and other formal

documents, including DOJ [Department

of Justice]-issued cover sheets

addressed to the President, to be issued

in event of a Presidentially-declared

national emergency.” 80

In 2005 William Arkin wrote

tentatively about PEADs:

Little is known about the highly

classified PEADs, which are

believed to constitute the highest

level contingency planning for the

White House and the federal

government, and constitute pre-

planned Presidential declarations.

PEADs are believed to mostly

relate to the Continuity of

Government (COG) program and

the execution of martial law and

other sensitive and secretive

operations. They are numbered and

approved by the President. PEAD 6

reportedly once provided for the

arrest and detention of U.S. citizens

as well as aliens considered

dangerous to the national defense

and public safety, as well as for the

seizure of property for which there

is a reason to believe may be used

to the detriment of national defense

and public safety. PEAD 22 was

approved in the Reagan

Administration.81

By 2013 Arkin had established that

PEADs and the phrase “continuity of

government” were first consolidated

under Eisenhower as Annex A to

Federal Emergency Plan D, dealing with

responses to “a crippling nuclear attack

on the United States. ”82

Some PEAD documents have been

declassified and posted on the Internet.

We learn from an internal FBI memo of

June 19, 1958, that one of these PEADs

concerned the “apprehension and

detention of those dangerous alien

enemies presently included in our

Security Index. ”83 (One wonders what

“dangerous alien enemies” were

contemplated in the emergency planning

of the late 1950s, when the Communist

Party was by then clearly moribund, and

the U.S. government had not yet begun to

stoke xenophobic anxieties about

terrorists.)

PEADs contemplated not only

detention but also surveillance.

According to another FBI document of

April 1976,

PEAD #8 authorizes the Secretary

of State to initiate measures for the

protection, surveillance, and

control of certain foreign

diplomatic, consular, and other

official personnel. PEAD #9

authorizes the Secretary of State to

take over property of enemy

governments. FBI would assist in

the implementation of these PEADs

under Procedures for Interning

Enemy Diplomatic Consular,

United Nations and Official

Personnel in the Event of War

(PRODIP). 84

THE EVOLUTION OF MARTIAL

LAW PLANNING: GARDEN PLOT,

CABLE SPICER, AND FEMA

Martial law was also envisaged under

PEAD #20, “created under Eisenhower

and thoroughly revised and signed by

President Jimmy Carter on October 13,

1978. ”85

The Army developed a plan for

quelling civil disturbance after the

difficulties experienced at the Ole Miss

riot of 1962, where military

commanders “reported back that they

were blindsided by a lack of

intelligence. ”86 As violence increased in

the 1960s, first in inner cities but also

eventually on campuses, successive

plans evolved into Garden Plot. This

plan was issued in June 1967, after the

riots following the Martin Luther King,

Jr. assassination, and one month before

being implemented in Detroit. Following

these riots, and as part of Garden Plot,

two brigades (4,800 troops) were

placed on permanent standby to quell

unrest. The two brigades were however

disbanded in 1971 under Nixon,

following the shootings of students at

Kent State and Jackson State University,

and the embarrassing testimony to

Congress by three army under-cover

agents that Army intelligence had 1,500

plainclothes agents watching every

demonstration of twenty people or more

throughout the United States. 87

But Garden Plot plans were

resurrected in 1978. This was the year

that Harvard Professor Samuel

Huntington, who earlier had written of

the occasional need to “override the

claims of democracy,” was named

“Coordinator of Security” for the Carter

administration.88 Together with his ally

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington

redesigned the overall architecture of the

COG planning system, notably by

creating the Federal Emergency

Management Agency (FEMA), to supply

infrastructure for an emergency

government takeover. 89

FEMA attracted some notoriety under

Reagan, who, as we saw in chapter 3,

installed a California counterinsurgency

team headed by Army Col. Louis

Giuffrida. Earlier Reagan had made

Giuffrida the head of the California

National Guard, and called on him “to

design Operation Cable Splicer. . . .

martial law plans to legitimize the arrest

and detention of anti-Vietnam war

activists and other political

dissidents.” 90 These plans were refined

with the assistance of British

counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert

Thompson, who had used massive

detention and deportations to deal with

the 1950s Communist insurgency in what

is now Malaysia.

Thompson’s plans for massive

detention, adapted first by Giuffrida in

California’s Operation Cable Splicer,

were further refined by Giuffrida and

FEMA with the assistance of Oliver

North. In 1984 they were the focus of a

massive COG exercise, REX-84, an

exercise preparing for the detention of

more than 400,000 Central American

refugees in ten military centers located

the country.91 REX-84 was the plan

described by Miami Herald reporter

Alfonso Chardy in 1987 as a “plan to

suspend the Constitution in the event of a

national crisis, such as nuclear war,

violent and widespread internal dissent

or national opposition to a U.S. military

invasion abroad.” 92

THE NATIONAL

COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM AND

THE DOOMSDAY PROJECT

Of primary significance to COG

planning in the 1980s and 1990s was the

decision by Eisenhower’s cabinet to

commission new “executive agencies to

develop continuity measures—the means

by which a fragmented federal

government could begin to exercise

authority over a devastated nation.” 93

One of these, destined to mushroom

under Reagan into a billion-dollar

boondoggle, was the National

Communications Agency (NCA), whose

designated task was to “assist in

maintaining the flow of essential

national telecommunications.” Like

some of the other such agencies, it was

chaired by a corporate executive outside

government: in this case by President

Frank Stanton of the CBS Television

Network.94 Eisenhower had first brought

in Stanton and other prominent private

citizens for Doomsday planning, just “a

few weeks after the Soviets launched the

first manmade satellite in 1957,

shattering America’s sense of security.”

The involvement of private leaders from

the deep state has been a feature of

Doomsday planning ever since.95

The NCA was a precursor of the

National Communications System

(NCS), formally established by a JFK

Presidential Memorandum on August 21,

1963. By 1969 at least $175 million had

been spent “to increase the survivability

of national communications resources”

in a nuclear attack. 96 In July 1979 the

system was tested under Carter, in the

first known instance of the exercise

GLOBAL SHIELD. By the Reagan era

the NCS had mushroomed into an $8

billion communications and logistics

program for an alternative emergency

communications network. 97

Earlier I argued that in the background

of 9/11, as well as in all comparable

deep events diverting America toward

its current dual state, we can see the

workings of what in chapter 9 I called

the “Doomsday Project—the alternative

emergency planning structure with its

own communications network, operating

as a shadow network outside of regular

government channels.” The purpose of

this chapter has been to note the

sporadic but crescive evolution of the

COG planning and network, through the

presidencies of Roosevelt, Truman,

Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Carter. But a

barrier was broken when Oliver North,

arranging for the arms shipments to Iran

that eventually cost him his job, made

the first documented use of the

Doomsday communications network,

Flashboard, to help implement a deep

event: Iran-Contra.

From this time forward into the

1990s, COG planning continued to

evolve, now under the watchful eyes of

neocons like Paul Wolfowitz.98 The

climax of this evolution was 9/11, when

COG plans themselves, and not just their

network, were implemented for the first

time.99

CHAPTER 12

America’s

Unchecked

Security State and

Lawlessness

This is the way of the post–

September 11 world, where

whistleblowers and news

organizations reveal what would

have once been considered illegal

and then, years later, find

themselves “revealing” it yet again,

and then again. So it has been with

torture and extrajudicial killing and

warrantless wiretapping. We might

call these frozen scandals, which

begin in revelation and white-hot

controversy and end with our

learning to live with secret

wrongdoing that is in fact no secret

at all. This is our new normal—and

a vital attribute of the world Dick

Cheney bequeathed us.1

FROM THE OUTSET OF HIS YEARS AT THE

FBI, HOOVER’S POWER WAS REINforced

by his de facto alliance with the

overworld and its own deep state

resources, combined with his de facto

alliance with lawless underworld

elements who were also part of the

informal power structure in that era.

Back in 1919–1920, Hoover’s

Bureau, in conducting its nationwide

raids and arrests, “coordinated its work

closely with a 250,000 member right-

wing vigilante group, the American

Protective League,” supported by

business leaders. 2 In later years Hoover

continued to augment the FBI’s spying

networks and files with other business-

supported organizations, above all the

American Legion3 and its postwar

offshoot the American Security Council

(ASC).

The second major network

supplementing the FBI was the Anti-

Defamation League (ADL). According to

its prominent critic Alfred M. Lilienthal,

“the ADL . . . works closely with the

Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, and

sometimes with the FBI or CIA.” 4

The author and Village Voice

journalist Robert Friedman agrees:

At the onset of the Cold War, the

ADL was running perhaps the

largest private spy agency in

America, regularly feeding the FBI

information not only on anti-

Semitic groups like the KKK and

the American Nazi party, but also

on Jewish leftists and members of

the Communist Party. . . . It

supplied not only the FBI, but,

according to the Congressional

Record, the Commerce Department,

which reviewed the files of

applicants for government jobs,

searching for “subversives.” . . . In

the ’50s and ’60s, the ADL

continued to penetrate and expose

racist and fascist groups. It also

championed the civil rights

movement, speaking out for fair

housing and against job

discrimination. Yet as always, there

was a darker side. The ADL spied

on Martin Luther King and passed

its files to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI,

according to Henry

Schwarz[s]child, who was an ADL

officer from 1962 to 1964 and is

now an official with the ACLU. “It

was common and casually accepted

knowledge,” Schwarz[s]child told

the S.F. Weekly. 5

Hoover also exploited the close and

arguably very improper relationships

that he maintained with wealthy, usually

independent and self-made, millionaires

like Joseph Kennedy, Clint Murchison,

Sr., Lewis Rosenstiel, and George Allen

(Hoover’s backdoor forwarder to

Truman of the memo attacking John

McCloy). 6

It is a telling sign of the deep state

milieu after Prohibition that every one of

these self-made millionaires had

intimate connections to organized crime

—and there are many reports that

through them and their journalistic

friends like Walter Winchell, Hoover

himself met at New York’s Stork Club

with organized crime figures like Frank

Costello. 7 Burton Hersh asserts that

Hoover tactfully maintained this

connection to the Stork Club milieu

because “Costello was a resource. ”8

For decades Hoover declined to

investigate and prosecute organized

crime, claiming “that it was a local

police problem, outside of the FBI’s

jurisdiction.” 9 As former FBI agent Peter

Pitchess (later Sheriff of Los Angeles

County) recalled, “Organized crime was

just not a concern of the Bureau. We

knew it existed, but there were hardly

any prosecutions, and we knew this was

FBI policy.” 10 In this way Hoover tacitly

accepted Tammany-style corruption as a

reinforcement of the status quo, and also

as a resource for dealing with outsiders

who threatened it.

Hoover was recognizing and

sanctioning, rather than creating, the

social status of the mob, which at the

time helped elect politicians and

perform favors for the wealthy. In

particular Hoover was helping to

preserve a status quo in which organized

crime continued to help wealthy

industrialists like Henry Ford (or more

precisely his security chief Harry

Bennett) fight trade unions like the

United Auto Workers, by granting

delivery contracts and concessions to

prominent mobsters like Joe Adonis,

Brooklyn’s top man in narcotics. 11

An important political consequence of

this de facto tolerance was to protect

and reinforce the enduring influence of

organized crime in the local politics of

cities like New York, Newark, Boston,

Chicago, and San Francisco. This was

brought home to me through my research

into Jack Ruby, whom I linked in an

early manuscript to a nationwide

network of mob figures involved in

gambling and narcotics. One morning I

was surprised to see in our local

newspaper that one of Ruby’s

associates, Benny Barrish, was named

for his part in the 1974 lease of a San

Francisco City golf course to an East

Coast gangster. 12

Hoover did not just tolerate organized

crime; he used it, not just as a source of

information, but also as a source of

enforcement. A notorious example of the

latter was the surrender at the Stork Club

of Louis Lepke Buchalter to Hoover

personally, negotiated with the approval

of Lansky and the aid of newsman Walter

Winchell. 13 Enforcement was politically

selective. For example when in 1957 a

rogue ex-FBI agent, with the assistance

of Joe Zicarelli of the Bonanno family,

kidnapped the left-wing Dominican

journalist Jesús de Galindez on behalf of

Dominican dictator Trujillo (who

subsequently had him murdered),

Hoover, rather than indict a right-wing

dictator, “informed the Justice and State

Departments that the case against

Trujillo and his henchmen was not

‘sufficiently airtight.’” 14

Hoover used political criteria to

recruit and protect individual mafia

members as informants, a process that

could easily lead to corruption and

scandal—some of which still exists. In

1971, as a favor to his political ally,

House Speaker John McCormack,

Hoover (in a personal memo) directed

the Boston FBI office to develop Whitey

Bulger, then a minor mob figure, as an

informant. (Whitey’s brother James was

part of the McCormack political

machine and a member of the House of

Representatives. )15

For two decades Bulger fed inside

information about the Boston Patriarca

crime family to his FBI contact John

Connolly (also appointed by Hoover on

the recommendation of McCormack). At

the same time Whitey Bulger ran a

lucrative protection racket targeting drug

kingpins and gambling operators.

Eventually Bulger was indicted for

nineteen murders, including the murder

of another FBI informant, a crime for

which Connolly also was jailed. 16

The Connolly-Bulger scandal in

Boston was not anomalous. In the 1980s

a very similar scandal developed in the

FBI’s New York office, where agent Lin

DeVecchio protected his mafia informant

Gregory Scarpa, Sr., from arrest,

allowing Scarpa to commit a series of

mob murders with impunity. 17 Author

Peter Lance has made a persuasive case

that the FBI’s eagerness to cover up the

De-Vecchio scandal eventually led it to

cover up significant evidence about

9/11. 18

HOOVER’S USE OF ILLEGAL

METHODS TO COMBAT THE KU

KLUX KLAN

Those who like myself celebrate the

nonviolent desegregation of the South in

the 1960s need to recognize that the civil

rights movement did not achieve this

fundamental change without other efforts

to enforce federal laws. The White

House deployed federal manpower to

enforce rulings of the federal courts—

U.S. marshals whenever possible. These

were inadequate, however, when

Governor Ross Barnett in 1962 sought to

block the court-ordered admission of

James Meredith to the University of

Mississippi, an event that “many

historians view as ground zero on the

southern counterrevolution against

integration and multiculturalism.” 19 In

this case a well-organized riot forced

the Kennedy brothers to send in more

than twelve thousand U.S. Army

soldiers, climaxing a fixed battle that left

two people dead. 20 As we saw in the last

chapter, the confusion in the army’s

response led to a series of plans,

resulting in Garden Plot.

The attempt of the Kennedys to use the

law against insurrection began to look

increasingly counterproductive. Robert

Kennedy then moved against General

Edwin Walker, who had mobilized the

mob at Ole Miss “with his contingent of

gunmen from Dallas,” by remanding the

general for psychiatric examination at

the Medical Center for Federal

Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. “The

John Birch Society and other far-right

groups heralded this as an example of

the ‘Kennedy police state.’” 21 After five

days, the U.S. government backed down

and Walker was released, now a

“leading light” of the Birch Society in

Dallas and elsewhere. 22 And he still had

good connections with other right-wing

veterans of the U.S. military.

In April 1963 there was a meeting in

New Orleans of the Congress of

Freedom, Inc., a Miami detective’s

report of which included the statement

that “there was indicated the overthrow

of the present government of the United

States,” including “the setting up of a

criminal activity to assassinate

particular persons and groups of persons

throughout the United States.” The report

added that “membership within the

Congress of Freedom, Inc., contain high

ranking members of the armed forces

that secretly belong to the

organization. ”23 Things were beginning

to get out of hand.

Characteristically, Hoover took no

known steps against this conclave of

“high ranking members of the armed

forces”; indeed, he took steps to

discredit the detective’s informant.24

With respect to the lower middle-class

Klan, however, his response was quite

different. 25 While the White House used

legal means to respond to the

phenomenon of Klan violence, Hoover

secretly resorted to illegal means to go

after the hidden roots of disorder in the

Klan and its allies. This may have been

more important as well as less

disruptive, for as journalist Maryanne

Vollers has noted, “the retaliation that

followed Meredith’s admission to Ole

Miss showed a pattern indicating that

someone was directing a terror

campaign in the state.” 26 (It is possible,

though not certain, that Hoover had

better intelligence than Kennedy on the

strength of the deep powers backing

Klan resistance to desegregation.)

Admittedly Hoover dealt very

belatedly with the problem of racial

violence, but in the end he also did so

forcefully. He himself was a

segregationist by background and

inclination. In 1956 he warned

Eisenhower’s cabinet about the dangers

of “mixed education” from

desegregation, including the “specter of

racial [i.e. interracial] marriage. ”27 It

has been alleged that, as late as 1961

there were only five African American

FBI agents, all of whom “mostly served

as drivers.” 28

There were other factors inhibiting his

commitment to racial justice. The FBI

model for social stability was

cooperation with local law enforcement,

which in the Deep South was committed

to segregation. And much of Hoover’s

support in Congress came from southern

racist committee chairmen like Senator

Eastland, the overseer of the Senate

Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS).

And yet, as the civil rights movement

was answered with more and more

bombings and murders from a resurgent

Ku Klux Klan, Hoover himself

intervened, far more vigorously than is

generally recognized. It is widely known

that on September 2, 1964, after the

murder of three civil rights workers in

Mississippi, Hoover matched his

COINTELPRO against “Black

Nationalist Hate Groups” (including the

Southern Christian Leadership

Conference [SCLC] and Martin Luther

King, Jr.) with a new COINTELPRO—

WHITE HATE directed exclusively

against the Klan. 29 In the next seven

years the FBI conducted 287 separate

operations, and by September 1965, the

FBI could identify 2,000 Klansmen on

its payroll as informants. 30

It is wrong to dismiss Hoover’s anti-

Klan campaign as “small” compared to

other COINTELPROs.31 On the contrary,

“COINTELPRO activities had a

devastating effect on Klan activity.

There were so many undercover agents

operating in the Klan that Klan leaders

became hesitant to make decisions for

fear that the FBI would learn of them.” 32

Tim Weiner writes,

“Mr. Hoover never would have

changed by himself” not without

LBJ’s forceful command [on July 2,

1964], Burke Marshall [RFK’s

civil rights chief] said. “The FBI

was grudging about doing anything”

against the Klan. “Mr. Hoover

viewed the civil-rights activists as

lawbreakers. The FBI was worse

than useless, given his mind-set”—

until the president ordered him to

change his mind.33

Marshall’s negative judgment of

Hoover reflects that voiced at the time

by Martin Luther King, Jr. However

Athan Theoharis reports that, already in

1963, Hoover had subordinated his

distaste for the nonviolent civil rights

movement to his concern that certain

Klan elements represented an organized

violent insurrection against the court-

ordered imposition of federal laws. Not

only this, Hoover had decided to fight

illegal violence with illegal violence—

the darker resources of the deep state.

It is alleged that, after the murder of

civil rights activist Medgar Evers in

June 1963, Hoover may have authorized

the use of a mafia killer, “Julio”

[possibly Gregory Scarpa], to extract the

name of Evers’s murderer from a pistol-

whipped and terrorized witness.34 A

year later, after the June 1964 murder of

three civil rights workers in Mississippi,

Scarpa extracted the facts for the FBI

from a witness, this time by brandishing

a straight-edge razor and unzipping the

witness’s fly. 35 And in 1966, after the

arson-murder of Vernon Dahmer, Scarpa

identified the culprit from a witness

beaten so violently he was hospitalized

and never again the same.36

Among those arrested and eventually

convicted as a result of Scarpa’s

interventions was Samuel Holloway

Bowers, leader of the White Knights of

the Ku Klux Klan, “the most successfully

violent KKK subgroup in the nation.” 37

Bowers was the power behind murders

and bombings across the entire Deep

South (including, a recent book has

suggested, at least one murder plot

against Martin Luther King, Jr.). 38 He

had rightly anticipated that he would not

be tried in a Mississippi state court; but

Scarpa’s discoveries helped enable the

federal government to establish federal

authority and convict him. This ended

the impunity of Bowers’s Klan, and

defused its dangerous “strategy to induce

[a] race war. ”39

In 1967, after the conviction of

Bowers, remnants of his White Knights

began bombing Jewish synagogues and

homes.40 This escalation of violence, to

include white as well as black targets,

also escalated the FBI’s resort to

illegalities, far beyond the use of torture

to obtain evidence. According to

investigative reporter Jack Nelson, who

broke the story, the FBI in 1968 helped

provoke the attempted bombing of a

Jewish businessman’s home in Meridian,

Mississippi. In Nelson’s account, the

FBI hired two informants to induce two

of Bowers’s close associates (Thomas

A. Tarrants III and another Klansman) to

attempt another bombing, so that police

waiting at the scene could execute them

during the commission of the crime. 41

As Nelson pointed out, this

represented a new level of FBI

illegality:

1. It involved premeditated murder.

2. It involved entrapment—Tarrants

(and another victim, not the

intended target) “had been lured

into a trap by a pair of

informants.”

3. The informants [one of them out

on appeal after being convicted

for shooting the three civil rights

workers in 1964] were

motivated, not just by thousands

of dollars in reward money put

up by the local Anti-Defamation

League, but also by “threats by

the local police and the FBI to

kill them if they didn’t

cooperate.” 42

It is difficult to defend such tactics,

other than to note (as Nelson does) that

1968 was “a year like no other,” with

killings and unprecedented rioting

around the nation and the world. Nelson

himself was so shocked by what he

learned that he broke with the local FBI

(his source for earlier stories) and

alerted the nation to the illegalities.43

At the same time Nelson had to

concede that, “Since the ambush, there

had been no further violence against

Jews in Mississippi.” 44 His assessment

is expanded on by Professor George

Michael: “The attack proved effective,

as it finally broke the back of the Klan

violence in Mississippi.” 45

Let me close this dubious late chapter

in Hoover’s career with words spoken

by Gandhi shortly before his

assassination: “No good act can produce

an evil result. Evil means, even for a

good end, produce evil results.” 46 Evil

results, in this case, even for the FBI

itself.

THE END OF HOOVERISM AND

THE DEBATES OF THE POST-

VIETNAM ERA

It can be said that by 1968 Hoover,

William Sullivan, the other leaders in

Washington, and the country itself were

all driven awry from violence, all no

longer themselves, all out of control. 47 I

wrote earlier that “all power intoxicates;

unchecked power intoxicates

irrevocably.” Like Defense Secretary

Forrestal and CIA officer Frank Wisner,

both Hoover and Sullivan were by now

behaving so oddly that their behavior,

especially Sullivan’s, was being

questioned by their own colleagues. 48

(More recently, both Rumsfeld and

Cheney have been analyzed as

paranoid. 49)

The point being made here is so

important that I should ground it in a

larger observation, both very obvious

and usually suppressed, that only very

abnormal people will seek the U.S.

presidency. That abnormality does not of

itself derogate from the ability to govern.

Indeed a recent book has argued that

there is a surprisingly deep correlation

between mental illness and successful

leadership, pointing to the examples of

Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D.

Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr.50

But the mania of 1968 was

institutional, not just personal, and was

inflaming a nation at war with itself. The

FBI by then, at Sullivan’s urging, had

helped instigate a number of other

murders, notably that of Black Panther

leader Fred Hampton in Chicago, killed

with multiple gun wounds while at home

sleeping in his bed. 51 Furthermore there

were a number of instances where the

FBI instigated battles, sometimes lethal,

between the Panthers and other groups,

making the Bureau, as legal scholar

Frank Donner has written, “criminally

complicit in the violence” that ensued.52

Across the country

break-ins and assaults were carried

out by right-wing paramilitary

groups coordinating their efforts

with FBI informants, military

intelligence agents, and local

police investigative units. . . . The

FBI relationship to the far right

reached a violent climax in San

Diego, where an FBI informant

testified the FBI provided him with

$10,000 worth of weapons,

including explosives used in a

bombing by the Secret Army

Organization (SAO), a right-wing

group which harassed activists

protesting the Vietnam war. The

FBI even hid a gun used in an SAO

assassination attempt against a

leftist professor until an ACLU-

sponsored lawsuit by a woman

wounded in the assault forced the

FBI to reveal the weapon’s

existence. 53

The FBI’s escalation in the use of

violence reflected the increasingly

independent domination of the its

COINTELPROs by Assistant Director

William “Crazy Bill” Sullivan. 54

Already in 1967 Sullivan had challenged

Hoover’s aging leadership, arguing that

the Ku Klux Klan was a far greater

threat than the Communist Party USA. As

Hoover grew increasingly cautious,

Sullivan took less and less guidance

from his director, and built violence-

prone coalitions instead with James

Angleton in the CIA, and eventually the

Nixon White House. 55

In a dialectic worthy of a Greek

tragedy, the FBI’s excesses had seriously

undermined Hoover’s powers before his

death in 1972. Nelson, backed by his

newspaper the L.A. Times, proceeded,

after exposing the Meridian incident, to

expose a series of other FBI illegalities,

inducing Hoover in turn to put Nelson on

his enemies’ list and wage a lying war

against him as a “jackal” and “a lice-

covered ferret. ”56 Nelson’s sequence of

page-one stories had the consequence of

eroding Hoover’s support in both

Congress and the White House:

“Suddenly, after years of near

idolization, J. Edgar Hoover was no

longer untouchable. The FBI director

was now fair game.” 57

Before Hoover’s death in 1972

Congress had finally begun to expose

and condemn Hoover’s wiretapping and

other illegalities. As Hoover became

more and more reluctant to break the

law, he became increasingly a curb to

the illegalities of others—notably the

increasingly obvious efforts of William

Sullivan to replace him, with the support

of President Nixon. A denouement of

sorts was Hoover’s blocking of the 1970

“Huston Plan” for a consolidated

national police uniting the resources of

FBI, CIA, DIA, and NSA. The plan was

nominally proposed by Tom Huston in

the Nixon White House, but in fact

drafted chiefly by Sullivan. The other

agencies supported the proposal and

Nixon initially signed it; but Hoover, by

enlisting Attorney General Mitchell as

an ally, succeeded in persuading Nixon

to reverse his decision. 58

This episode was not without

consequences. In the short run, the defeat

of the Huston Plan drove the White

House to engage unilaterally in the

series of illegalities we remember as

“Watergate.” 59 And the coalition of

agencies backing the plan was revived

during the COG planning (the Doomsday

Project) of the 1980s and 1990s. Viewed

retrospectively, the Huston Plan looks

like an early blueprint for the shadow

security state we live under today.

But simultaneously Hoover,

increasingly out of touch with reality,

began to lose the self-restraint with

which he had previously managed his

own secret intelligence. In 1971 a

congressman who was also a U.S. Navy

hero, Commander William Anderson,

spoke in the House and “rebuked J.

Edgar Hoover . . . for accusing two

prominent opponents of the Vietnam War

of plotting to kidnap a government

official and blow up electrical systems

in the Washington area. He termed

Hoover’s accusations the ‘climax’ of ‘an

outrageous pattern of fear and

repression.’” 60

Such a rebuke of Hoover in Congress

was unprecedented, and so was

Hoover’s response. Instead of privately

threatening Anderson, he

had the Congressman investigated. .

. . Agents found a madam who

“thought” Anderson had visited her

place of business several years

earlier. Hoover then scribbled

“whoremonger” on the

memorandum . . . and arranged to

have the story leaked to the press in

Anderson’s home state. . . . In 1972,

William Anderson—. . . four-term

congressman from Tennessee—was

defeated for reelection. 61

But the spell of the FBI over Congress

had been broken; and in a few years

Congress, in a turnabout, would begin to

investigate the FBI.

THE DEBATE OVER SECRET

POWERS IN THE POST-VIETNAM

INTERIM BEFORE REAGAN

After the traumas of Watergate and

Nixon’s resignation, the national mood

for more transparency in government

increased, at least temporarily. A

number of congressional committees,

notably the Senate committee chaired by

Senator Frank Church, began to examine

some of the illegalities of the COIN-

TELPROs, as did an administrative

committee of Justice Department

officials set up by Attorney General

William Saxbe.62

It appeared briefly, in short, that the

public state might bring this aspect of the

deep state under control. And indeed, a

number of key FBI programs, such as the

Security List for emergency mass

detentions, were terminated in 1978—at

least on paper. Congress also passed the

Foreign Intelligence Surveil-lance Act

(FISA) of 1978, as a compromise effort

to regulate wiretapping. In addition two

senior FBI officials were convicted in

1980 for having authorized illegal

break-ins.63

But meanwhile other counterforces

were building to reverse what Professor

Samuel Huntington, in his 1975 study for

the Trilateral Commission, called the

“excess of democracy” then current in

the American system. 64 In 1974 the new

Ford White House, with first Donald

Rumsfeld and later Dick Cheney as

Chief of Staff, became a focal point for

resisting the efforts of Church and others

to achieve greater openness in American

government. 65

Rumsfeld and Cheney were not acting

alone. Behind them were the neocons of

the 1970s Committee on the Present

Danger (CPD), who were mobilized to

ensure that U.S. defense budget would

not shrink (as candidate Jimmy Carter

intended) after Vietnam. 66 And behind

the CPD were still other, more shadowy

international forces, such as the Saudi-

backed Safari Club of intelligence

chiefs, and the ultra-reactionary political

backers of future leaders Reagan and

Thatcher (such as Alexandre de

Marenches) in the Euro-American Pinay

Circle.67

Although the predominant issues after

the collapse of the Saigon regime in

Vietnam were the future of détente and

the defense budget, also at stake was the

future of the secret powers amassed by

Hoover—above all warrantless

surveillance. Journalists Lou Dubose

and Jake Bernstein write that in this

period Cheney, aided by his friend

Antonin Scalia (then head of the Justice

Department’s Office of Legal Counsel)

“teamed up to defend executive

privilege,” including “illegal

wiretapping.” 68 Rumsfeld, Cheney, and

Scalia also united in an unsuccessful

campaign to block a major expansion of

the Freedom of Information Act

(FOIA). 69

This campaign of Donald Rumsfeld

and Cheney in the Ford White House, to

protect the FBI and CIA from

congressional tampering, was part of a

larger campaign, to put an end to Nixon-

Kissinger policies of détente and

multipolarity, and put America back on

the path toward global domination.

In the so-called “Halloween

Massacre” of 1975, Rumsfeld and

Cheney also arranged to end Kissinger’s

tenure as national security advisor, and

for Nelson Rockefeller to be removed

from his expected vice-presidential

position on the 1976 Republican ticket.

This opened the way to the election of

Reagan in 1980 and the subsequent

Reagan Revolution, the final victory of

the executive forces for secrecy over the

congressional efforts at openness.70 With

the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld and

Dick Cheney to a secret COG planning

committee in 1982 (the so-called

Doomsday Project), arrangements

resumed for warrantless surveillance,

massive emergency detentions, and other

suspended features of Hoover’s agenda.

In short the post-Vietnam struggle in

Washington, between the congressional

defenders of a public state, and the

administrative defenders of secret

powers, was effectively resolved by the

launching in 1982 of the so-called

“Doomsday Project”: plans for an

emergency suspension of provisions in

the Constitution. Today many of the post-

Watergate reforms, such as the FISA Act

and the National Emergencies Act, are

dead. Programs briefly suspended, such

as the maintenance of lists for wide-

scale detention, have been restored on a

level far, far wider than before.

Of all the post-Watergate reforms, the

most visible one to survive was the

establishment, by the Intelligence

Oversight Act of 1980, of permanent

committees in both the Senate and the

House for oversight of the CIA and FBI.

Those who see this reform as significant

point to the Iran-Contra crisis of the

1980s, when a congressional ban on CIA

aid to the Nicaraguan Contras (the so-

called “Boland Amendments”) led to

illegal responses by White House

officials, and their subsequent exposure.

But the intention of the reform can be

said to have been effectively reversed,

making the committees into

constituencies for the intelligence

agencies, rather than custodians of

them.71 Thus in the 1980s the

Committees not only gave the CIA full

leash on their dubious Afghan operation,

but Congressman Charlie Wilson also

actually pressed on the CIA a larger

budget than many CIA operatives

wanted.72

To sum up: on the surface, one can

date the growth of unchecked secret

powers in America to 9/11 and the

implementation that morning of

Continuity of Government (COG)

measures that had been secretly planned

for two decades by Cheney and

Rumsfeld, even when the two men were

not officially part of the U.S.

government. But that event had been

prepared for, perhaps even made

inevitable, by the much earlier

Rumsfeld-Cheney victory in the post-

Vietnam contest between Congress and

the White House—over whether the

public state would control the deep

state, or vice versa.

HOOVERISM AND THE

DOOMSDAY MANIA: THE

INSTRUCTIVE DIFFERENCE

The Doomsday Mania, I would once

have said, had restored Hooverism. I

would now say that COG planning, in

restoring specific Hoover techniques,

has gone beyond Hooverism to

something far more dangerous. In

addition, some of the illegalities that

Hoover merely planned for (like

detention), Rumsfeld and Cheney, after

also planning for two decades,

implemented on September 11, 2001.

The COG measures implemented on

9/11 have supplemented Hoover’s

powers with parallel powers developed

by the CIA and NSA (as foreseen in the

Huston Plan), plus the worst FBI

illegalities from the emergency era of the

1960s. Torture, practiced by the FBI in

an extreme situation, became embodied

in legal memoranda as a standard way to

interrogate suspects. Preemptive murder

of opponents, as encouraged by the FBI

in Meridian and Chicago, is now the

standard practice of the drone program

initiated by Bush and Cheney and since

expanded by Obama. In brief, as I said

earlier, the aims of Hooverism were to

maintain the status quo, while the aim of

the Doomsday Mania has been explicitly

to change it.

Hoover’s actions against the Klan

were accompanied by similar illegal

actions against Martin Luther King, Jr.,

whom he once characterized, on the

record, as “the most notorious liar in the

country. ”73 The two campaigns, set side

by side, reveal Hoover’s commitment to

the status quo, against any forces, legal

or illegal, violent or nonviolent,

threatening change.

His tactics to crush the Klan were

clearly illegal. But they were in

response to murders and a challenge to

public order. They were also in their

way measured, and in their way less

disruptive of the peace than the “legal”

tactics of the Kennedy brothers in the

1960s—whose response to the challenge

at Ole Miss had resulted not only in

lethal violence but the responsive

determination of Bowers and others to

commit serial murders, in order to

induce an apocalyptic race war. 74

In this respect Hoover’s “deep state”

illegalities can be distinguished from

those we have witnessed since 9/11

against al-Qaeda. Hoover’s actions

were finite and narrowly targeted, in

order to achieve a successful

consolidation of federal law. His

methods were essentially nonviolent

against the nonviolent, violent against

the violent. 75 The implementation of

COG planning we have seen since 9/11

has been, in contrast, an erosion of law

and everyone’s liberty, with no end in

sight.

In this chapter I have tried to show

Hoover’s responsibility for developing

the traditions of suspending habeas

corpus and other constitutional liberties

that have been implemented in the last

decade. But we should also recognize

the huge difference between planning for

a suspension of liberty, and the

implementation of those plans. There is

no evidence that Hoover wanted to see

his emergency plans implemented by

state institutions including his own FBI.

But Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney,

after working on COG plans for almost

two decades, called publicly in 2000 for

“a process of transformation, which

even if it brings revolutionary change, is

likely to be a long one, absent some

catastrophic and catalyzing event—like

a new Pearl Harbor.” 76

THE EXPANSION OF SECRET

POWERS SINCE 9/11

With the implementation of COG

emergency responses to 9/11, we have

indeed seen an exponential expansion of

America as a dual state, or what Dana

Priest and William Arkin called “two

governments: the one . . . operated more

or less in the open: the other a parallel

top secret government . . . visible to only

a carefully vetted cadre.” 77

The second government, called by

Priest and Arkin “Top Secret America,”

should not be thought of as identical to

the deep state, but rather as the radically

expanded institutional base for the deep

state, ensuring an ever-greater share of

the national budget for top-down

programs to constrain dissent both

abroad and at home.

The unchecked expansion of this base

—much of it now outsourced—has

continued under Obama, even as

budgetary cutbacks have continued to

weaken the public government citizens

are familiar with. For example

CACI . . . recorded $36.4 million

in profits in the third quarter of

fiscal 2011. It hired four hundred

new employees and was looking

for another four hundred. Analysts

attributed its success to the

swelling cybersecurity and

intelligence markets and to its

lucrative contracts with the army

for intelligence and information

war services.78

A percentage of such profits are

inevitably dedicated to supporting those

Congressmen who will continue to back

swollen budget allocations for security.

These flows of funds further trivialize

the independence of Congress, to the

point where, as The Nation editor

Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in 2013,

“Bipartisan agreement in Washington

usually means citizens should hold on to

their wallets or get ready for another

threat to peace.” 79

Priest and Arkin note how Obama

campaigned in 2008 as a critic of a

number of covert programs, including

torture, renditions, and secret prisons—

yet in the end, torture aside, the new

administration, in the words of a CIA

observer, “changed virtually nothing.” 80

Indeed, after having promised great

openness, the Obama administration has

proceeded to indict more

whistleblowers than all previous

administrations combined, with a

vindictiveness that has brought a

reprimand from a federal judge. 81

Priest and Arkin’s book is of great

value for its research into a top secret

realm not normally described in the

governing media. But it is almost silent

about the human agents who have

brought us here: in their book Dick

Cheney is mentioned only once in

passing, and there is nothing at all about

the COG planning of the Doomsday

Project.

At one point a statement by Janet

Napolitano, Obama’s cabinet-level

Secretary of Homeland Security,

reminds Priest and Arkin of J. Edgar

Hoover and “the dark days of

McCarthyism, when . . . an obsessed and

paranoid FBI had drawn up a black list”

(the Security Index). 82 There is indeed a

sense in which America’s Doomsday

Mania today is derived from Hoover’s

obsessive penchant for surveillance and

control. But if we were to begin by

returning to the dual state as it operated

under Hoover, this would represent a

return to a far more limited form of

secret government than that oppressing

us today.

CONCLUSION

Since the 1950s, American history has

seen two competing narratives: one

relatively stable and benign, and one

posing a lawless and dangerous threat to

constitutional democracy. On the one

hand a succession of power-hungry men

have first amassed excessive powers

and then in consequence have self-

destructed or been ousted: Joe McCarthy

in the 1950s, Richard Nixon in 1974,

Oliver North in 1986, and Donald

Rumsfeld in 2006. 83 Their rise and fall

might suggest that American politics

essentially comprises a self-correcting,

homeostatic system, one in which

excessive power generates

counterforces to correct it. But this

appearance of equilibrium is misleading.

Each of these visible figures

exercised power because of their

connection to the subterranean

accumulation of illegal secret powers

assembled originally and principally by

J. Edgar Hoover. The departure of

individuals did not establish effective

legal checks and balances on the deep

powers behind them. The one serious

congressional effort to do this, after

Nixon’s resignation in 1974, was

successfully stymied, largely by two men

(Rumsfeld and Cheney) who went on to

plan successfully for the expansion and

implementation of these same powers.

The second narrative illustrates the

truth of the principle, well understood by

America’s Founding Fathers, that power,

unchecked, will continue to grow like a

cancer. This unchecked growth of the

security state has been reinforced by a

parallel and related development—the

unchecked accumulation of gross wealth

by the top 1 percent of the 1 percent.84 (It

has been estimated that the top 1 percent

now earn 25 percent of the nation’s

annual income, as opposed to 9 percent

in 1976. They now possess 40 percent of

the nation’s wealth, compared to just 7

percent for the bottom 80 percent of the

nation. 85)

The combined growth of great wealth

and the security state has radically

diminished the powers of the public

state (and above all Congress) to restore

equilibrium to the American political

system. This process, as many have

warned, is not at all homeostatic, but

threatens disaster if not brought under

control.

Corresponding to these two narratives

are two opposing prospects for

America’s future: one optimistic and one

gloomy. The development of the Internet

has provided new channels of

communication for those concerned

progressives and dissidents (including

“conspiracy theorists”) who are unheard

in the increasingly corporatized and

corrupt governing media. These in turn

have supplied a growing constituency in

support of those isolated and embattled

whistleblowers who have arisen in

virtually every agency contributing to the

unchecked security state. And we have

seen at least two successful bureaucratic

revolts in the last decade: first in the FBI

and the Justice Department against the

Terrorist Surveillance Program memos

inspired by Cheney, and then “the revolt

of the generals” in 2006 against Donald

Rumsfeld. 86

A pessimist would respond that these

developments have somewhat

rationalized and heightened the powers

of the security state. A rational

assessment of the data assembled in this

chapter gives no grounds for predicting

that the checks needed for democratic

checks and balances will soon emerge.

If they do not, a veneer of continuity will

mask the growing irrelevance of the

public state’s democratic institutions,

leaving them to debate fruitlessly—in

the same way that the Roman Senate

continued to debate as the Republic

slouched into Empire.

In terms of logical analysis, the likely

prospect would seem to be the

pessimistic one. But neither humans nor

their history are wholly logical. The last

century has seen a number of nonviolent

changes—even revolutions—that few

social scientists were able logically to

predict. At their head we should list the

contribution of Gandhian nonviolence to

the liberation of India, one of the

world’s largest and most exploited

nations. Since then we have seen other

such contributions: to the largely

nonviolent desegregation of the

American South, the nonviolent transfer

of power in South Africa, and the

nonviolent expulsion of Soviet troops

from Poland and Eastern Europe.

So it is from faith, rather than from

logic, that I am committed to the

optimistic prospect. I do so because of

the rewards offered by that truth that, as

Gandhi wrote, “is like a birth.” 87 And I

do so from faith, because, to quote

Gandhi yet again, “Just as the body

cannot exist without blood, so the soul

needs matchless and pure strength of

faith.” 88 Those of us who are old enough

have seen such leaders of faith—Gandhi,

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lech Walesa

—arise to deal with what is humanly

intolerable. As I suggest in the next

chapter, I believe that we can see such

leaders again.

CHAPTER 13

Why Americans

Must End

America’s Self-

Generating Wars

THE MOST URGENT POLITICAL CHALLENGE

TO THE WORLD TODAY IS HOW TO prevent

the so-called “pax Americana” from

progressively degenerating, like the

nineteenth-century so-called “pax

Britannica” before it, into major global

warfare. I say “so-called,” because each

“pax,” in its final stages, became less

and less peaceful, less and less orderly,

more and more a naked imposition of

belligerent, competitive power based on

inequality.

To define this prevention of war as an

achievable goal may sound pretentious.

But the necessary steps to be taken are

above all achievable here at home in

America. And what is needed is not

some radical and untested new policy,

but a much-needed realistic

reassessment and progressive scaling

back of two discredited policies that are

themselves new, and demonstrably

counterproductive.

I am referring above all to America’s

so-called “war on terror.” American

politics, both foreign and domestic, are

being increasingly deformed by a war on

terrorism that is counter-productive,

radically increasing the number of

perpetrators and victims of terrorist

attacks. It is also profoundly dishonest,

in that Washington’s policies actually

contribute to the funding and arming of

the al-Qaedists that it nominally

opposes.

Above all the war on terror is a self-

generating war, because, as many

experts have warned, it produces more

terrorists than it eliminates. 1 And it has

become inextricably combined with

America’s earlier self-generating and

hopelessly unwinnable war, the so-

called War on Drugs.

The two self-generating wars have in

effect become one. By launching a War

on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico,

America has contributed to a parastate

of organized terror in Colombia (the so-

called AUC) and an even bloodier reign

of terror in Mexico (with over 50,000

killed in the last eight years). 2 By

launching a war on terror in Afghanistan

in 2001, America has contributed to a

doubling of opium production there,

making Afghanistan now the source of

90 percent of the world’s heroin and

most of the world’s hashish. 3

Americans should be aware of the

overall pattern that drug production

repeatedly rises where America

intervenes militarily—Southeast Asia in

the 1950s and 1960s, Colombia and

Afghanistan since then. (Opium

cultivation also increased in Iraq after

the 2003 U.S. invasion.)4 And the

opposite is also true: where America

ceases to intervene militarily, notably in

Southeast Asia in the 1970s, drug

production declines. 5

Both of America’s self-generating

wars are lucrative to the private

interests that lobby for their

continuance.6 At the same time, both of

America’s self-generating wars

contribute to an increasing insecurity and

destabilization in America and in the

world.

Thus, by a paradoxical dialectic,

America’s New World Order

degenerates progressively into a New

World Disorder. And at home the

seemingly indomitable national security

state, beset by the problems of poverty,

income disparity, and drugs, becomes,

progressively, a national insecurity state.

The purpose of this chapter is to

argue, using the analogy of British errors

in the late nineteenth century, for a

progressive return to a more stable and

just international order, by a series of

concrete steps, some of them

incremental. Using the decline of Britain

as an example, I hope to demonstrate that

the solution cannot currently be expected

from within the current party political

system, but must come from people

outside that system.

THE FOLLIES OF THE LATE

NINETEENTH CENTURY PAX

BRITANNICA

The final errors of British imperial

leaders are particularly instructive for

our predicament today. In both cases

power in excess of defense needs led to

more and more unjust expansions of

influence. My remarks in the following

paragraphs about Britain (as later about

America) are one-sidedly negative,

ignoring positive achievements abroad

in the areas of health and education. But

the consolidation of British power led to

the impoverishment abroad of

previously wealthy countries like India,

and also of British workers at home.7

A main reason for the latter was, as

Kevin Phillips has demonstrated, the

increasing outward flight of British

investment capital and productive

capacity:

Thus did Britain slip into

circumstances akin to those of the

United States in the 1980s and most

of the 1990s—slumping

nonsupervisory wage levels and

declining basic industries on one

hand, and at the other end of the

scale a heyday for banks, financial

services, and securities, a sharp

rise in the portion of income

coming from investment, and a

stunning percentage of income and

assets going to the top 1 percent. 8

The dangers of increasing income and

wealth disparity in Britain were easily

recognized at the time, including by the

young politician Winston Churchill. 9 But

only a few noticed the penetrating

analysis by John A. Hobson in his book

Imperialism (1902)—that an

untrammeled search for profit-directed

capital abroad created a demand for an

oversized defense establishment to

protect it, leading in turn to wider and

wilder use abroad of Britain’s armies.

Hobson defined the imperialism of his

time, which he dated from about 1870,

as “a debasement . . . of genuine

nationalism, by attempts to overflow its

natural banks and absorb the near or

distant territory of reluctant and

unassimilable peoples. ”10

The earlier British empire could be

described by a British historian in 1883

as having been “acquired in a fit of

absence of mind,” but this could not be

said of Cecil Rhodes’s advances in

Africa. Maldistribution of wealth was an

initial cause of British expansion, and

also an inevitable consequence of it.

Much of Hobson’s book attacked

Western exploitation of the Third World,

especially in Africa and Asia. 11 He thus

echoed Thucydides’s description of how

Athens was undone by the overreaching

greed ( pleonexia) of its unnecessary

Sicilian expedition. 12

Both the apogee of the British empire

and the start of its decline can be dated

to the 1850s. In that decade London

instituted direct control over India,

displacing the nakedly exploitative East

India Company. But in the same decade

Britain sided with France’s nakedly

expansionist Napoleon III (and the

decadent Ottoman empire) in his

ambitions against Russia’s status in the

Holy Land. Although Britain was

victorious in that war, historians have

since judged that victory to be a chief

cause of the breakdown in the balance of

power that had prevailed in Europe

since the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Thus the legacy of the war for Britain

was a more modernized and efficient

army, together with a more insecure and

unstable world. (Historians may in

future come to judge that Obama’s

ventures in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine

played a similar role in ending an era of

U.S.-Russian détente.)13

The Crimean War also saw the

emergence of perhaps the world’s first

significant antiwar movement in Britain,

even though that movement is often

remembered chiefly for its role in ending

the active political roles of its main

leaders, John Cobden and John Bright.14

In the short run, Britain’s governments

and leaders moved to the right, leading

(for example) to Gladstone’s

bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 to

recover the debts owed by the Egyptians

to private British investors.

Reading Hobson’s economic analysis

in the light of Thucydides, we can focus

on the moral factor of emergent hubristic

greed ( pleonexia) fostered by

unrestrained British power. In 1886 the

discovery of colossal gold deposits in

the nominally independent Boer

Republic of the Transvaal attracted the

attention of Cecil Rhodes, already

wealthy from South African diamonds

and mining concessions he had acquired

by deceit in Matabeleland. Rhodes now

saw an opportunity to acquire goldfields

in the Transvaal as well, by

overthrowing the Boer government with

the support of the uitlanders or

foreigners who had flocked to the

Transvaal.

In 1895, after direct plotting with the

uitlanders failed, Rhodes, in his

capacity as Prime Minister of the British

Cape Colony, sponsored an invasion of

Transvaal with the so-called “Jameson

Raid,” a mixed band of Mounted Police

and mercenary volunteers. The raid was

not only a failure, but a scandal: Rhodes

was forced to resign as Prime Minister

and his brother went to jail. The details

of the Jameson raid and resulting Boer

War are too complex to be recounted

here; but the end result was that after the

Boer War the goldfields fell largely into

the hands of Rhodes.

The next step in Rhodes’s well-funded

expansiveness was his vision of a Cape-

to-Cairo railway through colonies all

controlled by Britain. As we shall see in

a moment, this vision provoked a

competing French vision of an east-east

railway, leading to the first of a series of

crises from imperial competition that

progressively escalated toward World

War I.

According to Carroll Quigley, Rhodes

also founded a secret society for the

further expansion of the British empire,

an offshoot of which was the Round

Table that in turn generated the Royal

Institute of International Affairs (RIIA).

In 1917 some members of a parallel

American Round Table also helped

found the RIIA’s sister organization, the

New York–based Council on Foreign

Relations (CFR). 15

Some have found Quigley’s argument

overstated. But whether one agrees with

him or not, one can see a continuity

between the expansionist acquisitiveness

of Rhodes in Africa in the 1890s and the

postwar acquisitiveness of U.K. and

U.S. oil corporations in the U.S.-backed

coups in Iran (1953), Indonesia (1965),

and Cambodia (1970).16 In all these

cases private acquisitive greed (albeit of

corporations rather than an individual)

led to state violence and/or war as a

matter of public policy. And the

outcomes enriched and strengthened

private corporations in what I have

called the American war machine, thus

weakening those institutions representing

the public interest.

My main point is that the progressive

buildup of the British navy and armies

provoked, predictably, a responsive

buildup from other powers, particularly

France and Germany; and this ultimately

made World War I (and its sequel, World

War II) all but inevitable. In retrospect it

is easy to see that the arms buildup

contributed, disastrously, not to security

but to more and more perilous insecurity,

dangerous not just to the imperial

powers themselves, but also to the

world. Because American global

dominance surpasses what Britain’s ever

was, since the end of the Cold War we

have not yet seen a comparable arms

race from other states; but increasingly

we are beginning to see a backlash

buildup (or what the media call

“terrorism”) from increasingly

oppressed peoples.

In retrospect one can see also that the

progressive impoverishment of India and

other colonies guaranteed that the empire

would become progressively more

unstable, and doomed in its last days to

be shut down. This was not obvious at

the time; and comparatively few Britons

in the nineteenth century, other than

Hobson, challenged the political

decisions that led from the Long

Depression of the 1870s to the European

“Scramble for Africa,” and the related

arms race.17 Yet when we look back

today on these decisions, and the absurd

but ominous crises they led to in distant

corners of Africa like Fashoda (1898)

and Agadir (1911), we have to marvel at

the short-sighted and narrow stupidity of

the so-called “statesmen” of that era.18

We also note how foolish,

international crises could be initially

provoked by very small, uncontrolled,

bureaucratic cabals. The Fashoda

incident in South Sudan involved a small

troupe of 132 French officers and

soldiers who had trekked for 14 months,

in vain hopes of establishing a west-to-

east French presence across Africa (thus

breaching Rhodes’s vision of a north-to-

south British presence). 19 The 1911

provocative arrival (in the so-called

“Panzer-sprung”) of the German

gunboat Panzer at Agadir in Morocco

was the foolish brainchild of a Deputy

Secretary of Foreign Affairs; its chief

result was the cementing of the Anglo-

French Entente Cordiale, thus

contributing significantly to Germany’s

defeat in World War I.20

THE PAX AMERICANA IN THE

LIGHT OF THE PAX BRITANNICA

The world is not condemned to repeat

this tragedy under the Pax Americana.

Global interdependence and above all

communications have greatly improved.

We possess the knowledge, the abilities,

and the incentives to understand

historical processes more skillfully than

before. Above all it is increasingly

evident to a global minority that

American hypermilitarism, in the name

of security, is becoming—much like

British hypermilitarism in the nineteenth

century—a threat to everyone’s security,

including America’s, by inducing and

increasingly seeking wider and wider

wars.

There is one consolation for

Americans in this increasing global dis-

equilibrium. As the causes for global

insecurity become more and more

located in our own country, so also do

the remedies. More than their British

predecessors, Americans have an

opportunity that other peoples do not, to

diminish global tensions and move

toward a more equitable global regimen.

Of course one cannot predict that such a

restoration can be achieved. But the

disastrous end of the Pax Britannica

suggests that it is necessary. For

American unilateral expansionism, like

Britain’s before it, is now contributing to

a breakdown of the understandings and

international legal arrangements (notably

those of the U.N. Charter) that for some

decades contributed to relative stability.

It needs to be stated clearly that the

American arms buildup today is the

leading cause in the world of a global

arms build-up—one that is ominously

reminiscent of the arms race, fuelled by

the British armaments industry, which

led to the 1911 Agadir incident, and

soon after to World War I. But today’s

arms buildup cannot be called an “arms

race”: it is so dominated by America

(and its NATO allies, required by NATO

policy to have compatible armaments)

that the responsive arms sales of Russia

and China are small by comparison:

In 2010 . . . the United States

maintained its dominating position

in the global arms bazaar, signing

$21.3 billion in worldwide arms

sales, or 52.7 percent of all

weapons deals. . . . Russia was

second with $7.8 billion in arms

sales in 2010, or 19.3 percent of

the market, compared with $12.8

billion in 2009. Following the

United States and Russia in sales

were France, Britain, China,

Germany and Italy. 21

(A year later America’s total

dominance of overseas arms sales had

increased, to represent 79 percent of

global arms sales: “Overseas weapons

sales by the United States totaled $66.3

billion last year, or more than three-

quarters of the global arms market,

valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia

was a distant second, with $4.8 billion

in deals.” 22)

And what is NATO’s primary activity

today requiring arms? Not defense

against Russia, but support for America

in its self-generating war on terror, in

Afghanistan as it had been in Iraq. The

war on terror should be seen for what it

really is: a pretext for maintaining a

dangerously oversized U.S. military, in

an increasingly unstable exercise of

unjust power.

In other words, America is by far the

chief country flooding the world with

armaments today. It is imperative that

Americans force a reassessment of this

incentive to global poverty and

insecurity. We need to recall

Eisenhower’s famous warning in 1953

that “Every gun that is made, every

warship launched, every rocket fired

signifies, is in the final sense, a theft

from those who hunger and are not fed,

those who are cold and are not

clothed.” 23

It is similarly worth recalling that

President Kennedy, in his American

University speech of June 10, 1963,

called for a vision of peace that would

explicitly not be “a Pax Americana

enforced on the world by American

weapons of war.” 24 His vision was

wise, if short-lived. After sixty years of

the American security system—the so-

called “pax Americana”—America

itself is more and more caught up in an

increasingly paranoid condition of

psychological insecurity. Traditional

features of American culture—such as

respect for habeas corpus and

international law—are being jettisoned

because of a so-called “terrorist threat”

that is largely of America’s own making.

William Arkin has written that

Washington’s fear has created “the very

real predicament—and the danger—of a

nation permanently at war.” 25

Small bureaucratic cabals in

Washington have also inadvertently

contributed to larger disasters. The 1998

destruction of the U.S. embassies in

Kenya and Tanzania was two days after

a letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri,

published in a London Arab newspaper,

promised retribution for the CIA’s

illegal kidnapping and rendition of al-

Qaeda militants in Albania, resulting in

their torture and killing in Egypt. 26

The same kidnapping illustrates

another risk of small cabals operating

within a large bureaucracy: because of

the stovepiping of their intelligence, they

may end up, as in Bosnia, fighting on

opposite sides. The Dutch official

observer Cees Wiebes reported a

decade ago that, while one CIA cabal

was kidnapping al-Qaedists in the

Bosnian conflict, another cabal in the

Pentagon was supplying al-Qaedists

there.

Arms purchased by Iran and Turkey

with the financial backing of Saudi

Arabia made their way by night

from the Middle East. Initially

aircraft from Iran Air were used,

but as the volume increased they

were joined by a mysterious fleet

of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.

The report [by Wiebes] stresses

that the US was “very closely

involved” in the airlift. Mojahedin

fighters were also flown in, but

they were reserved as shock troops

for especially hazardous

operations. . . . The CIA’s main

opponents in Bosnia were now the

mojahedin fighters and their Iranian

trainers—whom the Pentagon had

been helping to supply months

earlier. 27

The result aggravated a chaos

profitable only to those private military

corporations (PMCs), like MPRI and

Blackwater, who were given contracts to

deal with it.

THE COVERT U.S.-SAUDI

ALLIANCE AND THE WAR ON

TERROR

Of the $66.3 billion in U.S. overseas

arms sales in 2011, over half, or $33.4

billion, consisted of sales to Saudi

Arabia. This included dozens of Apache

and Black Hawk helicopters, weapons

described by The New York Times, as

needed for defense against Iran.28

These Saudi arms sales are not

incidental; they reflect an agreement

between the two countries to offset the

flow of U.S. dollars to pay for Saudi

oil. 29

The wealth of the two nations, the

United States and Saudi Arabia, has

become more and more interdependent.

This is ironic. In the words of a leaked

U.S. cable, “Saudi donors remain the

chief financiers of Sunni militant groups

like Al Qaeda.” 30 As noted in chapter 6,

the Rabita al-Alam al-Islami or Muslim

World League, launched and largely

funded by the Saudi royal family, has

provided an international meeting place

for international Salafists including

some al-Qaeda leaders. 31

In short, the wealth generated by the

Saudi-American relationship is funding

both the al-Qaedists of the world today

and also America’s self-generating war

against them. The result is an

incremental militarization of the world

abroad and America at home, as new

warfronts in the so-called “war on

terror” spin off, predictably, into

previously stable areas like Mali.32

The media tend to present the “war on

terror” as a conflict between lawful

governments and fanatical peace-hating

Islamist fundamentalists. In fact in most

countries, the United States and Britain

not excepted, there is a long history of

occasional collaboration with the very

forces that at other times they oppose.

And it is sometimes American

lawlessness that has invited al-Qaeda’s

terrorist reaction. As previously noted,

the destruction of the U.S. embassies in

Kenya and Tanzania was two days after

a letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri

promised retribution for the CIA’s

illegal kidnapping and rendition of al-

Qaeda militants in Albania, resulting in

their torture and execution in Egypt. 33

Today America’s foreign policies and

above all covert operations are

increasingly lawless and chaotic. In

some countries, notably Afghanistan, the

United States is fighting al-Qaedists that

the CIA supported in the 1980s, and that

are still supported today by our nominal

allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In

some countries, notably Libya, the

United States has provided protection

and indirect support to the same kind of

al-Qaedists. In Kosovo, the United

States helped bring al-Qaedists to

power.34

One country where American

authorities conceded its clients were

supporting al-Qaedists is Yemen. As

Christopher Boucek reported some years

ago to the Carnegie Endowment of

International Peace,

Islamist extremism in Yemen is the

result of a long and complicated set

of developments. A large number of

Yemeni nationals participated in the

anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan

during the 1980s. After the Soviet

occupation ended, the Yemeni

government encouraged its citizens

to return and also permitted foreign

veterans to settle in Yemen. Many

of these Arab Afghans were co-

opted by the regime and integrated

into the state’s various security

apparatuses. Such co-optation was

also used with individuals detained

by the Yemeni government after the

September 11 terrorist attacks. As

early as 1993, the U.S. State

Department noted in a now-

declassified intelligence report that

Yemen was becoming an important

stop for many fighters leaving

Afghanistan. The report also

maintained that the Yemeni

government was either unwilling or

unable to curb their activities.

Islamism and Islamist activists

were used by the regime throughout

the 1980s and 1990s to suppress

domestic opponents, and during the

1994 civil war Islamists fought

against southern forces. 35

In March 2011 the same scholar,

Christopher Boucek, observed that

America’s war on terror had resulted in

the propping up of an unpopular

government, thus helping it avoid needed

reforms:

Our policy on Yemen has been . . .

terrorism and security and al-Qaida

in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP],

to the exclusion of almost

everything else. I think, despite

what—what people in the

administration say, we have been

focused on terrorism. We have not

been focused on the systemic

challenges that Yemen faces:

unemployment, governance abuses,

corruption. I think these are the

things that will bring down the

state. It’s not AQAP. . . . everyone

in Yemen sees that we’re

supporting the regimes, at the

expense of the Yemeni people. 36

Stated more bluntly: One major reason

why Yemen (like other countries)

remains backward and a fertile ground

for al-Qaedist terrorism is America’s

war on terror itself.

America’s is not the only foreign

security policy contributing to the crisis

in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has had a stake

in reinforcing the al-Qaedist influence in

republican Yemen, ever since the Saudi

royal family in the 1960s used

conservative hill tribes in northern

Yemen to repel an attack on southern

Saudi Arabia by the Nasser-backed

republican Yemeni government. 37

These machinations of governments

and their intelligence agencies can

create conditions of impenetrable

obscurity. For example, as Sen. John

Kerry has reported, one of the top

leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arab

Peninsula (AQAP) “is a Saudi citizen

who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia

from Guantanamo in November 2007

and returned to militancy [in Yemen]

after completing a rehabilitation course

in Saudi Arabia.” 38

Like other nations, America is no

stranger to the habit of making deals

with al-Qaedists, to let them fight abroad

in areas of mutual interest—such as

Bosnia—in exchange for not acting as

terrorists at home. This practice clearly

contributed to the World Trade Center

bombing of 1993, when at least two of

the bombers had been protected from

arrest because of their participation in a

Brooklyn-based program preparing

Islamists for Bosnia. As noted earlier, in

1994 the FBI secured the release in

Canada of a U.S.-al-Qaeda double agent

at the Brooklyn Center, Ali Mohamed,

who promptly went on to Kenya where

(according to The 9/11 Commission

Report) he “led” the organizers of the

1998 attack on the U.S. Embassy. 39

SAUDI ARABIAN SUPPORT FOR

TERRORISTS

Perhaps the foremost practitioner of this

game is Saudi Arabia, which has not

only exported al-Qaedists to all parts of

the globe but (as previously noted) also

has financed them, sometimes in alliance

with the United States. It is estimated

that Saudi Arabia has spent at least $87

billion to propagate Wahhabism abroad

during two recent decades. 40 And a New

York Times article in 2010 about leaked

diplomatic cables quoted from one of the

diplomatic dispatches: “Saudi donors

remain the chief financiers of Sunni

militant groups like Al Qaeda.” 41

Back in 2007 the London Sunday

Times also reported that “wealthy

Saudis remain the chief financiers of

worldwide terror networks. ‘If I could

somehow snap my fingers and cut off the

funding from one country, it would be

Saudi Arabia,’ said Stuart Levey, the

U.S. Treasury official in charge of

tracking terror financing.” 42

Similar reports of Saudi funding have

come from authorities in Iraq, Pakistan,

and Afghanistan, according to Rachel

Ehrenfeld:

Pakistani police reported in 2009

that Saudi Arabia’s charities

continue to fund al Qaeda, the

Taliban and Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-

Tayyiba. The report said the Saudis

gave $15 million to jihadists,

including those responsible for

suicide attacks in Pakistan and the

death of former Pakistani Prime

Minister Benazir Bhutto.

In May 2010, Buratha News

Agency, an independent news

source in Iraq, reported on a leaked

Saudi intelligence document

showing continued Saudi

governmental support for al Qaeda

in Iraq [now part of the Islamic

State of Iraq and al-Sham or ISIS]

in the form of cash and weapons. . .

. An article in the May 31, 2010,

edition of The Sunday Times in

London revealed that the Afghan

financial intelligence unit,

FinTRACA, reported that since

2006, at least $1.5 billion from

Saudi Arabia was smuggled into

Afghanistan, headed most probably

to the Taliban. 43

However the Saudi backing of al-

Qaeda was not, according to the London

Sunday Times, limited to funds:

In recent months, Saudi religious

scholars have caused consternation

in Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas

calling for the destruction of the

great Shi’ite shrines in Najaf and

Karbala in Iraq, some of which

have already been bombed. And

while prominent members of the

ruling al-Saud dynasty regularly

express their abhorrence of

terrorism, leading figures within the

kingdom who advocate extremism

are tolerated.

Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, the

chief justice, who oversees

terrorist trials, was recorded on

tape in a mosque in 2004,

encouraging young men to fight in

Iraq. “Entering Iraq has become

risky now,” he cautioned. “It

requires avoiding those evil

satellites and those drone aircraft,

which own every corner of the

skies over Iraq. If someone knows

that he is capable of entering Iraq in

order to join the fight, and if his

intention is to raise up the word of

God, then he is free to do so.” 44

THE EXAMPLE OF MALI

Something similar is happening today in

Africa, where Saudi Wahhabist

fundamentalism “has grown in recent

years in Mali with young imams

returning from studying on the Arab

peninsula.” 45 The world press, including

Al Jazeera, has reported on the

destruction of historic tombs by local al-

Qaedists:

Fighters from the al-Qaeda-linked

group Ansar Dine, controlling

northern Mali, have destroyed two

tombs at the ancient Djingareyber

mud mosque in Timbuktu, an

endangered World Heritage site,

witnesses say. . . . The new

destruction comes after attacks last

week on other historic and

religious landmarks in Timbuktu

that UNESCO called “wanton

destruction.” Ansar Dine has

declared the ancient Muslim

shrines “haram,” or forbidden in

Islam. The Djingareyber mosque is

one of the most important in

Timbuktu and was one of the fabled

city’s main attractions before the

region became a no-go area for

tourists. Ansar Dine has vowed to

continue destroying all the shrines

“without exception” amid an

outpouring of grief and outrage both

at home and abroad. 46

But most of these stories (including al

Jazeera’s) have failed to point out that

the destruction of tombs has long been a

Wahhabi practice not only endorsed, but

also carried out by the Saudi

government:

In 1801 and 1802, the Saudi

Wahhabis under Abdul Aziz ibn

Muhammad ibn Saud attacked and

captured the holy Muslim cities of

Karbala and Najaf in Iraq,

massacred parts of the Muslim

population and destroyed the tombs

of Husayn ibn Ali who is the

grandson of Muhammad, and son of

Ali (Ali bin Abu Talib), the son-in-

law of Muhammad. In 1803 and

1804 the Saudis captured Makkah

and Medina and destroyed

historical monuments and various

holy Muslim sites and shrines, such

as the shrine built over the tomb of

Fatimah, the daughter of

Muhammad, and even intended to

destroy the grave of Muhammad

himself as idolatrous. In 1998 the

Saudis bulldozed and poured

gasoline over the grave of Aminah

bint Wahb, the mother of

Muhammad, causing resentment

throughout the Muslim World.47

THE CHANCE OF PEACE AND

INSECURITY, THE CHIEF

IMPEDIMENT TO IT

Today one must distinguish between the

Saudi Arabian Kingdom and the

Wahhabism promoted by senior Saudi

clerics and some members of the Saudi

royal family. King Abdullah in particular

has reached out to other religions,

visiting the Vatican in 2007, and

encouraged an interfaith conference with

Christian and Jewish leaders, which

took place in 2008.

In 2002 Abdullah, as Crown Prince,

also submitted a proposal for Arab-

Israeli peace to a summit of Arab

League nations. The plan, which has

been endorsed by Arab League

governments on many occasions, called

for normalizing relations between the

entire Arab region and Israel, in

exchange for a complete withdrawal

from the occupied territories (including

East Jerusalem) and a “just settlement”

of the Palestinian refugee crisis based on

UN Resolution 194. It was spurned in

2002 by Israel’s Sharon and also by

Bush and Cheney, who at the time were

determined to go to war in Iraq. But as

David Ottaway of the Woodrow Wilson

Center has noted,

Abdullah’s 2002 peace plan

remains an intriguing possible basis

for U.S.-Saudi cooperation on the

Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Abdullah’s proposal was endorsed

by the entire Arab League at its

2002 summit; Israeli President

Shimon Peres and Olmert both

referred to it favorably; and Barack

Obama, who chose the Saudi-

owned al Arabiya television station

for his first interview after taking

office, praised Abdullah for his

“great courage” in making the

peace proposal. However, the

presumed new Israeli prime

minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has

strongly opposed the Saudi plan,

particularly the idea that East

Jerusalem should be the capital of a

Palestinian state. 48

Although the plan now has less

relevance, in 2009 Israeli President

Shimon Peres welcomed the initiative;

and George Mitchell, President Obama’s

special envoy to the Middle East,

announced in the same year that

President Barack Obama’s

administration intended to “incorporate”

the initiative into its Middle East

policy.49

These voices of support indicate that

a peace agreement in the Middle East is

theoretically possible, but by no means

do they make it likely. Any peace

settlement would require trust, and trust

is difficult when all parties are beset by

a sense of insecurity about their nations’

futures. Pro-Zionist commentators like

Charles Krauthammer recall that for

thirty years before Camp David, the

destruction of Israel was “the unanimous

goal of the Arab League.” 50 Many

Palestinians, and most of Hamas, fear

that a peace settlement would leave

unsatisfied, and indeed extinguish, their

demands for a just settlement of

grievances.

Insecurity is particularly widespread

in the Middle East because of the

widespread resentment there against

injustice, which insecurity both grows

from and propagates. Most of the global

status quo has its origins in injustice; but

the injustice in the Middle East, on all

sides, is extreme, recent, and ongoing. I

say this only to remind Americans that

the issues of security and justice cannot

be separated.

Above all compassion is needed. We

as Americans must understand that both

Israelis and Palestinians live in

conditions not remote from a state of

war; yet both have reason to fear that a

peace settlement might leave them even

worse off than in their present

uncomfortable situation. Too many

innocent civilians have been killed in the

Middle East. American actions should

not increase that number.

This sense of insecurity, the major

impediment to peace, is not confined to

the Middle East. Since 9/11 Americans

have experienced the anguish of

insecurity, and this is the major reason

why there is so little American

resistance to the manifest follies of the

Bush-Cheney-Obama Global War on

Terror (GWOT). 51

The war on terror promised to make

America more secure, yet as practiced it

continues to guarantee the proliferation

of America’s terrorist enemies. It also

continues to disseminate the war into

new battlefields, notably Pakistan,

Yemen, Somalia, Mali, and now Kenya.

By thus creating its own enemies, the

war on terror, now solidly entrenched in

bureaucratic inertia, seems likely to

continue unabated until it is changed. In

this it is much like the equally ill-

considered War on Drugs, dedicated to

maintaining the high drug costs and drug

profits that attract new traffickers.

Above all this contributes to Islamic

insecurity as well, causing more and

more Muslims to deal with the fear that

civilians, not just al-Qaedist terrorists,

will be the victims of drone attacks.

Insecurity in the Middle East is the

major obstacle to peace there.

Palestinians live in daily fear of

oppression by West Bank settlers and

retaliation by the Israeli state. The

Israelis live in constant fear of hostile

neighbors. So does the Saudi royal

family. Insecurity and instability have

increased together since 9/11 and the

war on terror.

Middle Eastern insecurity replicates

itself on a wider and wider scale. Israeli

fear of Iran and Hizbollah is matched by

Iranian fear of Israeli threats of massive

attacks on its nuclear installations. For

this reason Zbigniew Brzezinski, a

former U.S. hawk, warned in 2012 that

an Israeli attack on Iran could lead to a

longer war that spread elsewhere. 52

Above all, in my opinion, Americans

should fear the insecurity caused by

drone attacks. If not soon stopped,

America’s drone attacks threaten to do

what America’s atomic attacks did in

1945: lead to a world in which many

powers, not just one, possess this

weapon and may possibly use it. In this

case the most likely new target by far

would be the United States.

How long will it be, I wonder, before

a prevailable force of Americans will

recognize the predictable course of this

self-generating war, and mobilize

against it?

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

As stated above, the purpose of this

chapter is to argue, using the analogy of

British errors in the late nineteenth

century, for a progressive return, on both

the official and popular level, to a more

stable and just international order, by the

following series of concrete steps, some

of them incremental:

1. Immediately repeal The

Authorization for Use of Military

Force (AUMF), Pub. L. 107–40,

codified at 115 Stat. 224, passed

by the United States Congress on

September 14, 2001, and signed

into law by President Bush four

days later. Because AUMF

authorized military force only

against targets responsible for

9/11, some have called for a new

resolution expanding its scope;

but others have pointed to the

counterproductivity of expanding

the militarization of U.S. foreign

policy.53

2. Much of the recent intensification

of American militarism can be

traced to the “state of

emergency” proclaimed on

September 14, 2001, and

renewed annually by American

presidents ever since. We need

an immediate termination of this

state of emergency, and a

reassessment of all the so-called

“continuity of government”

(COG) measures associated with

it—warrantless surveillance,

warrantless detention, and the

militarization of domestic

American security. 54

3. Progressively phase-out the

violent aspects of the so-called

“war on terror,” while retaining

traditional law enforcement

means for dealing with terrorists.

4. Progressively reduce America’s

bloated military and intelligence

budgets, over and above that

already contemplated for

financial reasons.

5. Return to strategies for dealing

with the problem of terrorists

that rely primarily on civilian

policing and intelligence.

Forty years ago I would have

appealed to Congress to take these steps

to defuse the state of paranoia we are

living under. But I have come to see that

today’s Congress itself is dominated by

the deep state powers that profit from

what I have called “America’s global

war machine.” The so-called

“statesmen” of America are as dedicated

to the preservation of American

dominance as were their British

predecessors.

But to say this is not to despair of

America’s ability to change direction.

We should keep in mind that four

decades ago domestic political protest

played a critical role in helping to end

an unjustified war in Vietnam. It is true

that in 2003 similar protests—involving

one million Americans—failed to

impede America’s entry into an

unjustified war in Iraq. Nevertheless, the

large number of protesters, assembled

under relatively short notice, was

impressive. The question is whether

protesters can adapt their tactics to new

realities.

A healthy nation requires protest.

Imagine for a moment that the post-9/11

products of COG, including warrantless

surveillance of the entire American

people, had operated with equal

efficiency in the 1960s and 1970s.

America would not have had a powerful

antiwar movement; and America might

still be fighting in Southeast Asia, much

as Russia, since the time of Tolstoy, has

been mired in an unwinnable war in the

Caucasus. Few today would deny that

America was well served to get rid of

the Vietnam War; even Mobil, which had

lobbied for that war, today has access to

Vietnam’s offshore oil that it had

coveted all along. 55

But under the guise of Continuity of

Government planning, the American war

machine has been preparing for forty

years to neutralize street antiwar

protests. 56 Taking cognizance of this, and

using the folly of British hyper-

militarism as an example, today’s

antiwar movement must learn how to

apply coordinated pressure within

American institutions—not just by

“occupying” the streets with the aid of

the homeless. It is not enough simply to

denounce, as did Churchill in 1908, the

increasing disparity of wealth between

rich and poor. One must go beyond this

to see the origins of this disparity in

dysfunctional policies that can be

changed. And one of the chief of these is

the so-called “war on terror.”

The Occupy Movement, which

attracted many fine people with energy

and enthusiasm, was in my opinion

destined never to be a prevailable force

in this country. Its amorphousness and

lack of leadership guaranteed that it

would remain a marginal movement, for

it tolerated among its members a few

whose violent tactics assured that

Occupy would never win the hearts and

minds of enough Americans to make a

difference.

In my opinion Occupy was a learning

experience: one that taught how

necessary is disciplined nonviolence to

any popular movement that will

successfully challenge top-down

government. For that discipline there

must be leaders; and though leadership

at any level of society requires vigilant

watching, it is necessary. One has only

to look at the rapid erosion of the non-

violent civil rights movement after the

murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

No one can predict the success of a

new nonviolent movement. But I believe

that global developments will persuade

more and more Americans that one is

necessary. It could and should appeal to

a broad spectrum of the American

electorate, from the viewers of

Democracy Now on the left to the

libertarian followers of Murray

Rothbard, Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell

on the right.

And I believe also that a well-

coordinated nonviolent antiwar minority

—of from two to five million, acting

with the resources of truth and common

sense on their side—can win. America’s

core political institutions are at present

both dysfunctional and unpopular:

Congress in particular has an approval

rating of less than 10 percent. A more

serious problem is the determined

resistance of corporate and personal

wealth to reasonable reforms; but the

more nakedly wealth shows its

undemocratic influence, the more

evident will become the need to

organize against it. Currently much

wealth has targeted for removal

Congress members who have been guilty

of compromise to solve government

problems. Surely there is an American

majority out there to be mobilized for a

return to common sense.

Clearly new strategies and techniques

of protest will be needed. It is not the

purpose here to define them, but I

predict that future protests—or

cyberprotests—will require more

skillful use of the Internet. That is why

the revelations of Edward Snowden are

so significant: they reveal how the great

new hope for a global civil society—the

Internet—is being co-opted while few

noticed.

I repeat that one cannot be confident

of victory in the struggle for sanity

against special interests and ignorant

ideologues. But with the increasing

danger of a calamitous international

conflict, the need to mobilize for sanity

is increasingly clear. The study of

history is one of the most effective ways

to avoid repeating it.

Are these hopes for protest mere

wishful thinking? Very possibly. But,

wishful or not, I consider them to be

necessary.

EPILOGUE

Greek Theater

Mario Savio and the

Socratic Quest

But in changing the city’s desires

instead of complying with them . . .

that is the only business of a good

citizen.

—Plato, Gorgias 517 B-C

It has taken weeks

of unsettled half-awareness

for me to recognize

the student wrestled to the ground

by six Cohen Freedom’s Orator 213

policemen in uniforms

a baton menacing his neck and tie

(an arm across his throat

to keep him from speaking)

on San Francisco Chronicle December

9 1964

the

cover of this book

Rosenfeld Subversives

about how J. Edgar Hoover

slipped lies to the San Francisco

Examiner

advancing the career of Ronald

Reagan Rosenfeld Subversives 212, 227

is Mario Savio

leader of Berkeley Free Speech Movement

on the stage of the Greek Theater

wrecking December 7 1964; Rosenfeld

the well-planned closure

Subversives 224

of the assembly called to proclaim

an end to the protests and sit-ins

of the Free Speech Movement

and the inauguration

of a new era of freedom under

law

Rosenfeld Subversives 223

by an ambitious professor

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 213–14

hoping thereby to become

our next Chancellor

who defended the war on national

TV

and is now less googled

than his daughter a language poet

The anticlimax when Leslie Scalapino

Mario

came back out only to announce

there would be a Free Speech

rally

on the Cohen Freedom’s Orator 213–14

Sproul Hall steps

Rosenfeld Subversives 224

up-ended my own planned life

I was just a few yards away

at the same camera angle

one of those who had urged

the students to trust

the decency of those in power

my head then filled with Anglo-Latin

verse from the ninth century

why the return of a cuckoo in spring

spoke to the heart

expressing aspirations of

friendship

more deeply than Virgil could

Scott Alcuin’s Versus de Cuculo

and did more to invent Europe

at a higher level—

Christianus sum

I am a Christian

non possum militare—

I cannot

make war

Acta Maximiliani 1.3

than the battle stopping the

Moors

on the banks of the Loire

two different kinds of power

Douglass Gandhi and the Unspeakable 25

βία the power of dominance

versus πείθειν the

violence Arendt 93

power of persuasion

Schell Unconquerable World 218

the cop who thanked Howard Zinn

for his talk to the Police

Academy

then pleaded with him desperately

to please leave the antiwar blockade

before a little later

battering him with an outsized club

Ellsberg

versus Mario inspiring the crowd

to immobilize the campus police

car

till Jack Weinberg inside it was

released Cohen Freedom’s Orator 98–12

the power to transcend enmity

as I had seen in an iconic

moment

alone reading Plato’s Gorgias

in the Ambassador’s huge bed

when I was chargé d’affaires in

Warsaw—

stand-in for absent

that the way to change the world

ambassador

was not through international treaties

but through changing the city’s

desires

Plato Gorgias 503–21

the power of persuasion

versus that of the nightstick

or even the diplomatic service

with all its tempting frills—

the cook the chauffeur

that flag up

ahead on the limo

the house party up the Hudson

where baffled ducks were released

for the half-drunk guests to shoot

the sit-down banquet at

Schönbrunn Vienna Imperial Palace

for six hundred people

served by liveried footmen—

which I willingly abandoned

so I could teach in a university

the heritage of the Patrologia Latina

which I had skimmed so greedily

my first semester back

and then Dante la mala condotta

è la cagion che’l

misguidance

mondo ha fatto reo

e non

is why the world goes wrong

natura che’n voi sia corrotta

Danteand not your nature that is corrupt

Purgatorio 16:103–05

Well—little could I foresee

how Mario in an instant

(who himself had been inspired

by the plays of Sophocles

and Aeschylus and Euripides

before

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 35

being beaten in Mississippi

for walking in public with a black man

as part of Freedom Summer)

had

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 59–60

changed me from a Latinist

into an activist

no longer a mere spectator

(as I had been five days earlier

when the students filed into Sproul Hall

singing We shall overcome)

that December 2 1964; Rosenfeld 216–

22

same evening I spoke

Scott Charlie Sellers 1

at the crisis faculty meeting

and only one month later

my first Cohen Freedom’s Orator 214–15

public appeal

to get troops out of Vietnam

which though I could not know it

would soon bring a painful end

to my evenings with Milosz

debating the right English

for what is poetry

that does not save

nations or peoples?

a

Milosz New Collected Poems 78

heartbreaking loss at the time

Haven An Invisible Rope 69

but not one that deterred me

as much as the crazy violence

that developed after Mario

moved away from leadership

not

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 253

wanting the Movement

to become too dependent on him

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 237–38

in the dramatic struggle between

two kinds of decency

one struggling for an end

to racial hiring

in the local supermarkets

one that Rosenfeld Subversives 176–77

of the U.S. middle class

who did not want their kids dropping

acid

or cursing Amerikkka

and so whe R

n uether America Amerikkka

given a chance

voted for Ronald Reagan

the great persuader

while

Broder Washington Post 6/7/04

Richard Aoki

as a paid FBI informant

armed the Black Panthers

But Rosenfeld Subversives 418–19,

421

Mario returned in the 1980s

and revived a dormant campus

changing the city’s desires

with his use of

Plato Gorgias 517 B-C

philosophy

Socrates and Thoreau

when Cohen Freedom’s Orator 202

he spoke of shifting our values

for an America less dominated

by production for war

and more by human needs

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 280, 348

inspiring—yes!—even faculty like

myself

to monitor a divestment protest

in support of the South African

resistance

with white

Rosenfeld Subversives 501

armbands torn from a sheet in our

basement

all helping to stoke a nationwide

demonstration

New York Times 4/17/85

till finally the UC Regents

divested $3 billion in funds

Skelton Los Angeles Times 12/11/13

so that—I do believe—

Mario helped contribute

to the liberation of South Africa

Mandela himself credited California

with helping push his country

toward racial integration

Skelton Los Angeles Times

Truth-

12/11/13

force as history!

Oh John Searle

you recognized in your Satyagraha

student Mario’s speeches

a kind of freshness combined

with a certain deep intellectual vision

but

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 189

when you later came to see the

movement

as a bunch of losers

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 317

with unreasonable expectations

you were

Searle Interview 5

resuming your distinguished

career

as an academic philosopher

while it was Mario

at what you called a second-rate

university Cohen Freedom’s Orator

who remained on the straight path

of the Socratic quest

to change by persuasion

our misguided world

curbing the authority of violence

by appealing to those hints of

freedom

encoded in our DNA

that truth-force enabling a movement

to overcome the machine

so odious

you’ve got to make it stop

Cohen Freedom’s Orator 183, 458–59

GREEK THEATER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acta Maximiliani, ed. H. Musurillo. The

Acts of the Christian Martyrs.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and

Future: Eight Exercises in Political

Thought. New York: Penguin Books,

1993.

Broder, David S. “The Great

Persuader.” Washington Post, June 7,

2004.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/articles/A21076-2004Jun6.html.

Cohen, Robert. Freedom’s Orator:

Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy

of the 1960s. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2009.

Douglass, James W. Gandhi and the

Unspeakable: His Final Experiment

with Truth. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis

Books, 2012.

Ellsberg, Daniel. “A Memory of

Howard Zinn.” AntiWar.com, January

27, 2010.

http://antiwar.com/blog/2010/01/27/a-

memory-of-howard-zinn/.

Gleason, Ralph J. “The Tragedy at The

Greek Theater.” San Francisco

Chronicle, December 9, 1964.

http://www.fsm-

a.org/stacks/R_Gleason.html.

Haven, Cynthia, ed. An Invisible Rope:

Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz. Athens:

Ohio University Press, 2011. Contains

Peter Dale Scott, “A Difficult,

Inspirational Giant,” 65–73.

New York Times, April 17, 1985.

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/17/us/15-

arrested-on-berkeley-campus-in-

protest-on-south-africa-policy.html.

Rosenfeld, Seth. Subversives: The FBI’s

War on Student Radicals, and

Reagan’s Rise to Power. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. America,

Amerikkka: Elect Nation and

Imperial Violence. Oakville, CT:

Equinox, 2007.

Schell, Jonathan. The Unconquerable

World: Power, Nonviolence, and the

Will of the People. New York:

Metropolitan Books, 2003.

Scott, Peter Dale. “Alcuin’s Versus de

Cuculo: The Vision of Pastoral

Friendship.” Studies in Philology, 62

no. 4 (July 1965), 510–30.

http://www.enotes.com/alcuin-

essays/alcuin/peter-dale-scott-essay-

date-july-1965.

Scott, Peter Dale. “Charlie Sellers at

Berkeley.” A Tribute at the Charles G.

Sellers 90th Birthday Symposium,

Berkeley, CA, September 7, 2013.

http://nature.berkeley.edu/~c-

merchant/Sellers/tributes/1.pdf.

John Searle Interview. Conversations

with History, Institute of International

Studies, University of California,

Berkeley.

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Searle/searle-

con5.html.

Skelton, George. “Leading the Way to

Justice in South Africa.” Los Angeles

Times, December 11, 2013.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/11/local/la-

me-cap-mandela-20131212.

Notes

1. THE DOOMSDAY PROJECT,

DEEP EVENTS, AND THE

SHRINKING OF AMERICAN

DEMOCRACY

1. “‘America as the No. 1 Warmonger’:

President Jimmy Carter Talks to

Salon about Race, Cable News,

‘Slut-Shaming’ and More,” Salon,

April 10, 2014,

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/10/america_as_the_no_1_warmonger_president_jimmy_carter_talks_to_salon_about_race_cable_news_slut_shaming_and_more/

2. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The

Costs and Consequences of

American Empire (New York: Henry

Holt, 2000), 217. Cf. Chalmers

Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire:

Militarism, Secrecy and the End of

the Republic (New York:

Metropolitan Books, 2004).

3. Michael Lind, Made in Texas:

George W. Bush and the Southern

Takeover of American Politics (New

York: Basic Books, 2003), 143.

4. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and

Future: Eight Exercises in Political

Thought (New York: Penguin Books,

1993), 93.

5. Hannah Arendt, Crises of the

Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil

Disobedience, On Violence,

Thoughts on Politics and

Revolution (New York: Harcourt

Brace, 1972), 155. Cf. Jonathan

Schell, The Unconquerable World:

Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of

the People (New York: Metropolitan

Books/Henry Holt, 2003), 218.

Arendt also writes of “top down”

and “bottom up” power, but this

distinction is not quite the same.

There can also be top-down, one-

sided persuasive power, from

Plato’s philosopher king to FDR’s

fireside chats (James MacGregor

Burns, Leadership [New York:

Harper & Row, 1978]). This is on

the surface nonviolent. But in recent

years we have seen covert CIA and

Pentagon intervention in the fields of

culture and especially mass culture

(Frances Stonor Saunders, The

Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the

World of Arts and Letters [New

York: New Press, 1999]; Matthew

Alford, Reel Power: Hollywood

Cinema and American Supremacy

[London: Pluto Press, 2010]). One

result has been a Hollywood

propaganda of violence that has

contributed to the propagation of

nonstate violence on an unfamiliar

scale (Alford, Reel Power; The Act

of Killing, directed by Joshua

Oppenheimer [2012 documentary

film, Drafthouse Films]). To discuss

the deep state and cultural deep

politics would require another book.

6. Samuel P. Huntington, American

Politics: The Promise of

Disharmony (Cambridge, MA:

Belknap Press, 1981), 75.

7. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11:

Wealth, Empire, and the Future of

America (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007), 267.

8. Grant Barrett, “A Wordnado of

Words in 2013,” New York Times,

December 21, 2013,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/a-

wordnado-of-words-in-2013.html.

9. Cf. Schell, The Unconquerable

World, 227–31.

10. Kevin Phillips, Wealth and

Democracy: A Political History of

the American Rich (New York:

Broadway Books, 2002), 171–200.

11. Carl A. Huffman, Archytas of

Tarentum: Pythagorean,

Philosopher, and Mathematician

King (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005), 207: “In

Diodotus’ speech in the Mytilenian

debate, wealth is particularly

identified as producing arrogant

‘overreaching’ ( pleonexia—

III.45.4). Thus pleonexia seems to

be associated with the abuse of

power by either a tyrant or a wealthy

oligarchy.”

12. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall

of the Great Powers (New York:

Random House, 1987); Phillips,

Wealth and Democracy; Johnson,

The Sorrows of Empire.

13. Scott, The Road to 9/11, xiv-xv;

Peter Dale Scott, “Atrocity and its

Discontents: U.S. Double-

Mindedness About Massacre,” in

Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War

Crimes and the West: Ending the

Culture of Impunity (London: Zed

Press, 2004), 146–63.

14. Johnson, Blowback, 221.

15. Peter Dale Scott, American War

Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA

Global Drug Connection, and the

Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 63–

142, 239–53. The Karzai regime in

Afghanistan is only the latest of CIA

client governments to struggle to

maintain itself with support from

drug traffickers. Cf. Peter Dale

Scott, “Can the US Pacify the Drug-

Addicted War in Afghanistan?

Opium, the CIA and the Karzai

Administration,” The Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, April 5, 2010,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3340; Ryan Grim, “Karzai

Releasing Scores of Drug

Traffickers in Afghanistan,

WikiLeaks Cables Show,”

Huffington Post, December 31,

2010,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/27/karzai-

releasing-drug-tra_n_801587.html.

16. Tim McGurk, Time, August 2, 2004;

cf. USA Today, October 26, 2004.

17. James Risen, New York Times,

December 11, 2010. Both traffickers

were ultimately arrested by DEA

officials: Noorzai in 2005, and Khan

in 2008. The United States probably

came to prefer Khan over Noorzai,

because he was more closely allied

to Ahmed Wali Karzai, another drug

trafficker and CIA asset, as well as a

central figure in the power apparatus

of his brother Hamid Karzai, the

U.S. client president of Afghanistan.

18. Time, November 29, 1993; Scott,

American War Machine, 14–15.

19. It is too early to report the ultimate

fate of Noorzai and Khan after their

arrest and indictment by the United

States. But it is clear that Guillén

Davila’s arrest and indictment never

led to conviction or imprisonment.

On the contrary, he appears to have

continued to enjoy CIA favor in

Venezuela (Scott, American War

Machine, 14–15).

20. See chapter 4; also Peter Dale Scott,

The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire,

and the Future of America

(Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2007), 152–58.

21. “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter

Despite Warning,” New York Times,

November 8, 2009; cf. Scott,

American War Machine, 246–47.

Elsewhere I will develop the thesis

that what I call “surplus repressive

power”—power developed

exclusively by one society for the

repressive dominance of others—is

doomed, in this and other ways, to

encourage the proliferation of its

enemies. My point here is a more

modest and general one.

22. For details, see Peter Dale Scott,

The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11,

and the Deep Politics of War (New

York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013),

368–72.

23. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Atrocity and

its Discontents: U.S. Double-

Mindedness About Massacre,” in

Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War

Crimes and the West: Ending the

Culture of Impunity (London: Zed

Press, 2004), 146–63.

24. Oliver North Testimony, Iran-Contra

Committee, July 7, 1987; quoted in

Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein,

Vice: Dick Cheney and the

Hijacking of the American

Presidency (New York: Random

House, 2006), 75.

25. Ron Ridenhour with Arthur Lubow,

“Bringing the War Home,” New

Times, November 28, 1975; Dave

Lindorff, “Planning for Martial

Law?” Salon, March 15, 2002,

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/03/15/martial_law/index.html

26. “Brigade homeland tours start Oct.

1,” Army Times, September 30,

2008,

http://www.armytimes.com/article/20080930/NEWS/809300331/Brigade-

homeland-tours-start-Oct-1.

27. Scott, Road to 9/11, 241–42.

28. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and

the Death of JFK (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

1998), 24–37; The War Conspiracy,

285–333; James Galbraith, “Exit

Strategy: In 1963, JFK Ordered a

Complete Withdrawal from

Vietnam,” Boston Review,

October/November 2003,

http://new.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/galbraith.html 2. THE DEEP STATE, THE WALL

STREET OVERWORLD, AND BIG

OIL

1. “Competition in the Energy

Industry”: Hearings Before the

Subcommittee on Antitrust and

Monopoly of the Senate Committee

on the Judiciary, Ninety-third

Congress, First Session, June 8,

1973 (Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1974).

2. Steve Coll, Private Empire:

ExxonMobil and American Power

(New York: Penguin Press, 2012),

19–20.

3. Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top

Secret America: The Rise of the

New American Security State

(New York: Little Brown, 2011),

52.

4. For example, Marc Ambinder and

D. G. Grady, Deep State: Inside

the Government Secrecy Industry

(New York: Wiley, 2013); cf. John

Tirman, “The Quiet Coup: No, Not

Egypt. Here,” HuffingtonPost, July

9, 2013,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-

tirman/nsa-deep-

state_b_3569316.html: “Now we

know: the United States of America

is partially governed by a deep

state, undemocratic, secret, aligned

with intelligence agencies, spying

on friend and foe, lawless in almost

every respect.”

5. Mike Lofgren, “A Shadow

Government Controls America,”

Reader Supported News, February

22, 2014,

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-

75/22216-a-shadow-government-

controls.

6. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics

and the Death of JFK (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

1998), 7.

7. “Tom Hayden on Venezuela’s

Current Crisis,” Tikkun, February

25, 2014,

http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2014/02/28/tom-

hayden-on-venezuelas-current-

crisis/.

8. Henry Fairlie, “Political

Commentary,” The Spectator,

September 23, 1955. Cf. Henry

Fairlie, “Evolution of a Term,”

New Yorker, October 19, 1968. The

notion of a Wall Street

establishment was developed by

Carroll Quigley, notably in Tragedy

and Hope: A History of the World

in Our Time (New York:

Macmillan, 1966).

9. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

(New York: Oxford University

Press, 1956). The deep state,

consisting of those whose powers

can transcend and override public

power, would not include many of

Mills’s corporate managers, the

military, and politicians.

10. C. Wright Mills, The Causes of

World War Three (London: Secker

& Warburg, 1958), 37.

11. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross,

The Invisible Government (New

York: Random House, 1964).

12. To take a single telling example, six

of Sam Walton’s heirs are now

reportedly wealthier than the

bottom 30 percent of Americans, or

94.5 million people (Tim Worstall,

“Six Waltons Have More Wealth

Than the Bottom 30% of

Americans,” Forbes, December 14,

2011,

www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/14/six-

waltons-have-more-wealth-than-

the-bottom-30-of-americans/). Cf.

the devastating picture of a

disintegrating America in George

Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner

History of the New America (New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

2013).

13. See Kevin Phillips, The Politics of

Rich and Poor: Wealth and the

American Electorate in the Reagan

Aftermath (New York:

HarperCollins, 1991). Cf. John T.

Stinson, The Reagan Legacy

(Bloomington, IN: iUniverse,

2009), 146; Timothy Noah, The

Great Divergence: America’s

Growing Inequality Crisis and

What We Can Do about It (New

York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012).

14. For the impact of railroads on

expanded social awareness, see

Benedict Anderson, Imagined

Communities: Reflections on the

Origin and Spread of Nationalism

(London: Verso, 1991).

15. “What Is the Deep State?,” On

Religion, July 4, 2013,

http://www.onreligion.co.uk/what-

is-the-deep-state/.

16. Gareth Jenkins, “Susurluk and the

Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War,”

Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008;

quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “9/11,

Deep State Violence and the Hope

of Internet Politics,” Global

Research, June 11, 2008,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/9-

11-deep-state-violence-and-the-

hope-of-internet-politics.

For the Susurluk incident, see

also Peter Dale Scott, American

War Machine: Deep Politics, the

CIA Global Drug Connection, and

the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham,

MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010),

19–20, etc.

17. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death

of JFK, xi–xii.

18. Lofgren, “A Shadow Government

Controls America.”

19. Quoted in Peter Dale Scott, The

Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and

the Future of America (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

2007), 1. A year later Senator

Gerald Nye, a Republican,

presided over a series of influential

hearings into munitions companies

and banks, after which Senator Nye

commented that it was “altogether

fair to say that these bankers

[referring to the “house of

Morgan”] were in the heart and

center of a system that made our

going to war inevitable” (“Nye

Denies Inquiry ‘Cleared’ Morgan,”

New York Times, February 10,

1936, quoted in Oliver Stone and

Peter Kuznick, The Untold History

of the United States [New York:

Gallery Books, 2012], 76).

20. Forbes magazine founder Bertie

Charles Forbes wrote six years

later, “Picture a party of the

nation’s greatest bankers stealing

out of New York on a private

railroad car under cover of

darkness, stealthily riding

hundred[s] of miles South,

embarking on a mysterious launch,

sneaking onto an island [the

appropriately named Jekyll Island]

deserted by all but a few servants,

living there a full week under such

rigid secrecy that the names of not

one of them was once mentioned,

lest the servants learn the identity

and disclose to the world this

strangest, most secret expedition in

the history of American finance. I

am not romancing; I am giving to

the world, for the first time, the real

story of how the famous Aldrich

currency report, the foundation of

our new currency system, was

written (B. C. Forbes, Leslie’s

Weekly, October 19, 1916, quoted

in T. Cushing Daniel, Real Money

Versus False Money—Bank

Credits; The Most Important

Factor in Civilization and Least

Understood by the People

[Washington, DC: The Monetary

Educational Bureau, 1924], 169.

Cf. B. C. Forbes, Men Who Are

Making America [New York:

Forbes Publishing Co., 1922], 398;

cf. G. Edward Griffin, The

Creature from Jekyll Island: A

Second Look at the Federal

Reserve [Westlake Village, CA:

American Media, 1994]).

Paul Warburg later wrote that

“Though eighteen years have since

gone by, I do not feel free to give a

description of this most interesting

conference, concerning which

Senator Aldrich pledged all

participants to secrecy” (Paul

Warburg, The Federal Reserve

System: Its Origin and Growth

[New York, Macmillan, 1930],

128).

21. Congress was persuaded to provide

perfunctory support of the bailout,

under an alleged mysterious threat

of martial law. See Peter Dale

Scott, “Martial Law, the Financial

Bailout, and War,” Global

Research, January 8, 2009,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?

context=va&aid=11681, and

reprinted in Michel Chossudovsky

and Andrew Gavin Marshall, eds.,

The Global Economic Crisis: The

Great Depression of the XXI

Century (Montreal: Global

Research Publishers, 2010), 219–

40; Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,

“Sen. Inhofe: [Henry] Paulsen

[Secretary of the Treasury and

former Chief Executive Officer of

Goldman Sachs] Threatened

Martial Law To Pass Bailout,”

LewRockwell.com, November 20,

2008,

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-

blog/sen-inhofe-paulsen-

threatened-martial-law-to-pass-

bailout/.

22. Richard Helms, with William

Hood, A Look Over My Shoulder:

A Life in the Central Intelligence

Agency (New York: Random

House, 2003), 82–83. Cf. Scott,

American War Machine, 26–28.

23. Laurence H. Shoup and William

Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The

Council on Foreign Relations and

United States Foreign Policy

(New York: Monthly Review Press,

1977), 195–99.

24. Gordon Thomas, Secret Wars: One

Hundred Years of British

Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6

(New York: Thomas Dunne

Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2009),

98. This may have occurred during

Dulles’s visit to Europe in the

spring of 1947 (James Srodes,

Allen Dulles: Master of Spies

[Washington, DC: Henry Regnery,

1999], 392).

25. Richard Aldrich, The Hidden

Hand: Britain, America, and Cold

War Secret Intelligence

(Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press,

2001), 343. Dulles also chaired the

executive committee of the

companion National Committee for

a Free Europe (behind the Iron

Curtain), whose legal affairs were

handled by Sullivan and Cromwell

(Wilson D. Miscamble, George F.

Kennan and the Making of

American Foreign Policy, 1947–

1950 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1992], 204).

26. Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design:

The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and

NSC (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1999), 189; citing

Christopher Andrew, For the

President’s Eyes Only (New York:

HarperCollins, 1995), 172. See

also Senate Select Committee to

Study Governmental Operations

with Respect to Intelligence

Activities [Church Committee],

Final Report: Book IV—

Supplementary Detailed Staff

Reports on Foreign and Military

Intelligence (Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1976),

28–29.

27. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross,

The Espionage Establishment

(New York: Random House, 1967),

166; Scott, Road to 9/11, 13.

28. “In January 1946 Dulles outlined in

some detail a reconstruction plan

that is one of the earliest notions of

what would, a year later, be known

as the Marshall Plan” (Srodes,

Allen Dulles: Master of Spies,

374).

29. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The

History of the CIA (New York:

Doubleday, 2007), 28. Cf. Daniel J.

Leab, Orwell Subverted: The CIA

and the Filming of Animal Farm

(University Park: Pennsylvania

State University Press, 2007), 18:

For each dollar in aid received, as a top

ECA administrator later explained, “the

recipient had to contribute an equal

amount in local currency, 95% would be

used for Marshall Plan programs, and 5%

(the counterpart of the dollars provided)

would be used by the U.S. government.” .

. . That 5 percent has been estimated to

be close to $200 million a year, much of

which Wisner appropriated for OPC.

30. Douglas Valentine, “The French

Connection Revisited: The CIA,

Irving Brown, and Drug Smuggling

as Political Warfare,” Covert

Action Quarterly,

http://www.covertaction.org/content/view/99/75/

31. Norbert Schlei, “Japan’s ‘M-Fund’

Memorandum, January 7, 1991,”

JPRI [Japan Policy Research

Institute] Working Paper No. 11:

July 1995,

http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp11.html

“Incident to the revision of the

Security Treaty [in 1960], Vice

President Nixon agreed to turn over

exclusive control of the M-Fund to

Japan. It has been alleged that this

action by Nixon was part of a

corrupt political bargain, whereby

it was agreed that if Japan would

assist him to become President of

the United States, Nixon would

agree to release control of the Fund

to Japan and, if he became

President, would return Okinawa to

Japan.”

32. “C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support

Japanese Right in 50’s and 60’s,”

New York Times, October 9, 1994.

Cf. Scott, American War Machine,

93–94, 298–99, citing Chalmers

Johnson, “The 1955 System and the

American Connection: A

Bibliographic Introduction,” JPRI

[Japan Policy Research Institute]

Working Paper No. 11: July 1995,

http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp11.html

33. Chalmers Johnson, “The 1955

System and the American

Connection: A Bibliographic

Introduction,” Japan Policy

Research Institute, JPRI Working

Paper No. 11: July 1995,

http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp11.html

34. Scott, American War Machine, 94,

etc.

35. Scott, American War Machine, 65–

67, 87–96.

36. Norman Mailer, “A Harlot High

and Low: Reconnoitering Through

the Secret Government,” New York,

August 16, 1976 (Hughes); Michael

Schaller, Altered States: The

United States and Japan Since the

Occupation (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1997), 294

(Lockheed).

37. Johnson, “The 1955 System and the

American Connection.”

38. David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro,

Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal

Underworld (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2003), 89–90.

Cf. Jonathan Marshall, in William

O. Walker, III, ed., Drug Control

Policy: Essays in Historical and

Comparative Perspective

(University Park: Pennsylvania

State University Press, 1992), 108:

“Yoshio Kodama’s fortune, built of

profits from tungsten and opium,

established the party that today

rules Japan. . . . Kodama

contributed to the pervasive

corruption of Japanese politics by

steering huge corporate

contributions into the coffers of

favored LDP members. This pattern

culminated in the Lockheed

scandal, which revealed that multi-

million-dollar payoff by American

aerospace firms had swayed key

procurement decisions by Japan’s

national airline and defense

establishment and raised the

possibility that the CIA had used

Kodama and corporate funds to

influence Japanese politics. The

money-laundering channel used for

Lockheed’s bribes was favored

both by the CIA and international

drug traffickers.”

39. The San Francisco Chronicle

(October 24, 1983, 22) described a

USAF-Lockheed operation in

Southeast Asia, “code-named

‘Operation Buttercup’ that operated

out of Norton Air Force Base in

California from 1965 to 1972.” For

the CIA’s close involvement in

Lockheed payoffs, cf. Anthony

Sampson, The Arms Bazaar (New

York: Viking Press, 1977), 137,

227–28, 238.

40. Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 137,

227–28, 238; cf. Thomas Fensch,

ed. The C.I.A. and the U-2

Program: 1954–1974 (The

Woodlands, TX: New Century

Books, 2001).

41. William D. Hartung, Prophets of

War: Lockheed Martin and the

Making of the Military-Industrial

Complex (New York: Nation

Books, 2011), 121; David Boulton,

The Grease Machine (New York:

Harper & Row, 1978), 97 (friends);

Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J.

McCloy—The Making of the

American Establishment (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 1992),

471–72 (Retinger and Jackson).

42. Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow

World: Inside the Global Arms

Trade (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 2011), 265; Sampson,

The Arms Bazaar, 135–36.

43. Committee on Foreign Relations,

United States Senate, Multinational

Corporations and United States

Foreign Policy, Hearings Before

the Subcommittee on

Multinational Corporations, Part

12 (Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1973–

1975), 943–51.

44. Bradley R. Simpson, Economists

with Guns: Authoritarian

Development and U.S.-Indonesian

Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press,

2008), 142, quoting from CIA,

“Political Action Project,”

November 19, 1964; Foreign

Relations of the United States,

1964–1968, Vol. 26: Indonesia;

Malaysia-Singapore; Philippines

(Washington, DC: U.S. Government

Printing Office, 2000), 181–84,

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-

68v26.

45. In addition there was “a U.S. deal

to deliver 200 light aircraft to the

Indonesian Army in July 1965. . . .

[The aircraft went to the army’s

Diponegoro division, which] as

well as supplying the bulk of the

[September 30] ‘coup’ personnel in

Java, . . . also provided the bulk of

the personnel for its suppression”

(Nathaniel Mehr, “Constructive

Bloodbath” in Indonesia: The

United States, Britain and the

Mass Killings of 1965–66

[Nottingham, UK: Spokesman

Books, 2009], 36).

46. Peter Dale Scott, “The United

States and the Overthrow of

Sukarno, 1965–1967,” Pacific

Affairs, 58, Summer 1985,

http://www.namebase.org/scott.html

citing Senate Committee on Foreign

Relations, Multinational

Corporations and United States

Foreign Policy, Part 12, 937–65.

47. Scott, “The United States and the

Overthrow of Sukarno.”

48. Masashi Nishihara, The Japanese

and Sukarno’s Indonesia: Tokyo-

Jakarta Relations, 1951–1966

(Honolulu: University Press of

Hawaii, 1976), 171, 194, 202;

Scott, “The United States and the

Overthrow of Sukarno.”

49. Fortune, July 1973, 154, cf. Wall

Street Journal, April 18, 1967.

50. Ian J. Bickerton, “America’s

Israel/Israel’s America,” in John

Dumbrell and Axel R Schäfer, eds.,

America’s “Special

Relationships”: Foreign and

Domestic Aspects of the Politics of

Alliance (London: Routledge,

2009), 187.

51. John Foster Dulles to Lord

McGowan, Chairman of Imperial

Chemical Industries, in Nancy

Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, A Law

unto Itself: The Untold Story of

the Law Firm of Sullivan &

Cromwell (New York: William

Morrow, 1988), 127.

52. Charles T. O’Reilly, Forgotten

Battles: Italy’s War of Liberation,

1943–1945 (Lanham, MD:

Lexington Books, 2001), 288; Peter

Dale Scott, “How Allen Dulles and

the SS Preserved Each Other,”

Covert Action Information

Bulletin, 25 (Winter 1986), 4–14.

Dulles’s plans to use SS resources

in postwar Germany can be seen as

part of a successful plan to frustrate

the implementation of Roosevelt’s

so-called “Morgenthau Plan” to

deindustrialize Germany.

53. Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the

Covert World of Her Majesty’s

Secret Intelligence Service (New

York: Free Press, 2000), 659–60.

54. Ovid Demaris, Dirty Business: The

Corporate-Political Money-Power

Game (New York: Avon, 1974),

213–14.

55. J. P. D. Dunbabin, International

Relations Since 1945: A History in

Two Volumes, vol. 2, (London:

Longman, 1994), 344. The boycott

is denied without argumentation in

Exxon’s corporate history (Bennett

H. Wall et al., Growth in a

Changing Environment: A History

of Standard Oil Company (New

Jersey), Exxon Corporation,

1950–1975, vol. 4 (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1988), 476:

“Despite oft-printed statements to

the contrary, the oil majors did not

conspire to boycott NIOC oil.”

56. Robert Palmer Smith, Darkest

Truths of Black Gold: An Oil

Industry Executive Breaks the

Industry’s Code of Silence (New

York: iUniverse, 2007), 256. In

July 1952 Mossadeq attempted to

break the embargo by contracting to

sell oil to a small private Italian oil

firm. The maneuver was frustrated

by the British Royal Navy, which in

July 1952 intercepted the Italian

tanker Rose Mary and redirected it

to Aden. The news dissuaded other

tankers from trying to reach Abadan

(Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and

Nationhood: The United States,

Great Britain, and Iranian Oil,

1950–1954 [New York: Columbia

University Press, 1997], 130;

Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s

Men: An American Coup and the

Roots of Middle East Terror

[Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons,

2003], 136).

57. Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and

Principle: Iran’s Oil

Nationalization and Its After-math

(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University

Press, 1992), 198–99 (Churchill);

Robert Moskin, American

Statecraft: The Story of the U.S.

Foreign Service (New York:

Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s

Press, 2013), 627–28 (Harriman).

58. Demaris, Dirty Business, 214–25:

“The incoming Eisenhower

Administration . . . quickly dropped

the criminal case. The civil suit that

was instituted alleged that the five

American oil companies violated

the Sherman Antitrust and the

Wilson Tariff Acts by conspiring to

divide and control foreign

production and distribution. . . . An

inadequate staff was assigned to the

case and the action finally petered

out a decade later with a couple of

meaningless consent decrees.”

59. Robert Sherrill, The Oil Follies of

1970–1980: How the Petroleum

Industry Stole the Show (and Much

More Besides) (Garden City, NY:

Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983),

221.

60. William R. Freudenburg and Robert

Gramling, Oil in Troubled Waters:

Perceptions, Politics, and the

Battle over Offshore Drilling

(Albany: State University of New

York Press, 1994), 17; citing Shukri

Mohammed Ghanem , OPEC, The

Rise and Fall of an Exclusive Club

(London: KPI, 1986); Mira

Wilkins, “The Oil Companies in

Perspective,” in Raymond Vernon,

ed., The Oil Crisis (New York: W.

W. Norton, 1976).

61. William Roger Louis, “Britain and

the Overthrow of Mossadeq,” in

Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm

Byrne, eds., Mohammad Mosaddeq

and the 1953 Coup in Iran

(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University

Press, 2004), 168. Cf. William R.

Clark, Petrodollar Warfare: Oil,

Iraq and the Future of the Dollar

(Gabriola Island, BC: New Society

Publishers, 2005), 125: “The

Dulles brothers had already

conceived a plot when Eisenhower

became president in January 1953.”

62. Scot Macdonald, Rolling the Iron

Dice: Historical Analogies and

Decisions to Use Military Force in

Regional Contingencies (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 98.

Cf. Richard H. Immerman, John

Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism,

and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy

(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly

Resources, 1999), 67. Allen Dulles

played a personal role in

TP/AJAX, by flying to Italy and

persuading the frightened Shah to

return to Tehran.

63. In the past, wishing to dissociate

the term “deep state” from

organizational connotations, I have

written of the American “deep

state” as “a milieu both inside and

outside government with the power

to steer the history of the public

state and sometimes redirect it”

(Peter Dale Scott, “William

Pawley, the Kennedy Assassination,

and Watergate,” Global Research,

November 29, 2012,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/william-

pawley-the-kennedy-assassination-

and-watergate-tilt-and-the-phase-

three-story-of-clare-boothe-

luce/5313486. But there are also

extragovernmental structural

components in the deep state

system.

64. See Chalmers A Johnson, The

Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,

Secrecy, and the End of the

Republic (New York: Metropolitan

Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 218–19;

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon

Democracy: Political Power in the

Age of Oil (New York: Verso

Books, 2011), 212. In 1952 Aramco

offered logistical support to a Saudi

force in a military dispute with

Oman and Abu Dhabi (Mark Curtis,

Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion

with Radical Islam [London:

Profile, 2011], 69).

65. James Bamford, A Pretext for War:

9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of

America’s Intelligence Agencies

(New York: Doubleday, 2004), 71.

See discussion in chapter 11.

66. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The

Secret World of Intelligence

Outsourcing (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2008), 6.

67. Glenn Greenwald, “Mike

McConnell, the WashPost & the

Dangers of Sleazy Corporatism,”

Salon, March 29, 2010,

http://www.salon.com/2010/03/29/mcconnell_3/

68. George H. W. Bush was an adviser

to Carlyle, which in its early days

“backed a management-led buyout

of Caterair and appointed George

W Bush to the board” (Jamie

Doward, “Bush Sr’s Carlyle Group

Gets Fat On War And Conflict,”

The Observer, March 25, 2003,

http://www.rense.com/general36/fat.htm

69. Lofgren, “A Shadow Government

Controls America.”

70. A May 2014 Google search for

“‘Booz Allen’ + ‘COOP COG’”

yielded 478 informative hits.

71. Booz Allen Hamilton’s

headquarters is now in McLean,

Virginia, close to the headquarters

of the CIA.

72. Art Kleiner, Booz Allen Hamilton:

Helping Clients Envision the

Future (Old Say-brook, CT:

Greenwich Publishing, 2004), 43.

http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/90th-

History-Book-Complete.pdf

73. John Prados, Safe for Democracy:

The Secret Wars of the CIA

(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 139.

Cf. Christine N. Halili, Philippine

History (Manila: Rex Book Store,

2004), 258 (Philippines land

distribution).

74. Miles Copeland, The Game

Player: The Confessions of the

CIA’s Original Political Operative

(London: Aurum Press, 1989), 158.

75. Ephraim Kahana and Muhammad

Suwaed, Historical Dictionary of

Middle Eastern Intelligence

(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,

2009), 65 (“advisor”); Jack

O’Connell, King’s Counsel: A

Memoir of War, Espionage, and

Diplomacy in the Middle East

(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011),

20 (channel).

76. Committee on Foreign Relations,

United States Senate, The BCCI

Affair: BCCI, the CIA and Foreign

Intelligence, A Report to the

Committee on Foreign Relations,

United States Senate by Senator

John Kerry and Senator Hank

Brown, December 1992; 102d

Congress, 2d Session, Senate Print

102–140 (Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office),

https://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm (“agent”). His close friend and

fellow architect of the 1953 CIA

operation in Iran, Kermit

Roosevelt, became a similar agent

for first Gulf Oil and then Northrop

(Anthony Sampson, The Arms

Bazaar, 159, 247).

77. William D. Hartung, Prophets of

War, 126.

78. Copeland, The Game Player, 231.

79. Copeland, The Game Player, 233.

80. Copeland, The Game Player, 239.

81. For example, Evan Thomas, The

Very Best Men: Four Who Dared:

The Early Years of the CIA (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 1995),

380.

82. Larry J. Kolb, Overworld: The Life

and Times of a Reluctant Spy

(New York: Riverhead/Penguin,

2004), 237–38. Cf. Copeland, The

Game Player, 230, 262–63; Ronald

Kessler, The Richest Man in the

World: The Story of Adnan

Khashoggi (New York: Warner

Books), 300–301: “On May 17,

1983, [Khashoggi] submitted to

President Reagan a confidential

‘yellow paper’ [which] proposed

an economic aid program similar to

the 1949 Marshall Plan developed

by the United States for Europe.

Called a Peace Fund, it would

provide up to $300 billion in

regional economic aid from the

United States, Saudi Arabia and

Kuwait to Israel and any Arab

country that signed a peace treaty

with it.”

83. Peter Dale Scott, “Deep Events and

the CIA’s Global Drug

Connection,” 911Truth.org, October

12, 2008,

http://www.911truth.org/deep-

events-and-the-cias-global-drug-

connection/; Scott, American War

Machine, 160–65.

84. Committee on Foreign Relations,

United States Senate, The BCCI

Affair. Khashoggi’s status had

declined, but by no means vanished.

As late as 2003, Khashoggi was

negotiating with Richard Perle, a

member of the Cheney-Rumsfeld

clique who at the time was still

Chairman of the U.S. Defense

Policy Board, to invest

considerable Saudi money in

Perle’s company Trireme (Seymour

Hersh, New Yorker, March 17,

2003).

85. Copeland, The Game Player, 239;

cf. 228. For decades Congress has

been a field of tensions between

Arab and Israeli interests,

represented primarily by the oil

lobby and by the American Israel

Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

But in a very interesting essay by

Robert Dreyfuss for PBS’s

Frontline, former AIPAC official

Keith Weissman describes how he

brought some Conoco guys to AIPAC’s

policy conference, where half the House

and half the Senate usually attend, and

they knew that night that they would

never win anything against us. So they

began to cooperate. A lot of the oil

companies realized, “We’re not gonna

beat these guys in Congress, so we might

as well try to tailor their activities, where

we at least have some room to work.”

And I was the go-between. I was the guy. I

mean, BP still credits me with being the

guy who greased the Baku-Tbilisi-

Ceyhan pipeline, because of my work

with them. That was originally designed

as an anti-Iran project (Robert Dreyfuss,

“AIPAC from the Inside,” Frontline, June

11, 2013,

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/06/aipac-

from-the-inside-1-isolating-iran.html).

86. Kessler, The Richest Man in the

World, 84, 188, etc.; Scott,

American War Machine, 158–62.

87. Scott, American War Machine,

158–62; citing “Moss, Edward K.

#172 646,” CIA Memo of 19 April

1967, NARA #104-10122-10006;

CIA Inspector General’s Report on

CIA-Mafia Plots to Assassinate

Fidel Castro, NARA # 104-10213-

10101, 38. Cf. memo of 7

November 1962 in CIA’s Edward

K. Moss folder, 26, NARA

#1994.05.03.10:54:53:780005.

88. “Manuel Antonio Varona,” FBI

Memorandum of January 16, 1961

to A. H. Belmont, 105-76826-20;

NARA #124-90055-10139, 2. Cf.

“Moss, Edward K. #172 646,” CIA

Memo of 14 May 1973, in Meyer

Lansky Security File, 9, NARA

#1993.08.13.17:42:12:560059;

CIA letter of 16 December 1960 to

FBI, FBI file 105-76826-18;

NARA #124-90055-10133. The

CIA itself had notified the FBI on

December 16, 1960, that Julia

“Cellino” had advised that her

brothers “have long been

associated in the narcotics and

white slavery rackets in Cuba”

(CIA letter of 16 December 1960 to

Director, FBI, FBI File 105-76826-

18; NARA #124-90055-10133.

89. Kessler, The Richest Man in the

World, 29 (Yassin), 275–78

(Khashoggi). A friend of

Khashoggi’s, Larry Kolb, reports

that Khashoggi himself essentially

corroborated the story that

Khashoggi and John Kennedy had a

friendship in the 1950s that

“evolved primarily out of whoring

together” (Kolb, Overworld: The

Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy,

236). The woman who destroyed

the presidential aspirations of

Senator Gary Hart in 1987 was one

of Khashoggi’s many women.

90. Nor was Khashoggi the first CIA

foreign asset to have been accused

of using women to acquire political

influence in Washington. Similar

rumors had circulated about the

wealthy Korean Tong Sun Park,

owner of the fashionable

Georgetown Club, and said to be an

associate of the Korean Central

Intelligence Agency (KCIA). See

Claude A. Buss, The United States

and the Republic of Korea:

Background for Policy (Stanford,

CA: Hoover Institution Press,

Stanford University, 1982), 127;

Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda:

Watergate, Deep Throat, and the

CIA (New York: Random House,

1984), 120–21; Scott, Deep

Politics and the Death of JFK,

237.

91. Anthony Summers with Robbyn

Swan, The Arrogance of Power:

The Secret World of Richard Nixon

(New York: Viking Penguin, 2000),

283. Cf. Kessler, The Richest Man

in the World, 171: Khashoggi told

the prosecutors “that he churned

millions through the tiny [Rebozo]

bank to win favor with the

president.”

92. Investigative reporter Jim Hougan

reports the incredulity of

congressional investigators that

Lockheed was the only large

corporation not to have made a

contribution to Nixon’s 1972

election campaign (Jim Hougan,

Spooks: The Haunting of America:

The Private Use of Secret Agents

[New York: William Morrow,

1978], 457–58).

93. Scott, Road to 9/11, 35; citing

Summers, Arrogance of Power,

283; Robert Baer, Sleeping with

the Devil (New York: Crown,

2003), 43. (Baer reports the year of

the briefcase as 1968, not 1972.)

Kolb (“unequivocally, and from

personal experience”) denies the

briefcase story (Kolb, Overworld:

The Life and Times of a Reluctant

Spy, 299).

94. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death

of JFK, 234–39.

95. Kessler, The Richest Man in the

World, 129, 160–61. When Hughes

flew from Las Vegas to the Paradise

Island casino in the Bahamas

(where Edward Moss’s brother-in-

law Eddie Cellini was casino

manager), he did so on a Khashoggi

plane. (Kessler, The Richest Man

in the World, 149–50).

96. Summers, with Swan, The

Arrogance of Power, 242, 252;

Hougan, Spooks, 398. Cf. Denny

Walsh, New York Times, January

21, 1974; Jeff Gerth, in Sidney

Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian,

eds., Government by Gunplay

(New York: New American

Library, 1976), 137–39.

97. Alan A. Block, Masters of

Paradise: Organized Crime and

the Internal Revenue Service in

the Bahamas (New Brunswick, NJ:

Transaction Publishers, 1991), 94–

96; Summers with Swan, The

Arrogance of Power, 244–45.

Benguet Mines have also been

associated with Yamashita’s gold

(Seagrave and Seagrave, Gold

Warriors, 147; Scott, American

War Machine, 322n15).

98. Summers, with Swan, The

Arrogance of Power, 244–45, 253–

54.

99. Marquis Who’s Who, Who’s Who in

Finance and Industry, 1979, 568.

100. Scott, American War Machine, 71–

72. Cf. Wall Street Journal, April

18, 1980: “In 1951, Mr. Helliwell

helped set up and run Sea Supply

Corp., a concern controlled by the

CIA as a front. For almost 10 years,

Sea Supply was used to supply

huge amounts of weapons and

equipment to 10,000 Nationalist

Chinese [KMT] troops in Burma as

well as to Thailand’s police.”

101. In the course of Operation

Safehaven, the U.S. Third Army

took an SS major “on several trips

to Italy and Austria, and, as a result

of these preliminary trips, over

$500,000 in gold, as well as

jewels, were recovered” (Anthony

Cave Brown, The Secret War

Report of the OSS [New York:

Berkeley, 1976], 565–66).

102. Scott, American War Machine, 54–

56, 70–72; cf. John Loftus and

Mark Aarons, The Secret War

against the Jews (New York: St.

Martin’s, 1994), 110–11.

103. Kessler, Richest Man in the World,

238–41; Scott, American War

Machine, 161–62.

104. The operation kept the name

“Safari Club” even after moving

from Khashoggi’s Club to a

permanent headquarters in Cairo.

105. Ibrahim Warde, The Price of Fear:

The Truth behind the Financial

War on Terror (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

2007), 133. Cf. Robert Lacey,

Inside the Kingdom: Kings,

Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists,

and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia

(New York: Penguin Books, 2009),

66, 72, 76.

106. Christopher Byron, “The Senate

Looks at BCCI,” New York

Magazine, October 28, 1991, 20–

21.

107. Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, 66. Cf.

John Cooley, Unholy Wars

(London: Pluto Press, 1999), 24–

27.

108. David Teacher, “The Pinay Circle

and Destabilisation in Europe,”

Lobster, 18, October 1989,

http://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document

The_Pinay_Circle.

109. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim,

Bad Muslim: America, the Cold

War, and the Roots of Terror (New

York: Pantheon Books 2004), 84.

110. Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad

Muslim, 85.

111. Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror:

The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of

America’s Private Intelligence

Network (New York: Carroll &

Graf, 2005), 61.

112. Trento, Prelude to Terror, 104–5.

113. Kevin Phillips, “The Barreling

Bushes,” Los Angeles Times,

January 11, 2004.

114. Trento, Prelude to Terror, 113–14.

115. Rod Lenahan, Crippled Eagle: A

Historical Perspective of U.S.

Special Operations 1976–1996

(Charleston, SC: Narwhal Press,

1998), 178.

116. “In 1980, Shackley was set on

putting his former boss, George

Bush, in the White House and

possibly securing the CIA

directorship for himself. Shackley

volunteered his prodigious skills to

Bush in early 1980. Though that

fact has come out before,

Shackley’s involvement in the Iran

hostage issue, the so-called

‘October Surprise’ controversy, has

been a closely held secret, until

now” (Robert Parry, “Bush & a

CIA Power Play—The

Consortium,” Consortiumnews,

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile7.html Cf. “The CIA/Likud Sinking of

Jimmy Carter,” Consortiumnews,

June 24, 2010,

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/062410.html

“Inside the CIA, Carter and his CIA

Director Stansfield Turner were

blamed for firing many of the free-

wheeling covert operatives from

the Vietnam era, for ousting

legendary spymaster Ted Shackley,

and for failing to protect longtime

U.S. allies (and friends of the CIA),

such as Iran’s Shah and Nicaragua’s

dictator Anastasio Somoza.”

117. Robert Parry, Trick or Treason:

The October Surprise Mystery

(New York: Sheridan Square Press,

1993), 154–55.

118. David Teacher, “The Pinay Circle

and Destabilisation in Europe.”

119. W. Carl Biven, Jimmy Carter’s

Economy: Policy in an Age of

Limits (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2002), 1:

“There were more practical

consequences of the Iranian crisis

that tested the temper of the public;

perhaps the most visible were a

gasoline shortage and long lines of

cars at gas stations caused by the

cutoff of Iranian oil.” Cf. Daniel

Yergin, The Quest: Energy,

Security and the Remaking of the

Modern World (New York: Penguin

Press, 2011), 531: “The Iranian

Revolution led to chaos in the oil

market, rapid increases in prices,

new gas lines, and a second oil

shock, and the Carter

administration started to come

unwound.”

In 2007 I myself wrote, “By

effectively restricting the access of

Iran to the global oil market, the

Iranian assets freeze became a

factor in the huge oil price

increases of 1979 and 1981 (and

thus an indirect cause of Carter’s

electoral defeat in 1980)” (Scott,

The Road to 9/11, 88). It was

indeed a factor. But in the context I

was arguing that the Iranian assets

freeze attributed to Carter in 1979

was in fact part of a complex

strategy arranged by advisers to the

Chase Manhattan Bank. Prominent

among these was Archibald

Roosevelt, a former CIA officer

and colleague of Copeland, whom

Parry also accuses of involvement

in the Republican October Surprise

(Scott, The Road to 9/11, 91; Parry,

Trick or Treason, 49, 51, 257).

120. Robert Sherrill, The Oil Follies of

1970–1980, 435–37. In like

manner, William Engdahl has

attributed the European oil crisis in

1979 to the market behavior of BP

(F. William Engdahl, A Century of

War: Anglo-American Oil Politics

and the New World Order [London:

Pluto Press, 2004], 173).

121. David B. Ottaway, The King’s

Messenger: Prince Bandar bin

Sultan and America’s Tangled

Relationship with Saudi Arabia

(New York: Walker, 2008), 41.

122. Robert Lacey, The Kingdom:

Arabia & the House of Sa’ud

(New York: Avon, 1981), 451–55:

“Crown Prince Fahad decided he

must distance himself from

Washington. In February 1979 he

cancelled a trip he had scheduled to

meet President Carter in the

following month” (452). In ensuing

months of negotiations, Saudis first

increased production in late 1979

and then increased their oil price in

1980. At issue also was the Saudi

desire to acquire AWACS (airborne

warning and control system)

aircraft, which, as we shall see in

chapter 10, were not supplied to

them until under Reagan (Ottaway,

The King’s Messenger, 42–47).

123. Committee on Foreign Relations,

United States Senate, The BCCI

Affair, Part 11, “BCCI, the CIA and

Foreign Intelligence,”

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm

124. Dan Bawley, Corporate

Governance and Accountability:

What Role for the Regulator,

Director, and Auditor? (Westport,

CT: Quorum, 1999), 37.

125. Bawley, Corporate Governance

and Accountability, 37.

126. “Revealed—the capitalist network

that runs the world,” New Scientist,

October 24, 2011,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-

revealed--the-capitalist-network-

that-runs-the-

world.html#.Uw9X_14ihpi.

127. Scott, American War Machine,

163; quoting from Peter Truell and

Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The

Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s

Most Corrupt Financial Empire

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992),

384 (“ties”)

128. Alan A. Block and Constance A.

Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire:

Global Banking, Money

Laundering, and International

Organized Crime (Westport, CT:

Praeger, 2004), 36–37.

129. “Saudi prince ‘received arms

cash,’” BBC, June 7, 2007,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6728773.stm It is unclear whether payments

continued after 2001, when the

United Kingdom signed the

OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention,

making such overpayments illegal.

130. Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, 108.

131. Former Turkish President and

Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel

commented that “In our country . . .

there is one deep state and one

other state. . . . The state that should

be real is the spare one, the one that

should be spare is the real one”

(Jon Gorvett, “Turkey’s ‘Deep

State’ Surfaces in Former

President’s Words, Deeds in

Kurdish Town,” Washington

Report on Middle East Affairs,

January/February 2006; quoted in

Scott, American War Machine, 24.

3. THE DOOMSDAY PROJECT

1. One of the highest-ranking CIA

officials, as reported in Robert Baer,

See No Evil: The True Story of a

Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on

Terrorism (New York: Crown

Publishers, 2002), xix. The comment

of Baer, himself an ex-CIA officer:

“If that’s going to be the official line

of thinking at the agency . . . then I

am more than angry. I’m scared to

death of what lies ahead.”

2. New York Times, July 14, 1987. We

have never heard if there was or was

not an executive session, or if the

rest of Congress was ever aware of

the matter. According to James

Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11,

Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s

Intelligence Agencies (New York:

Doubleday, 2004), 74: “The

existence of the secret government

was so closely held that Congress

was completely bypassed. Rather

than through legislation, it was

created by Top Secret presidential

fiat. In fact, Congress would have no

role in the new wartime

administration. ‘One of the awkward

questions we faced,’ said one of the

participants, ‘was whether to

reconstitute Congress after a nuclear

attack. It was decided that no, it

would be easier to operate without

them.’” Cf. James Mann, The Rise of

the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s

War Cabinet (New York: Viking,

2004), 145. But key individuals in

Congress, such as Senator Inouye of

the Senate Intelligence Committee,

were certainly aware of something.

3. Miami Herald, July 5, 1987. In

September 1984 Jack Anderson

reported that FEMA’s plans would

“suspend the Constitution and the

Bill of Rights, effectively eliminate

private property, abolish free

enterprise, and generally clamp

Americans in a totalitarian vise”

( Lawrence [Kansas] Journal-World,

September 25, 1984).

4. Diana Reynolds, “The Rise of the

National Security State: FEMA and

the NSC, Political Research

Associates,” Covert Action

Information Bulletin, #33 (Winter

1990),

http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/fema/Fema_2.html Earlier, Governor Reagan in

California had authorized the

development of a counterinsurgency

plan (known as Cable Splicer) and

exercises to deal with such crises, in

conjunction with the U.S. Sixth Army

and the Pentagon (Operation Garden

Plot). The cadres developing Cable

Splicer (headed by Louis Giuffrida)

were with Reagan’s elevation to the

presidency transferred into FEMA.

5. Glenn Beck, The Overton Window

(New York: Threshold

Editions/Mercury Radio Arts, 2010),

296. Cf. Robert C. Aldridge,

America in Peril (Pasadena, CA:

Hope Publishing House, 2008), 295.

It would appear that in REX-84 the

Army’s Garden Plot plan for martial

law became fused with COG’s plan

for massive detention. But the highly

classified details remain obscure.

6. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11:

Wealth, Empire, and the Future of

America (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007), 184; citing

Ross Gelbspan, Break-Ins, Death

Threats, and the FBI: The Covert

War against the Central America

Movement (Boston: South End

Press, 1991), 184.

7. Peter Dale Scott, “Northwards

without North,” Social Justice

(Summer 1989). Revised as “North,

Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday

Project: The Original Congressional

Cover Up of Continuity-of-

Government Planning,” Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, February 21,

2011, http://japanfocus.org/-

Peter_Dale-Scott/3491.

8. Tim Weiner, New York Times, April

17, 1994. The first public reference

to the “Doomsday Project” (the

Pentagon in-house term for COG

procedures) was apparently Steven

Emerson, “America’s Doomsday

Project,” U.S. News & World

Report, August 7, 1989.

9. Bamford, A Pretext for War, 74; cf.

Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans, 138–

45.

10. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The

Secret World of Intelligence

Outsourcing (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2008), 78; Shirley Anne

Warshaw, The Co-Presidency of

Bush and Cheney (Stanford, CA:

Stanford Politics and Policy, 2009),

162.

11. “The provisions of Executive Order

12656 of Nov. 18, 1988, appear at

53 FR 47491, 3 CFR, 1988 Comp.,

p. 585,”

http://www.archives.gov/federal-

register/codification/executive-

order/12656.html. Washington Po st (March 1, 2002) later claimed,

falsely, that Executive Order 12656

dealt only with “a nuclear attack.”

Earlier there was a similar

misrepresentation in The New York

Times (November 18, 1991).

12. William M. Arkin, “Back to the

Bunker,” Washington Post, June 4,

2006,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2006/06/02/AR2006060201410.html Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Systemic

Destabilization in Recent American

History: 9/11, the JFK

Assassination, and the Oklahoma

City Bombing as a Strategy of

Tension,” Japan Focus: Asia-Pacific

Journal, October 7, 2013,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3835.

13. William Arkin, American Coup:

How a Terrified Government Is

Destroying the Constitution (New

York: Little Brown, 2013), 5.

14. Gelbspan, Break-Ins, Death

Threats, and the FBI, 184; cf. New

York Times, November 18, 1991.

REX 84 (short for Readiness

Exercise 1984) turned out to be part

of a series of such exercises (now

known as Continuity of Operations

Exercises) that have continued under

FEMA down into the Obama era.

See for example the Department of

Homeland Security Press Release,

“DHS Conducts Continuity of

Operations Exercise,” June 17,

2009,

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1245258718688.shtm

15. In stressing the alteration of our

present political milieu by an

extragovernmental group, I do not

intend to exonerate Congress. In

1981 Congress passed the Military

Cooperation with Civilian Law

Enforcement Agencies Act.

According to a brilliant and

prescient essay written by an Air

Force Colonel at the National War

College, the Act “was specifically

intended to force reluctant military

commanders to actively collaborate

in police work” (Air Force Lt. Col.

Charles E. Dunlap, “The Origins of

the American Military Coup of

2012”; quoted in Harry G. Summers,

The New World Strategy: A Military

Policy for America’s Future (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 195.

16. Arkin, American Coup, 34–35. The

incoming Reagan administration also

tried, unsuccessfully until 1985, to

persuade Congress to repeal the so-

called “Clark Amendment” of 1975

barring aid to private groups

engaged in military or paramilitary

operations in Angola—a restriction

that had led the Safari Club to fill the

gap. See Rachel Bronson, Thicker

than Oil: America’s Uneasy

Partnership with Saudi Arabia

(Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2006), 129, 177–79.

17. National Commission on Terrorist

Attacks upon the United States, The

9/11 Commission Report (New

York: W. W. Norton, 2004),

http://www.9-

11commission.gov/report/911Report. pdf 38, 326; Scott , The Road to 9/11,

228–29.

18. Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon

9/11 (Washington, DC: Department

of Defense, 2007), 132.

19. Warshaw, The Co-Presidency of

Bush and Cheney, 164–65; cf.

Washington Post, March 1, 2002;

Scott, Road to 9/11, 237. Warshaw

took the characterization of “shadow

government” from earlier reports by

U.S. News and World Report in

1989, and CNN in 1991 (Warshaw,

The Co-Presidency of Bush and

Cheney, 162).

20. Barton Gellman, Angler: The

Cheney Vice Presidency (New York:

Penguin Press, 2008), 133–35.

21. Gellman, Angler, 284. The same

channel was used for Yoo’s still-

withheld fifty-page memo on torture:

“In an interview after leaving

government, Yoo said Addington and

Flanigan assisted in the preparation

of that memo” (Gellman, Angler,

191).

22. Scott, Road to 9/11, 238, 240–41.

23. “The exercise anticipated civil

disturbances, major demonstrations

and strikes that would affect

continuity of government and/or

resource mobilization. To fight

subversive activities, there was

authorization for the military to

implement government-ordered

movements of civilian populations at

state and regional levels, the arrest

of certain unidentified segments of

the population, and the imposition of

martial rule” (Reynolds, “The Rise

of the National Security State,”

http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/fema/Fema_3.html

24. “The National Consortium for the

Study of Terrorism and Responses to

Terrorism (START) Global

Terrorism Database—part of a joint

government-university program on

terrorism—is hosted at the

University of Maryland. . . . A quick

review of charts from the START

database show that terrorism has

increased [dramatically] in the last 9

years since the U.S. started its ‘war

on terror’” (“U.S. ‘War On Terror’

Has INCREASED Terrorism,”

Washington’s Blog, October 21,

2013,

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/u-

s-war-on-terror-has-increased-

terrorism.html).

25. “President Bush Addresses the

Nation,” Washington Post,

September 20, 2011.

26. “NSPD-9: Combating Terrorism,”

Federation of American Scientists,

http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-

9.htm:

On April 1, 2004, the White House

released the following characterization of

this otherwise classified document: “The

NSPD called on the Secretary of Defense

to plan for military options ‘against

Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including

leadership, command-control, air and air

defense, ground forces, and logistics.’ The

NSPD also called for plans ‘against al

Qaeda and associated terrorist facilities in

Afghanistan, including leadership,

command-control-communications,

training, and logistics facilities.’”

27. “NSPD-9: Combating Terrorism,”

Federation of American Scientists,

http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-

9.htm citing testimony of Donald

Rumsfeld before 9/11 Commission,

March 23, 2304. Cf. Richard Clarke,

Against All Enemies: Inside

America’s War on Terrorism (New

York: Free Press, 2004), 237–38;

Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret

History of the CIA, Afghanistan,

and bin Laden, from the Soviet

Invasion to September 10, 2001

(New York: Penguin Press, 2004),

574–76; Commission Report, 212–

14. A draft of the presidential

directive had originally been

circulated in June 2001 ( 9/11

Commission Report, 208). But the

directive approved on September 4

was for covert action only ( 9/11

Commission Report, 213).

28. Bamford, A Pretext for War, 287.

29. Jennifer Van Bergen, “The USA

PATRIOT Act Was Planned Before

9/11,” Truthout.org, May 20, 2002,

http://www.globalissues.org/article/342/the-

usa-patriot-act-was-planned-before-

911. Van Bergen notes a parallel

with the Patriot Act’s predecessor,

the Antiterrorism Act of 1996:

“James X. Dempsey and David Cole

state in their book, ‘Terrorism & the

Constitution: Sacrificing Civil

Liberties in the Name of National

Security,’ that the most troubling

provisions of the pre-USAPA

antiterrorism laws, enacted in 1996

and expanded now by the USAPA,

‘were developed long before the

bombings [i.e., the Oklahoma City

bombing of 1995] that triggered their

final enactment.’”

30. Cf. Time, Nov. 26, 2001: “While

Daschle, the Senate majority leader,

could have been chosen as a

representative of all Democrats or of

the entire Senate, Leahy is a less

obvious choice, most likely targeted

for a specific reason. He is head of

the Senate Judiciary Committee,

which is involved in issues ranging

from antitrust action to antiterror

legislation [emphasis added].” See

also Anthony York, “Why Daschle

and Leahy?” Salon, November 21,

2001,

http://www.salon.com/2001/11/22/anthrax_17/

31. Glenn Greenwald, “Vital unresolved

anthrax questions and ABC News,”

Salon, August 1, 2008,

http://www.salon.com/2008/08/01/anthrax_2/

32. Lew Dubose and Jake Bernstein,

Vice: Dick Cheney and the

Hijacking of the American

Presidency (New York: Random

House, 2006), 28: “Dick Cheney . . .

would spend the rest of his career

working to restore the Nixon vision

of an all-powerful executive, by

undoing the Watergate reforms that

came out of the early seventies.”

33. Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. and

Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and

Unbalanced: Presidential Power in

a Time of Terror (New York: The

New Press, 2007), 174; emphasis

added.

34. Dubose and Bernstein, Vice: Dick

Cheney, 187–90; citing John Yoo

memos of September 25, 2001

(“deploy”) and January 2002 (“do

not protect”).

35. Department of Justice, “Review of

the Terrorist Screening Center,”

www.justice.gov/oig/reports/FBI/a0527/final.pdf

36. Ellen Nakashima, “Terrorist Watch

List: One Tip Now Enough to Put

Name in Database, Officials Say,”

Washington Post, December 29,

2010.

37. Naomi Wolf, “Fascist America,”

Guardian (London), April 24, 2007,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment

38. “Former U.S. Marine Placed On ‘No

Fly’ List, Sues FBI,” NPR, August 5,

2010,

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?

storyId=129002767. On August 28,

2013, a federal court in Portland,

Oregon, ruled that constitutional

rights are at stake when the

government places Americans on the

No Fly List, agreeing with the

plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the

American Civil Liberties Union

(ACLU of Oregon press release,

http://aclu-or.org/nofly).

39. Scott Shane, “American Man in

Limbo on No-Fly List,” New York

Times, June 15, 2010,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/world/middleeast/16yemen.html

40. U.S. Department of Defense, “U.S.

Northern Command,”

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/northcom.htm Cf. John R. Brinkerhoff, PBS, Online

Newshour, September 28, 2002:

“The United States itself is now for

the first time since the War of 1812 a

theater of war. That means that we

should apply, in my view, the same

kind of command structure in the

United States that we apply in other

theaters of war.” Brinkerhoff had

earlier developed the martial law

provisions of REX 84 in the Reagan

era.

41. Shorrock, Spies for Hire, 344.

42. Julian Assange, “The spy who billed

me twice,” Wikileaks,

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_spy_who_billed_me_twice The March 2009 Army manual “US

Army Concept of Operations for

Police Intelligence Operations”

contains phrases such as, “It [fusion]

does not have constraints that are

emplaced on MI [Military

Intelligence] activities within the

US, because it operates under the

auspice and oversight of the police

discipline and standards” (“Spying

on Anti-War Protesters: US Army

Concept of Operations for Police

Intelligence Operations, 4 Mar

2009,” Wikileaks, May 6, 2009,

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Spying_on_anti-

war_protesters:_US_Army_Concept_of_Operations_for_Police_Intelligence_Operations,_4_Mar_2009

43. “Notice—Continuation of the

National Emergency With Respect to

Persons Who Commit, Threaten To

Commit, or Support Terrorism,”

Daily Compilation Of Presidential

Documents” (“Author: Obama,

Barack H”), September 16, 2010,

http://www.readperiodicals.com//201009/2184118701.html

44. Humanitarian Law Project v.

United States Department of

Treasury. “In April 2007 Judge

Collins lifted her injunction against

enforcement of that portion of the

EO, satisfied that the new definitions

were neither vague nor overbroad.

Judge Collins also reversed her

decision holding Bush’s designations

unconstitutional, deciding that she

erred in allowing the plaintiffs to use

a more relaxed standing analysis for

First Amendment claims” (Jason

Shepard, “Terrorism Over the

Airwaves? Satellite Television and

the First Amendment in the War on

Terror,”

http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/0/4/2/5/p204257_index.html

45. Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth,

Empire, and the Future of America

(Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press,

2007), 183–87.

46. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 142

(order); John Fass Morton, Next-

Generation Homeland Security:

Network Federalism and the Course

to National Preparedness

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute

Press, 2012), 57 (NSDD 55);

Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His

Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

(New York: Scribner, 2007), 88

(2001).

47. Cockburn, Rumsfeld, 88.

48. Clarke, Against All Enemies, 8,

165–75.

49. Shorrock, Spies for Hire, 72–75,

292–96. Project 908 attracted the

attention of Steve Emerson and other

journalists in 1989, when it was

revealed that there had been huge

cost overruns, double billing for the

same work, and eventually

destruction of many key contract

documents in the course of an Army

investigation. The son of the Army

general overseeing the project,

former Congressman Rick Renzi,

was eventually indicted in 2008 on

related charges of extortion, fraud,

money laundering and other crimes

(Steven Emerson, “America’s

Doomsday Project,” U.S. News &

World Report, August 7, 1989, 26–

31). After years of delays, he was

convicted in 2013 and sentenced to

three years in prison (Bob Christie,

“Ex-Rep. Rick Renzi Gets 3 Years in

Prison for Corruption Convictions,”

AP, October 28, 2013). As of June

2014, Renzi was free on appeal.

50. See for example, Clarke, Against All

Enemies, 91.

51. See discussion in Scott, Road to

9/11, 223–36. There were reports

that when Bush was airborne in Air

Force One on 9/11, there were

connectivity problems forcing the

President to use an ordinary cell

phone (Paul Thompson, The Terror

Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day,

Minute by Minute [New York:

HarperCollins/Regan Books, 2004],

437). This may help explain why Air

Force One eventually flew to Offutt

Air Force Base near Omaha, where

the E4-B “Doomsday Planes” are

based.

52. CNN, September 11, 2007,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=UgF9Fd4UyMY. On the CNN

show 9/11 Commission cochair Lee

Hamilton said he had a vague

memory of the mystery plane story,

but that it was never discussed by the

9/11 Commission. CNN promptly

withdrew its 9/11 E-4B story from

its website (“CNN Pulls 9/11 E4B

‘Doomsday’ Plane Video over White

House,” JREF Forum, September 13,

2007,

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?

t=93196.

53. Federal Emergency Management

Agency, Federal Continuity

Directive 1,

http://www.fema.gov/media-

library/assets/documents/30478.

NSPD-51 also nullified PDD 67,

Richard Clarke’s COG directive of a

decade earlier; and it referred to

new “classified Continuity Annexes”

that shall “be protected from

unauthorized disclosure.”

54. Dennis Kucinich, David Swanson,

and Elizabeth De La Vega, The 35

Articles of Impeachment and the

Case for Prosecuting George W.

Bush (Port Townsend, WA: Feral

House, 2008), 81; Peter Dale Scott,

“Congress, the Bush Administration

and Continuity of Government

Planning: The Showdown,”

CounterPunch, March 31, 2008,

http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/03/31/the-

showdown/.

55. “Notice: Continuation of the

National Emergency with Respect to

Certain Terrorist Attacks,” Federal

Register, September 12, 2007,

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/WCPD-

2007-09-17/pdf/WCPD-2007-09-

17-Pg1204.pdf, emphasis added.

56. E.g. “Notice from the President on

the Continuation of the National

Emergency with Respect to Certain

Terrorist Attacks,”: White House,

September 10, 2010,

(http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-

press-office/2010/09/10/notice-

president-continuation-national-

emergency-with-respect-certain-te).

57. Public Law 94-112, Sec. 202, 90

Stat. 1256,

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-

90/pdf/STATUTE-90-Pg1255.pdf, 2.

This language overruled the

specification in President Ford’s

Executive Order 11921 the same

year, that, when a state of emergency

was declared by the President,

Congress could not review the

matter for a period of six months.

58. Cf. Peter Dale Scott and Dam

Hamburg, “To All Readers: Help

Force Congress to Observe the Law

on National Emergencies!!!,”

911Truth.org, March 24, 2009,

http://www.911truth.org/to-all-

readers-help-force-congress-to-

observe-the-law-on-national-

emergencies/.

59. Peter Dale Scott and Dan Hamburg,

911Truth.org, March 24, 2009,

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?

story=20090324183053848#r7.

60. See for example, White House Press

Release, September 10, 2010,

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-

press-office/2010/09/10/notice-

president-continuation-national-

emergency-with-respect-certain-te.

61. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 145.

62. CNN Special Assignment,

November 17, 1991.

63. Public Law 94-112, 2.

4. THE FALSIFIED WAR ON

TERROR

1. Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top

Secret America: The Rise of the

New American Security State (New

York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.

2. For example, Marc Ambinder and D.

G. Grady, Deep State: Inside the

Government Secrecy Industry (New

York: John Wiley, 2013); John

Tirman, “The Quiet Coup: No, Not

Egypt. Here,” HuffingtonPost, July 9,

2013,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-

tirman/nsa-deep-

state_b_3569316.html.

3. Erich Lichtblau, “In Secret, Court

Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.,”

New York Times, July 6, 2013.

4. National Commission on Terrorist

Attacks upon the United States, The

9/11 Commission Report (New

York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 68,

http://www.9-

11commission.gov/report/911Report. pdf

5. 9/11 Commission Report, 145.

6. In addition there are unproven

allegations that the United States

granted a green card to Ayman al

Zawahiri, identified in the 9/11

Commission Report as “the most

important Egyptian in bin Laden’s

circle” ( 9/11 Commission Report,

57), and since 2011 the leader of al-

Qaeda (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed,

The War On Truth: 9/11,

Disinformation and the Anatomy of

Terrorism [Northampton, MA: Olive

Branch Press, 2005], 46). It is not

contested that “foreign trial

transcripts and U.S. court records

confirmed that Zawahiri had

previously flown to America, once

in the early 1990s, and again in

1994. . . . Ali Mohamed, bin-Laden’s

American-trained military adviser,

served as Zawahiri’s host during the

1994 American fundraising

campaign” (Jayna Davis, The Third

Terrorist: The Middle East

Connection to the Oklahoma City

Bombing [Nashville, TN: WND

Books, 2004], 318–19).

7. I have chosen to use the term “Al-

Qaedist” here in place of what I

earlier wrote, “jihadi terrorists.”

“Jihadist,” like “Islamist,” can refer

in English to someone in a legitimate

pursuit of Islam; and it is important

to distinguish between jihad and

terrorism—not blur the distinction

between them. I should make it clear

that by the term “al-Qaedist” I refer

to any terrorist broadly sharing the

terrorist political ideology of al-

Qaeda, not just those who have

sworn allegiance to Osama bin

Laden or his successors. Thus for

example it would include “the

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a

jihadist group that is so radical it has

broken with al Qaeda, in part

because it insisted on being allowed

to indiscriminately kill Shiites”

( New York Times, April 29, 2014, 1).

8. Richard Clarke, Against All

Enemies: Inside America’s War on

Terror (New York: Free Press,

2004), 30.

9. It is relevant that in 2011 the United

States provided assistance to the

armed overthrow of Qaddafi in

Libya, by a violent resistance force

in which al-Qaedists were

prominent.

10. For example, Mark Mazzetti, “Spy

Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens

Terrorism Threat,” New York Times,

September 23, 2006,

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/world/middleeast/24terror.html?

pagewanted=all.

11. A 2013 FBI circular instructs

enforcement officials that people

should be “considered suspicious”

of possible involvement in “terrorist

activity” if they hold the “attitude”

described as “Conspiracy theories

about Westerners” (Ralph Lopez,

“FBI calls half of populace with

9/11 doubts potential terrorists,”

Crime, September 19, 2013,

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/358624

citing FBI circular, “Potential

Indicators of Terrorist Activities

Related to Sleepers”).

12. Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume

Dasquié, Ben Laden: la vérité

interdite (Paris: Denoël, 2001), 14.

13. Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True

Story of a Ground Soldier in the

CIA’s War On Terrorism (New York:

Crown Publishers, 2002), 243–44;

discussion in Peter Dale Scott,

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United

States in Afghanistan, Colombia,

and Indochina (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 28–

31; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to

9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the

Future of America (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

2007), 170–72.

14. Cf. my enlargement of the concept of

an American deep state beyond

parallel government in Peter Dale

Scott, American War Machine:

Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug

Connection, and the Road to

Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman

& Littlefield, 2010), 20–23; Peter

Dale Scott, “The ‘Deep State’ behind

U.S. democracy,” VoltaireNet, April

6, 2011,

http://www.voltairenet.org/article169316.html etc.

15. All of America’s military

engagements since 1950 have

involved defense of the petrodollar

system. See chapter 6.

16. Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin

Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the

CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI

—and Why Patrick Fitzgerald

Failed to Stop Him (New York:

Regan, 2006), 120–25. Cf. Toronto

Globe and Mail, November 22,

2001; Tim Weiner, Enemies: A

History of the FBI (New York:

Random House, 2012), 397.

17. Ali H. Soufan, The Black Banners:

The Inside Story of 9/11 and the

War Against al-Qaeda (New York:

W. W. Norton, 2011), 75–77.

18. Lance, Triple Cross, 373. Cf. J. M.

Berger, “Paving the Road to 9/11,”

Intelwire,

http://intelwire.egoplex.com/unlocking911-

1-ali-mohamed-911.html: “Ali

Mohamed was the utility player who

created al Qaeda’s terrorist

infrastructure in the United States—a

series of connections, ideas,

techniques and specific tools used by

the [9/11] plot’s hijackers and

masterminds. . . . Mohamed

described teaching al Qaeda

terrorists how to smuggle box cutters

onto airplanes.”

19. Lance, Triple Cross, 123–24.

20. Soufan, The Black Banners, 561.

The testimony of former FBI agents

like Ali Soufan that Mohamed was

not incarcerated has been challenged

in a curious book by Special Forces

veteran Pete Blaber, The Mission,

The Men, and Me: Lessons from a

Former Delta Force Commander

(New York: Berkley Trade, 2010).

Blaber claims to have interviewed

Mohamed in a prison cell, after

reading Mohamed’s perceptive

document on how to track down

Osama bin Laden. Blaber argues

strenuously that Mohamed was not a

double agent, but fails to deal with

any of the countervailing evidence

(such as the RCMP release).

21. “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter

Despite Warning,” New York Times,

November 8, 2009; cf. Scott,

American War Machine, 246–47.

Cf. The Globe and Mail (Canada),

May 26, 2011: “FBI thought Mumbai

massacre plotter worked for them,

court told.” Another much simpler

domestic example of this puzzle is

Richard Aoki, the FBI informant

who in the 1960s supplied the Black

Panthers in Oakland with arms (Seth

Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s

War on Student Radicals, and

Reagan’s Rise to Power [New York:

Macmillan, 2012], 418–24, etc.).

22. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11,

151–60. For a summary, see Peter

Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and

Now Libya: The Human Costs of

Washington’s On-Going Collusion

with Terrorists,” Asian-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3578.

23. Steven Emerson, American Jihad:

The Terrorists Living among Us

(New York: Free Press, 2002), 57–

58; Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.:

Inside the Secret World of Osama

bin Laden (New York: Free Press,

2001), 135; Lawrence Wright, The

Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the

Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 2006), 181–82. Wright gives

a detailed summary of John Zent’s

ensuing interview with Mohamed in

May 1993, but says not a word about

Zent’s intervention with the RCMP.

To my knowledge the only privileged

book to do so is Tim Weiner’s

Enemies, 397: “He explained that he

was working for the FBI and he

offered the telephone number of his

Bureau contact in San Francisco.

The Canadians released Mohamed

after the agent vouched for him.”

Weiner’s relative candor came in

2012, long after this FBI scandal had

already been publicized by Lance

and other authors, including myself.

24. Cf. Washington Post, June 1, 2012:

“Soufan’s case was unusual because

he never worked for the CIA. The

PRB’s [Publications Review

Board’s] authority [i.e., legal

authority] is grounded in the secrecy

agreements signed by agency

employees that require them to

submit any material prepared for

public disclosure ‘either during my

employment . . . or at anytime

thereafter.’” In other words, the

CIA’s PRB had no legal right to

censor Soufan’s book, but did so

anyway—an example of the blurring

of past bureaucratic distinctions in

today’s shadow state.

25. Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden

(New York: Oxford University

Press, 2011), 218n.

26. Lessons from“Ali Mohamed Case,”

Defense Human Resources Activity

(DHRA), Department of Defense,

http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/osg/terrorism/mohamedhtm

27. Benjamin Weiner and James Risen,

“The Masking of a Militant: A

Special Report; A Soldier’s

Shadowy Trail In U.S. and in the

Mideast,” New York Times,

December 1, 1998. This

embarrassing exercise in damage

control cannot be found on

LexisNexis.

28. Peter Waldman, Gerald F. Seib,

Jerry Markon, and Christopher

Cooper, “Sergeant Served U.S.

Army and bin Laden, Showing

Failings in FBI’s Terror Policing,”

Wall Street Journal, November 26,

2001.

29. Daniel Coleman, Affidavit, Sealed

Complaint, United States of America

v. Ali Abdelseoud Mohamed, U.S.

District Court, Southern District of

New York, September 1998

(obtained by INTELWIRE.com), p.7,

http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/ali-

mohamed-coleman-affidavit.pdf. In fact Mohamed had been an FBI

informant since at least 1992.

30. I had no choice but to remove certain

relevant material from The Road to

9/11. As British and American

lawyers pointed out to me, my

sources had already retracted their

statements before me.

31. Lance, Triple Cross, 125. Cf. Steven

Emerson, “Osama bin Laden’s

Special Operations Man,” Journal

of Counterterrorism and Security

International, September 1, 1998,

http://www.investigativeproject.org/187/osama-

bin-ladens-special-operations-man:

“In a seemingly bizarre twist, while

in California, Mohammed

volunteered to provide information

to the FBI on a smuggling operations

involving Mexicans and other aliens

not connected to terrorist groups.

Within time, officials say, the

relationship allowed Mohammed to

divert the FBI’s attention away from

looking at his real role in terrorism

into examining the information he

gave them about other smuggling.”

But it could not have diverted the

FBI’s attention for very long. By

May 1993, five months later,

Mohamed had described to Zent in

some detail his activities with

Osama and al-Qaeda (Wright,

Looming Tower, 181–82; J. M.

Berger, ed., Ali Mohamed: An

Intelwire Sourcebook [Intelwire

Press, 2006], 31–32).

32. Lance, Triple Cross, 95. Cf. Weiner,

Enemies, 397.

33. Lance, Triple Cross, 99. Similarly

Tim Weiner writes that the FBI

agents handling Mohamed “did not

comprehend him” (Weiner, Enemies,

397).

34. “Ali Mohamed Case,” Defense

Human Resources Activity (DHRA),

Department of Defense,

http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/osg/terrorism/mohamed.htm emphasis added.

35. John Miller, Michael Stone, and

Chris Mitchell, The Cell: Inside the

9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA

Failed to Stop It (New York:

Hyperion, 2002), 90–91.

36. United States of America v. Omar

Abdel Rahman et al., September 11,

1995; quoted in Berger , Ali

Mohamed, 210; cf. Lance, Triple

Cross, 48.

37. “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin

Laden,” Wall Street Journal,

November 26, 2001: “At the time,

the FBI wrote them off as harmless

zealots, fired up to help the

mujahedeen fighting the Soviet

puppet government in Afghanistan.”

38. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 134. The al-

Kifah Center (“al-Kifah” means “the

struggle”) was “known informally as

‘the jihad office.’ . . . There was no

problem finding volunteers, who

might stay in Afghanistan up to three

months at a time. . . . The volunteers

joined the forces of the Hezb-I-

Islami (Party of Islam), led by

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar” (Stephen

Franklin, “Slain Muslim Had Link

To Radical Cleric,” Chicago

Tribune, July 11, 1993,

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-

07-11/news/9307110208_1_world-

trade-center-bombing-sheik-omar-

abdel-rahman-mustafa-shalabi).

39. Mitchell D. Silber, The Al Qaeda

Factor: Plots Against the West

(Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 169–70.

40. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 130–31.

41. Wright, Looming Tower, 180; citing

Boston Globe, February 3, 1995; cf.

Robert Friedman, “The CIA’s

Jihad,” New Yorker, March 27,

1995; Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda:

Brotherhood of Terror (Parsippany,

NJ: Alpha, 2002), 117.

42. Lance Williams and Erik

McCormick, “Al Qaeda Terrorist

Worked with FBI,” San Francisco

Chronicle, November 4, 2001.

43. “Lessons from Ali Mohamed Case,”

Pentagon,

http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/osg/terrorism/mohamed.htm

44. Robert Friedman, “The CIA and the

Sheik,” Village Voice, March 30,

1993; Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s

Jihad in Europe (New York: Berg,

2004), 26.

45. Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, The

Cell, 44. Cf. J. M. Berger, Jihad

Joe: Americans Who Go to War in

the Name of Islam (Washington, DC:

Potomac Books, 2011), 44: “The

stash included military training

manuals and documents given to

Nosair by Sergeant Ali Mohamed,

the jihadist mole at Fort Bragg.”

46. Newsday, November 8, 1990.

47. New York Times, November 8, 1990.

48. New York Times, December 16,

1990. Compare the Pentagon’s

terrorist account of the training given

by Mohamed (“surveillance,

weapons and explosives”) with the

more benign version in the long

article about Mohamed in The New

York Times: “Mr. Mohamed met the

local Muslims at an apartment in

Jersey City, and taught them survival

techniques, map reading and how to

recognize tanks and other Soviet

weapons, according to testimony by

one of his students at Mr. Nosair’s

1995 Federal trial” (Benjamin

Weiner and James Risen, “The

Masking of a Militant: A Special

Report,” New York Times, December

01, 1998).

49. TV journalist John Miller, a former

New York deputy police

commissioner who would later

become the FBI’s Assistant Director

for Public Affairs, reported in

Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, The

Cell, 44, that the disputed evidence

from Nosair’s home was withheld

from NYPD officer Edward Norris,

who prepared the NYPD case

against Nosair:

On the third day after the shooting, while

Norris was out to lunch, the FBI removed

Nosair’s 16 boxes of files from Norris’s

squad room. Unfortunately the evidence

was about to enter a black hole. The FBI

now says it turned the files over to the

Manhattan District Attorney’s Office,

after it was decided, following a series of

meetings and phone calls, that the local

prosecutor and the NYPD would have

exclusive jurisdiction over the murder

case. The Manhattan DA’s office won’t

comment on what was done with the files

before Nosair’s trial, though Norris was

never informed they were available. But

this much is certain: The bulk of the

material remained untranslated and unread

for nearly three years.

This last sentence is hard to

reconcile with the detailed

description given at the time by

Borelli.

50. Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad.”

51. Lance, Triple Cross, 58–62.

52. “Lessons from Ali Mohamed Case,”

DHRA, Department of Defense,

http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/osg/terrorism/mohamed.htm

53. For the list, see Lance, Triple Cross,

574–75.

54. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret

History of the CIA, Afghanistan,

and bin Laden, from the Soviet

Invasion to September 10, 2001

(New York: Penguin Press, 2004),

251.

55. Quoted in Lance, Triple Cross, 383.

56. Coll, Ghost Wars, 255: “Since 1989

the FBI had been running paid

informants inside circles of Islamic

radicals in New York and New

Jersey. In 1990, FBI agents carted

away forty-seven boxes of

documents and training manuals from

the home of El Sayyid Nosair.” Cf.

Lance, Triple Cross, 73–75, etc.

57. Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad.”

58. Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game:

How the United States Helped

Unleash Fundamentalist Islam

(New York: Metropolitan Books,

2003), 73–79, 98–108, 120–25. Cf.

Robert Baer [a former CIA officer],

Sleeping with the Devil (New York:

Crown, 2003), 99: “The White

House looked on the Brothers as a

silent ally, a secret weapon against

(what else?) communism. This

covert action started in the 1950s

with the Dulles brothers . . . when

they approved Saudi Arabia’s

funding of Egypt’s Brothers against

Nasser”; Scott, Road to 9/11, 44.

59. Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 274–75;

quoting John Cooley, Unholy Wars

(London: Pluto Press, 1999), 31–32:

“By the end of 1980, U.S. military

trainers were sent to Egypt to impart

the skills of the U.S. Special Forces

to those Egyptians who would, in

turn, pass on the training to the

Egyptian volunteers flying to the aid

of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.”

60. Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror:

The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of

America’s Private Intelligence

Network (New York: Carroll and

Graf, 2005), 150, 247.

61. “Lessons from Ali Mohamed Case,”

http://www.dhra.mil/perserec/osg/terrorism/mohamed.htm

62. Cf. Emerson, “Osama bin Laden’s

Special Operations Man”: “He had

been in the United States earlier that

decade, having graduated as a

captain from a Special Forces

Officers School at Fort Bragg in

1981 in a program for visiting

military officials from foreign

countries.”

63. Lance, Triple Cross, 194 (oath).

5. THE FALSIFIED WAR ON

TERROR II

1. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11:

Wealth, Empire, and the Future of

America (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007), 161–62;

citing Guardian (London), January 7,

1993; Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s

Jihad in Europe (New York: Berg,

2004), 16.

2. Ferrukh Mir, Half Truth

(Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2011),

163–64: “In 1992, Ali Mohamed, a

double agent and ex-US Special

Forces officer with close ties to Al-

Kifah, led a group of US militants

who were all ex-US soldiers to train

and fight in Bosnia. Abu Obadiah

Yahiya, an ex-US Marine and

security chief at the Brooklyn branch,

lead [sic] a second group of US

militants to fight in Bosnia.” Cf.

Mark Huband, Trading Secrets:

Spies and Intelligence in an Age of

Terror (New York: I. B. Tauris,

2013), 112: “Mohamed—using the

nom-de-guerre Abu ‘Abdallah—

travelled to Bosnia as part of a team

which trained and armed Muslim

fighters there until June 1993, when

he travelled on to Khartoum and was

asked by bin Laden to set up the al-

Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.”

3. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in

Europe, 39–41; citing Steve Coll and

Steve LeVine, “Global Network

Provides Money, Haven,”

Washington Post, August 3, 1993.

Bin Laden also gave money to the

Third World Relief Agency to buy

weapons for Bosnian fighters

(Michael Scheuer, Through Our

Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden,

Radical Islam, and the Future of

America [Washington, DC: Potomac

Books, Inc., 2006], 151).

4. Scott, Road to 9/11, 149–50;

Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in

Europe, 45, 73–75.

5. Scott, Road to 9/11, 149; Kohlmann,

Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, 73. I

have been unable to identify this

Prince Faisal securely. He is perhaps

Prince Faisal bin Salman bin

Abdulaziz al-Saud, who frequently

visited the United States in

connection with his horse-breeding

interests in Kentucky. In 2003 Gerald

Posner claimed that Faisal’s older

brother and business partner Ahmed

bin Salman had had ties to al-Qaeda

and advance knowledge of 9/11

(Gerald Posner, Why America Slept:

The Failure to Prevent 9/11 [New

York: Random House, 2003]), 202.

Cf. Anthony Summers and Robbyn

Swan, The Eleventh Day: The Full

Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden

(New York: Ballantine Books,

2011), 405–7, 419, 563–64.

6. Robert Friedman, “The CIA’s Jihad,”

New Yorker, March 27, 1995. About

this time, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in

2014 the leader of al-Qaeda, came

without difficulty to America to raise

funds in Silicon Valley, where he

was hosted by Ali Mohamed

(Lawrence Wright, “The Man Behind

Bin Laden,” New Yorker, September

16, 2002: “Zawahiri decided to look

for money in the world center of

venture capitalism—Silicon Valley.

He had been to America once before,

in 1989, when he paid a recruiting

visit to the mujahideen’s Services

Bureau branch office in Brooklyn.

According to the F.B.I., he returned

in the spring of 1993, this time to

Santa Clara, California, where he

was greeted by Ali Mohamed, the

double agent.”)

7. Bruce O. Riedel, The Search for Al

Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology,

and Future (Washington, DC:

Brookings Institution Press, 2008),

43: “Osama also worked with ISI in

the creation of a key Kashmiri

jihadist group in the late 1980s, the

Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.” Cf. Yossef

Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who

Declared War on America (Rocklin,

CA: Forum, 2001), 320.

8. Michael Scheuer, “Central Asia in

Al-Qaeda’s Vision of the Anti-

American Jihad, 1979–2006,” China

and Eurasia Forum Quarterly,

2006, 3.

9. The Black Vault,

https://www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-

content/uploads/2013/10/Letter-to-

Mullah-Mohammed-Omar-from-bin-

Laden-Translation.pdf

10. Ahmed Rashid, “They’re Only

Sleeping: Why Militant Islamicists

in Central Asia Aren’t Going To Go

Away,” New Yorker, January 14,

2002,

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/01/14/theyre-

only-sleeping; cf. Ahmed Rashid,

Jihad (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2002), 165; Svante Cornell,

“Narcotics, Radicalism and Security

in Central Asia: The Islamic

Movement of Uzbekistan,” Uppsala

University, December 2004, 19:

“Bolot Januzakov, Head of the

Kyrgyz Security Council, asserted in

2000 that the IMU controlled the

majority, perhaps up to 70%, of the

heroin entering Kyrgyzstan.”

11. Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror:

How Heroin Is Bankrolling the

Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York:

Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s

Press, 2009), 69, 87, 89, 132–33.

Cf. Parviz Mullodzhanov, “IMU

becomes multinational force,”

Central Asia Online, March 17,

2010,

http://centralasiaonline.com/en_GB/articles/caii/features/main/2010/03/17/feature-

03: “IMU leaders are focused on the

international black market and drug

trafficking.”

12. Peters, Seeds of Terror, 132–33.

13. 9/11 Commission, “Monograph on

Terrorist Financing: Staff Report to

the Commission,” 7. Cf. National

Commission on Terrorist Attacks

upon the United States, The 9/11

Commission Report (New York: W.

W. Norton, 2004),

http://counterterrorismblog.org/upload/2008/09/911_TerrFin_Monograph.pdf 171: “Al Qaeda has been alleged to

have used a variety of illegitimate

means, particularly drug trafficking

and conflict diamonds, to finance

itself. . . . While the drug trade was a

source of income for the Taliban, it

did not serve the same purpose for al

Qaeda.” The footnote to this

sentence adds: “No evidence

indicates any such involvement in

drug trafficking, and none of the

detained al Qaeda operatives has

indicated that this was a method of

fund-raising” ( 9/11 Commission

Report, 499).

14. “Evidence Presented to the British

Parliament, 4th October 2001,” Los

Angeles Times, October 4, 2001. Cf.

New York Times, October 4, 2001.

For further documentation, see Peter

Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War:

The United States in Afghanistan,

Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham,

MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003),

32, 36.

15. New York Times, July 20, 1993. Cf.

J. R. de Szigethy, “Crime Scene—

World Trade Center,”

AmericanMafia.com, September

2004,

http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_275.html

“The murders [from the 1993 WTC

bombing] were the result of a plot by

members of an organized crime

syndicate involved in drug

trafficking.”

16. Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist:

The Middle East Connection to the

Oklahoma City Bombing (Nashville,

TN: WND Books, 2004), 303.

17. Boston Herald, October 17, 2001;

cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 175.

18. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret

History of the CIA, Afghanistan,

and bin Laden, from the Soviet

Invasion to September 10, 2001

(New York: Penguin Press, 2004),

104.

19. Mullodzhanov, “IMU becomes

multinational force.”

20. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War

Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA

Global Drug Connection, and the

Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

21. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of

Heroin: CIA Complicity in the

Global Drug Trade (Brooklyn, NY:

Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 261–

78.

22. Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of

Patriots (New York: W. W. Norton,

1987), 115 (Nugan Hand); Rachel

Bronson, Thicker than Oil:

America’s Uneasy Partnership with

Saudi Arabia (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2006), 177–80;

Elaine Windrich, “The Laboratory of

Hate: The Role of Clandestine Radio

in the Angolan War,” International

Journal of Cultural Studies 3(2),

2000 (Safari Club).

23. Steven Emerson, American Jihad:

The Terrorists Living among Us

(New York: Free Press, 2002), 28.

24. Yossef Bodansky, Terror! The Inside

Story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in

America (New York: S.P.I. Books,

1994), 166. Similarly Gerald Posner

notes “rumors that [Mustafa] Shalabi

[the head of the al-Kifah Center until

he was murdered in February 1991] .

. . might be involved in

counterfeiting” (Posner, Why

America Slept, 8).

25. Berger, Jihad Joe, 37; citing United

States of America v. Rahman, S5 93

Cr. 181, court transcript, April 3,

1995.

26. Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’

Eyes, 151.

27. Emerson, American Jihad,

28. 28. Bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s

proximity to Khattab is both asserted

and disputed at high levels. See

Robert W. Schaefer, The Insurgency

in Chechnya and the North

Caucasus: From Gazavat To Jihad

(Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger

Security International, 2011), 165–

66.

29. Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in

Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-

Islamism Since 1979 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2010),

56.

30. Ali H. Soufan, Black Banners: The

Inside Story of 9/11 and the War

Against al-Qaeda, (New York: W.

W. Norton, 2011), 62. Jeremy

Scahill also writes of Special

Operations veterans in Blackwater

with previous “experience in

Chechnya” (Jeremy Scahill, Dirty

Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

[New York: Nation Books, 2013],

408).

31. Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18 (discussed

below).

32. Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of

Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at

Islam’s Holiest Shrine (New York:

Anchor, 2008).

33. Peter Tomsen, The Wars of

Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism,

Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of

Great Powers (New York:

PublicAffairs, 2011), 179–82, 195–

99.

34. Coll, Ghost Wars, 155. For Azzam’s

and Osama bin Laden’s Muslim

Brotherhood memberships, see Steve

Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian

Family in the American Century

(New York: Penguin Press, 2008),

148, 253.

35. 9/11 Commission Report, 56.

36. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant

Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in

Central Asia (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2001), 131. Cf.

Steven A. Yetiv, The Petroleum

Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and

Terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 2011), 65.

37. Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan,

198.

38. Scott, Road to 9/11, 171; citing

Rajeev Sharma, Pak Proxy War

(New Delhi: Kaveri Books, 2002),

145–46.

39. Cf. John J. Loftus, “What Congress

Does Not Know about Enron and

9/11,” May 2003,

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4219.htm The . . . block order, in force since the

1980’s, was against any investigation that

would embarrass the Saudi Royal family.

Originally, it was designed to conceal

Saudi support for Muslim extremists

fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan

and Chechnya, but it went too far. Oliver

North noted in his autobiography, that

every time he tried to do something about

terrorism links in the Middle East, he was

told to stop because it might embarrass

the Saudis. This block remains in place.

40. Scott, Road to 9/11, 172; citing Greg

Palast and David Pallister,

“Intelligence: FBI Claims Bin Laden

Inquiry Was Frustrated,” Guardian,

November 7, 2001,

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/07/afghanistan.september11

41. Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand

Jihad: How Islam and the Left

Sabotage America (New York:

Encounter Books, 2010), 124–25.

Andrew C. McCarthy is the former

Assistant United States Attorney who

led the 1995 terrorism prosecution

against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman

and also contributed to the

prosecutions of those (including Ali

Mohamed) who bombed U.S.

embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

He later became a columnist for

National Review. His book is biased

but contains much useful information.

42. David Livingstone, Black Terror

White Soldiers: Islam, Fascism and

the New Age ([Place of publication

not identified]: Sabilillah

Publications, 2013), 557, citing

Craig Unger, House of Bush, House

of Saud (New York: Scribner,

2004), 112 (cf. 101). Cf. Coll, The

Bin Ladens, 342.

43. Nathan Vardi, “Sins of the Father?”

Forbes, March 18, 2002.

44. Coleman affidavit, 2; in J. M.

Berger, ed., Ali Mohamed: An

Intelwire Sourcebook (Intelwire

Press, 2006), 26, 31–32).

45. Coll, The Bin Ladens, 399–401.

46. For a summary of some of the

conflicting accounts, see Summers

and Day, The Eleventh Day, 215–16.

47. Coll, Ghost Wars, 231, emphasis

added. In 2001 Peter Bergen had

claimed that bin Laden “used his

family connections with King Fahd

to convince the [Saudi] government

that he needed to leave the country to

sort out some business matters in

Pakistan. Arriving there in April

1991, he then sent a letter to his

family telling them that he would not

be able to return home. After some

months in Afghanistan he arrived in

Sudan” (Peter L. Bergen, Holy War,

Inc. [New York: Free Press, 2001],

81–82).

48. 9/11 Commission Report, 57. In the

December 2004 paperback edition

of Ghost Wars, 231–32, Coll

adjusted his account to reconcile

with The 9/11 Commission Report.

He replaced his sentence, “The

escort put bin Laden on a plane out

of Saudi Arabia,” with two new

ones: “Two associates of bin Laden

later offered a different version

while under interrogation. They said

a dissident member of the royal

family helped him leave the country

by arranging for bin Laden to attend

an Islamic conference in Pakistan

during the spring of 1991.”

49. Steve Coll also suggests that the

“interior ministry” (headed by the

Prince) supplied bin Laden with “a

one-time exit visa to travel to

Pakistan to liquidate investments

there” (Coll, The Bin Ladens, 381).

Both motives may have been present

in bin Laden’s mind, but his capacity

to serve as a mediator may have

been more influential in persuading

the Saudis to arrange for his

departure.

50. Lawrence Wright, Looming Tower:

Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006),

161. For Naif (or Nayef) as anti-

American, see Coll, Ghost Wars,

399; Coll, The Bin Ladens, 437,

626n.

51. Wright, Looming Tower, 161; Roy

Gutman, How We Missed the Story:

Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and

the Hijacking of Afghanistan

(Washington, DC: Endowment of the

United States Institute of Peace,

2008), 34.

52. Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan,

485: “Al-Qaeda, Muslim

Brotherhood extremists, and Prince

Turki’s General Intelligence

Directorate supported the ISI’s

extremist-centered Afghan strategy.”

53. Against this odd claim cf., for

example, Coll, The Bin Ladens, 251:

“Osama developed cordial relations

with Prince Turki al-Faisal. . . . He

also won audiences with the

powerful full brothers of Fahd—

Nayef and Ahmed”; Wright,

Looming Tower, 154: “The minister

of the interior, Prince Naif, . . .

summoned bin Laden to his office. . .

. Bin Laden had reported to Naif . . .

many times during the Afghan jihad.”

As noted above, Ahmed Rashid

claims that bin Laden and Prince

Turki became “firm friends and

allies” in the same cause (Rashid,

Taliban, 131).

54. “A Biography of Osama bin Laden,”

Frontline, PBS,

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/bio2.html

55. Scheuer, Through Our Enemies’

Eyes, 131.

56. Coll, Ghost Wars, 207.

57. Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan from

the Cold War through the War on

Terror (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2013), 86.

58. Coll, Ghost Wars, 215–16.

59. Coll, The Bin Ladens, 403–5:

“Osama now became a target; it is

not entirely clear why.”

6. DEEP STATE USES AND

PROTECTION OF AL-QAEDA

TERRORISTS

1. Peter Tomsen, The Wars of

Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism,

Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of

Great Powers (New York:

PublicAffairs, 2011), 337.

2. Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan,

406–7.

3. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret

History of the CIA, Afghanistan,

and bin Laden, from the Soviet

Invasion to September 10, 2001

(New York: Penguin Press, 2004),

225.

4. Peter Dale Scott, American War

Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2010), 94–105; Peter

Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy:

JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of

War (New York: Skyhorse, 2013),

98–103.

5. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant

Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in

Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2001), 145.

6. Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A

Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an

Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet

Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E.

Sharpe, 1999), 272–75. Cf. Mark

Irkali, Tengiz Kodrarian, and Cali

Ruchala, “God Save the Shah,”

Sobaka Magazine, May 22, 2003,

http://16beavergroup.org/articles/2003/07/03/rene-

god-save-the-shah-american-guns-

oil-and-spies-in-azerbaijan/. A

fourth operative in MEGA Oil, Gary

Best, was also a veteran of North’s

Contra support effort, and before that

of efforts to support UNITA in

Angola. For more on General

Secord’s and Major Aderholt’s roles

as part of Ted Shackley’s team of

off-loaded CIA assets and

capabilities, see Jonathan Marshall,

Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter,

The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret

Teams and Covert Operations in the

Reagan Era (Boston: South End

Press, 1987), 26–30, 36–42, 197–

98.

7. It was also a time when Congress,

under pressure from Armenian

voters, had banned all military aid to

Azerbaijan (under Section 907 of the

Freedom Support Act). This ban,

reminiscent of the Congressional ban

on aid to the Contras in the 1980s,

ended after 9/11. “In the interest of

national security, and to help in

‘enhancing global energy security’

during this War on Terror, Congress

granted President Bush the right to

waive Section 907 in the aftermath

of September 11th. It was necessary,

Secretary of State Colin Powell told

Congress, to ‘enable Azerbaijan to

counter terrorist organizations’”

(Irkali, Kodrarian, and Ruchala,

“God Save the Shah”).

8. Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272–75;

Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and

War (Lanham, MD: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of the

airline operation, Azeri pilots were

trained in Texas. Dearborn had

previously helped Secord advise and

train the fledgling Contra air force

(Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The

Iran-Contra Connection, 197).

These important developments were

barely noticed in the U.S. press, but

a Washington Post article did

belatedly note that a group of

American men who wore “big

cowboy hats and big cowboy boots”

had arrived in Azerbaijan as military

trainers for its army, followed in

1993 by “more than 1,000 guerrilla

fighters from Afghanistan’s radical

prime minister, Gulbuddin

Hekmatyar” ( Washington Post, April

21, 1994). Richard Secord was

allegedly attempting also to sell

Israeli arms, with the assistance of

Israeli agent David Kimche, another

associate of Oliver North. See Scott,

Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20.

Whether the Americans were aware

of it or not, the al-Qaeda presence in

Baku soon expanded to include

assistance for moving al-Qaedists

onward into Dagestan and Chechnya.

9. Steve Levine claims that “The

Afghans, too, returned home,” having

achieved little (Steve Levine, The

Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of

Empire and Fortune on the Caspian

Sea [New York: Random House,

2007], 188). But John Cooley

reports that “According to the

Russian Foreign Intelligence Service

. . . they played an important role in

the capture from the Armenians of

Goradiz”; and that “after suffering

high casualties in battles with the

Armenians . . . the fighters that

remained turned to sabotage and

terrorism” (John Cooley, Unholy

Wars [London: Pluto Press, 1999],

180–81).

10. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott,

Drugs, Oil, and War, 7.

11. The bin Laden organization

established an NGO in Baku, which

became a base for terrorism

elsewhere (National Commission on

Terrorist Attacks upon the United

States, The 9/11 Commission Report

(New York: W. W. Norton, 2004),

http://www.9-

11commission.gov/report/911Report. pdf 58). It also became a transshipment

point for Afghan heroin to the

Chechen mafia, whose branches

“extended not only to the London

arms market, but also throughout

continental Europe and North

America” (Cooley, Unholy Wars,

176).

12. Loretta Napoleoni, Terror

Incorporated (New York: Seven

Stories Press, 2005), 90–97.

13. “KLA Funding Tied to Heroin

Profits,” Washington Times, May 3,

1999. Cf. Mark Curtis, Secret

Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with

Radical Islam (London: Profile,

2011), 237-47; Marcia Christoff

Kurop, Wall Street Journal Europe,

November 1, 2001:

Islamist infiltration of the Kosovo

Liberation Army advanced, meanwhile.

Bin Laden is said to have visited Albania in

1996 and 1997, according to the murder-

trial testimony of an Algerian-born French

national, Claude Kader, himself an

Afghanistan-trained mujahideen fronting

at the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank. He

recruited some Albanians to fight with the

KLA in Kosovo, according to the Paris-

based Observatoire Geopolitique des

Drogues.

14. Barnett R. Rubin, Afghanistan from

the Cold War through the War on

Terror (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2013), 86.

15. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.:

Inside the Secret World of Osama

bin Laden (New York: Free Press,

2001), 67. Cf. Ali H. Soufan, The

Black Banners: The Inside Story of

9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda

(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011),

565 (murder of Anwar Sadat, watch

list); J. M. Berger, Jihad Joe:

Americans Who Go to War in the

Name of Islam (Washington, DC:

Potomac Books, 2011), 24 (watch

list).

16. Lawrence Wright, The Looming

Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to

9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2006), 180; cf. Paul L. Williams, Al

Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror

(Parsippany, NJ: Alpha, 2002), 117.

17. “A Soldier’s Shadowy Trail in U.S.

and in the Mideast,” New York

Times, December 1, 1998,

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/01/international/120198LADEN_SHADOW.html

18. Phil Karber, Fear and Faith in

Paradise: Exploring Conflict and

Religion in the Middle East

(Lanham, MD: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2012), 3; cf. Wright,

Looming Tower, 164–65.

19. Anthony Summers and Robbyn

Swan, The Eleventh Day: The Full

Story of 9/11 and bin Laden (New

York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 393:

“Citing a U.S. intelligence source,

the author Simon Reeve reported as

much in 1999—well before it

became an issue after 9/11.”

20. Summers and Swan, The Eleventh

Day, 394.

21. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An

Arabian Family in the American

Century (New York: Penguin Press,

2008), 399–401. Cf. Geoffrey

Wawro, Quicksand: America’s

Pursuit of Power in the Middle East

(New York: Penguin Press, 2010):

“Osama mixed business and religion.

He committed to build an airport at

Port Sudan”; Karber, Fear and Faith

in Paradise: “Bin Laden promised

the people of Sudan an airport at

Port Sudan.”

22. Wright, Looming Tower, 165.

23. The text of the State Department

paper of August 14, 1996, “State

Department Issues Factsheet on Bin

Laden,” is reproduced in Jean-

Charles Brisard and Guillaume

Dasquié, Ben Laden: la vérité

interdite (Paris: Denoël, 2001),

257–58.

24. The Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan

and the Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt

were both founded in 1977 with

official approval by Prince

Mohammed al-Faisal al-Saud, a

graduate of Menlo College in

California. Cf. “Sudan Islamic

Banking,” Photius [n.d.],

http://www.photius.com/countries/sudan/economy/sudan_economy_islamic_banking.html The Faisal Islamic Bank, whose principal

patron was the Saudi prince, Muhammad

ibn Faisal Al Saud, was officially

established in Sudan in 1977 by the Faisal

Islamic Bank Act. The “open door” policy

enabled Saudi Arabia, which had a huge

surplus after the 1973 Organization of

Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)

increases in the price of petroleum, to

invest in Sudan. Members of the Muslim

Brotherhood and its political arm, the

National Islamic Front, played a

prominent role on the board of directors

of the Faisal Islamic Bank, thus

strengthening the bank’s position in Sudan.

25. John Crewdson, “Swiss Officials

Freeze Bank Accounts Linked to

Supporters of Terrorist Groups,”

Chicago Tribune, November 3,

2001,

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2001-

11-03/news/0111030131_1_laden-

linked-bin-terror-list.

26. Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game:

How the United States Helped

Unleash Fundamentalist Islam

(New York: Metropolitan Books,

2005), 180–81.

27. Jane’s Intelligence Review, August

1, 2001; quoted in Peter Dale Scott,

Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and

the Future of America (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

2007), 356.

28. Crewdson, “Swiss Officials Freeze

Bank Accounts Linked to Supporters

of Terrorist Groups.” Cf. Nafeez

Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on

Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and

the Anatomy of Terrorism

(Northampton, MA: Olive Branch

Press, 2005), 98; Financial Times,

November 29, 2001,

http://archive.today/PEgwN: “A US

State Department report in 1996 and

a French investigation into the bank

separately concur that bin Laden

invested $50m in the bank on his

arrival in Sudan in 1991, an

allegation Mr. Ismail [of the bank]

denies.” Cf. also Brisard and

Dasquié, Ben Laden, 119–21, 308–

10, etc.

29. Coll, The Bin Ladens, 413. There is

a brief reference to the State

Department White Paper in Bergen,

Holy Wars, Inc., 83: “Bin Laden . . .

sank $50 million of his own money

into the Al-Shamal Islamic Bank in

Khartoum” (cf. 264n). The

controversial author Yossef

Bodansky links both the Faisal

Islamic Bank and the Al-Shamal

Bank to significant al-Qaedist

activities, as well as possible drug

trafficking (Yossef Bodansky, Bin

Laden: The Man Who Declared War

on America [Rocklin, CA: Forum,

2001], 42–43).

30. Tony Rizzo, “KC Man Linked to

Early al-Qaida,” Kansas City Star,

September 9, 2006.

31. Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How Bin

Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the

CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI

—and Why Patrick Fitzgerald

Failed To Stop Him (New York:

Regan, 2006), 157–59, citing State

Department Cable

1994STATE335575.

32. Steve A. Yetiv, The Petroleum

Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and

Terror (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 2011), 114–15.

33. Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in

Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror

(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003),

108. At ease in Saudi Arabia,

Khalifa became a misleading source,

rather than a topic of inquiry, in

privileged bin Laden books like

Wright’s The Looming Tower, 112–

13, 450.

34. Michael Scheuer, Through Our

Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden,

Radical Islam, and the Future of

America (Washington, DC: Potomac

Books, 2006), 151.

35. Lance, Triple Cross, 161, citing

personal interview.

36. Lance, Triple Cross, 162.

37. Lance, Triple Cross, 157–58.

38. Khalifa also “headed the Muslim

World League office in Peshawar in

the 1980s. In 1988, he moved to

Manila and opened a branch office

of the World Assembly of Muslim

Youth [an allied royal creation]”

(Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan,

198).

39. Robert Baer, Sleeping with the

Devil (New York: Crown, 2003),

167, 140.

40. Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan,

179–82, 195–99.

41. Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast

Asia, 93.

42. Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 69;

Aaron Mannes, Profiles in Terror:

The Guide to Middle East Terrorist

Organizations (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 41.

43. Kumar Ramakrishna (ed.), After

Bali: The Threat of Terrorism in

Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute

of Defence and Strategic Studies,

2003), 139.

44. Wesley J. L. Anderson, Disrupting

Threat Finances: Utilization of

Financial Information to Disrupt

Terrorist Organizations in the

Twenty-First Century (Ft. Belvoir

Defense Technical Information

Center, 2007), 14.

45. Girma Yohannes Iyassu Menelik,

Europe: The Future Battleground of

Islamic Terrorism (München: GRIN-

Verlag, 2010), 95.

46. Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in

Europe (New York: Berg, 2004),

41–42. Before being captured in

Pakistan, Ramzi Yousef was being

sheltered by his maternal uncle

Zahid al-Shaikh, a principal with

Mercy International (Peter Lance,

1000 Years for Revenge:

International Terrorism and the

FBI, the Untold Story [New York:

ReganBooks, 2003], 189). Mercy

International was another Islamic

NGO involved in recruiting

“international volunteers” for the

war in Bosnia (Richard Labévière,

Dollars For Terror: The United

States and Islam (New York:

Algora, 2000), 151.

47. Larry Niksch, Abu Sayyaf: Target of

Philippine-U. S. Anti-Terrorism

Cooperation (Washington, DC:

Congressional Research Service,

Library of Congress, 2007), CRS-4.

48. Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin

Laden I Know: An Oral History of

al Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free

Press, 2006), 408.

49. 9/11 Commission Report, 73; citing

Joint Inquiry Report (classified

version), 324– 28. Cf. pp. 146, 148:

“In 1992, KSM . . . moved his family

to Qatar at the suggestion of the

former minister of Islamic affairs of

Qatar, Sheikh Abdallah . . ., In

January 1996, well aware that U.S.

authorities were chasing him, he left

Qatar for good.”

50. Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, 18–

19, 194–96. Baer heard from another

member of the al-Thani family,

former police chief Hamad bin Jasim

bin Hamad al-Thani, that when KSM

came from the Philippines, Abdallah

bin Khalid gave him 20 blank Qatari

passports. Later, “As soon as the FBI

showed up in Doha” in 1996, the

emir ordered Abdallah to move

KSM out of his apartment to his

beach estate, and eventually out of

the country (Baer, Sleeping with the

Devil, 195–96).

51. Brian Ross and David Scott, “Qatari

Royal Family Linked to Al Qaeda,”

ABC-NEWS.com, February 7, 2003,

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?

id=129838.

52. 9/11 Commission Report, 488, citing

Intelligence report, interrogation of

KSM, July 23, 2003.

53. 9/11 Commission Report, 171. A

Sarajevo paper confirmed that KSM

worked for a relief group in Bosnia

that “was just a cover for the Cairo-

based Islamist movement, the

Muslim Brotherhood” ( Adnkronos,

January 20, 2009,

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?

id=3.0.2928330465).

54. “How Saudi Arabia and Qatar are

the Tortoise and the Hare of the

Middle East,” The Atlantic, August

27, 2013,

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/how-

saudi-arabia-and-qatar-are-the-

tortoise-and-the-hare-of-the-middle-

east/279090/. Qatar’s motives for

this support seem to be the same as

Saudi support earlier, for protection

at home: “By aligning itself with [the

Brotherhood] Qatar could extend its

influence and protect itself from

revolution on its own soil, turning

the Muslim Brotherhood into an ally

rather than a threat” (Frida Ghitis,

“Qatar’s Risky Bet on the Muslim

Brotherhood,” World Policy Review,

January 31, 2013).

55. For example, Kimberley N. Trapp,

State Responsibility for

International Terrorism (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2011), 51.

56. Lance, Triple Cross, 253; emphasis

in original. Lance does discuss the

role of Qatar’s Sheikh Abdullah in

helping KSM to escape the FBI

(Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the

Government is Still Hiding about

the War on Terror [New York:

Regan Books, 2004], 168–69).

57. Lance, Triple Cross, 342.

58. Paul Church, “Was Saudi Arabia

involved?” Asia Times Online,

February 11, 2012,

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB11Ak03.html Cf. Summers and Swan, The

Eleventh Day, 410–15, 559–62;

Former Senator Bob Graham, Keys

to the Kingdom (New York :

Vanguard Press, 2011), 131–32;

David B. Ottaway, The King’s

Messenger: Prince Bandar bin

Sultan and America’s Tangled

Relationship with Saudi Arabia

(New York: Walker, 2008), 198–99.

59.   The Report of the Joint

Congressional Inquiry into

Intelligence Community Activities

before and after the Terrorist

Attacks of September 11, 2001,

107th Congress, 2nd Session, S.

Rept. 107-351 and H. Rept. 107-

792, 173–77,

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?

browsePath=107/HRPT/[700%3b799]&granuleId=CRPT-

107hrpt792&packageId=CRPT-

107hrpt792.

60. This is an appropriate point to make

clear that, in my mind, referring to

deep state supporters for alleged

9/11 hijackers does not imply that

those supporters intended the

destruction of the WTC towers and

the murder of thousands of civilians.

I believe that there were at least two

and probably three overlapping

conspiracies on 9/11: first, a joint

operation involving both U.S.

government and Saudi officials,

along with at least some of the

alleged hijackers; second, a plot to

steer airplanes, probably by remote

control, and regardless of the alleged

hijackers’ knowledge and intentions,

into WTC towers and the Pentagon;

third, a plot to bring down the WTC

towers in a controlled demolition not

caused by the impact of the

airplanes. I am not clear whether the

first and second plots were the same

or different, but I strongly believe

the third plot, though cognizant of the

second, involved quite different

plotters. I can of course prove none

of this, but at least I can clarify what

I mean by “supporting those

eventually accused of 9/11.”

61. National Commission on Terrorist

Attacks upon the United States,

“Monograph on Terrorist Financing,”

http://counterterrorismblog.org/upload/2008/09/911_TerrFin_Monograph.pdf

1:

Despite persistent public speculation,

there is no evidence that the hijackers who

initially settled in San Diego, Mihdhar and

Hazmi, received funding from Saudi

citizens Omar al Bayoumi and Osama

Bassnan, or that Saudi Princess Haifa al

Faisal provided any funds to the hijackers

either directly or indirectly. A number of

internal FBI documents state without

reservation that Bayoumi paid rent on

behalf of Mihdhar and Hazmi, a claim

reflecting the initial view of some FBI

agents. More thorough investigation,

however, has determined that Bayoumi did

not pay rent or provide any funding to the

hijackers.

62. 9/11 Commission Report, 266–72,

272.

63. Rory O’Connor and Ray

Nowosielski, “Who Is Rich Blee?”

911Truth.org, September 21, 2111,

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?

story=20110921153919600; Rory

O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski,

“Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA’s

9/11 Story,” Salon, October 14,

2111,

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/14/insiders_voice_doubts_cia_911/

O’Connor and Nowosielski add

corroboration from former

Counterterrorism Chief Richard

Clarke:

Clarke said he assumed that “there was a

high-level decision in the CIA ordering

people not to share that information.”

When asked who might have issued such

an order, he replied, “I would think it

would have been made by the director,”

referring to Tenet—although he added that

Tenet and others would never admit to the

truth today “even if you waterboarded

them.”

64. Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the

Dots (Walterville, OR: TrineDay,

2011); cf. Peter Dale Scott, “9/11 as

a Deep Event: How CIA Personnel

Helped Allow It To Happen,” in

James R. Gourley, ed., The 9/11

Toronto Report: International

Hearings on the Events of

September 11, 2001 (Seattle, WA:

CreateSpace Independent Publishing

Platform, 2012), 109–27.

65. On August 29, less than two weeks

before 9/11, this interference led one

FBI agent, Steve Bongardt, to predict

accurately that “someday someone

will die” ( 9/11 Commission Report,

259, 271; Wright, Looming Tower,

352–54; Scott, American War

Machine, 203).

66. Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New

Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf.

Wright, Looming Tower, 339–44;

discussion in Scott, The War

Conspiracy, 355, 388–89.

67. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

383–86.

68. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 48.

Cf. Wright, “The Agent,” 68; quoted

approvingly in Scott, American War

Machine, 399.

69. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

371, cf. 95.

70. Quoted in Jeremy Scahill, Dirty

Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

(New York: Nation Books, 2013),

21.

71. Tom Wilshire, July 23, 2001, in

“United States v. Zacarias

Moussaoui (No. 01-455),

Substitution for the Testimony of

‘John.’” U.S. Court for the District

of Alexandria, July 31, 2006; quoted

in Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

274, 401.

72. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

276.

73. J. M. Berger, ed., Ali Mohamed: An

Intelwire Sourcebook (Intelwire

Press, 2006), 17; citing Wayne Parry,

“Mysterious Pair in Custody

Perplexes Federal Investigators,”

Associated Press, November 11,

2001; Falasten M. Abdeljabbar,

“Neighborhood Tired of Suspicions

and Fear,” The Jersey Journal,

December 18, 2001.

74. Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller,

“4 Transcripts Are Released in Case

Tied to 9/11 Hijackers,” New York

Times, June 25, 2003.

75. Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing

John Kifner, “Kahane Suspect Is a

Muslim with a Series of Addresses,”

New York Times, November 7, 1990;

Transcript, Sealed Bail Hearing, US

v. El-Atriss (no case number, bail

hearing [sealed]), November 19,

2002. The transcripts were unsealed

after a lawsuit by several

organizations including The New

York Times and the Washington Post.

76. Wayne Parry, “September 11 Fake

ID Suspect Flees U.S.,” Associated

Press, July 31, 2003,

http://911review.org/Wiki/Mohamed-

El-Atriss.html.

77. Berger, Ali Mohamed, 18; citing

Robert Hanley and Jonathan Miller,

“4 Transcripts Are Released in Case

Tied to 9/11 Hijackers”; Wayne

Parry, “Judge Releases Transcripts

in Sept. 11 Fake IDs Case,”

Associated Press, June 24, 2003.

The New York Times story is worth

quoting further:

*Mr. Atriss was a co-founder of a Jersey

City check-cashing company, Sphinx

Trading Company, that had bank accounts

with millions of dollars and had as a co-

owner Waleed Abouel Nour, whom the

F.B.I. had identified as a terrorist.

*That business was at the same location,

on Kennedy Boulevard, used as a mailing

address by several of the hijackers and

earlier by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman,

whose followers were convicted of the

1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

78. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos:

The United States and the Failure

of Nation Building in Pakistan,

Afghanistan, and Central Asia

(New York: Viking, 2008), 92–93;

cf. Seymour M. Hersh, “The

Getaway,” New Yorker, January 28,

2002; Scott, Road to 9/11, 134–35,

336.

79. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and

War, 53. Cf. David E. Spiro, The

Hidden Hand of American

Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling

and International Markets (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press,

1999), x:

In 1974 [Treasury Secretary William]

Simon negotiated a secret deal so the

Saudi central bank could buy U.S. Treasury

securities outside of the normal auction. A

few years later, Treasury Secretary

Michael Blumenthal cut a secret deal with

the Saudis so that OPEC would continue

to price oil in dollars. These deals were

secret because the United States had

promised other industrialized

democracies that it would not pursue such

unilateral policies.

80. See for example, Michael Quint,

“Saudi Prince to Become Citicorp’s

Top Stockholder,” New York Times,

February 22, 1991.

81. Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil

Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and

Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance

of Power in the Middle East (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 275,

etc.; Scott, Road to 9/11, 33–34.

82. F. William Engdahl, A Century of

War: Anglo-American Oil Politics

and the New World Order (London:

Pluto Press, 2004), 173.

83. “Halliburton to Move Headquarters

to Dubai,” New York Times, March

11, 2007,

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/business/12halliburtoncnd.html?

_r=0. Halliburton made this

announcement after it was “being

investigated by different government

agencies for various allegations of

improper business dealings, and it is

in the cross hairs of Democrats in

Congress for alleged overbilling”

(ABC News, March 12, 2007,

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/story?

id=2943017&page=1). In 2013 the

hotel conglomerate Starwood,

operating Sheraton and Westin

hotels, announced a similar move for

a month as “a grand experiment”

( Business Insider, April 11, 2013,

http://www.businessinsider.com/starwood-

dubai-headquarters-2013-4).

84.  Energy analyst Roger Read said that

if Halliburton “formally incorporates

itself in the U.A.E., the banking

mecca of the Middle East, company

profits will soar. . . . ‘You’d

probably be looking at a tax savings

of several hundred million [dollars].

. . . It’s a win for the shareholders’”

(ABC News, March 12, 2007,

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/story?

id=2943017&page=1).

85.  “Egypt Is Arena for Influence of

Arab Rivals,” New York Times, July

9, 2015,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/middleeast/aid-

to-egypt-from-saudis-and-emiratis-

is-part-of-struggle-with-qatar-for-

influence.html?

pagewanted=all&_r=0.

86. “Secret Desert Force Set Up by

Blackwater’s Founder,” New York

Times, May 14, 2011,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/middleeast/15prince.html?

pagewanted=all&_r=0.

87. David E. Sanger and Nicole

Perlroth, “After Profits, Defense

Contractor Faces the Pitfalls of

Cybersecurity,” New York Times,

June 15, 2013,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/us/after-

profits-defense-contractor-faces-the-

pitfalls-of-cybersecurity.html?

pagewanted=all.

88. Kevin Phillips, Wealth and

Democracy: A Political History of

the American Rich (New York:

Broadway Books, 2002), 71.

89. Michael Quint, “Saudi Prince to

Become Citicorp’s Top

Stockholder,” New York Times,

February 22, 1991.

90. Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The

Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces

that Put It in the White House, and

What Their Influence Means for

America (New York: Bloomsbury

Press, 2009), 304; citing Craig

Unger, House of Bush, House of

Saud: The Secret Relationship

between the World’s Two Most

Powerful Dynasties (New York:

Scribner, 2004), 34.

91. Unger, House of Bush, House of

Saud, 101.

92. Unger, House of Bush, House of

Saud, 122; cf. Scott, Road to 9/11,

176–78.

93. For a sensitive analysis of the

current disarray in U.S.-Saudi

relations, see Robert Lacey, Inside

the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics,

Modernists, Terrorists, and the

Struggle for Saudi Arabia (New

York: Penguin Books, 2009), 284–

302. “If 9/11 took the special out of

the U.S.-Saudi ‘special relationship,’

the U.S. invasion of Iraq killed it

stone dead—for the time being, at

least” (Lacey, Inside the Kingdom,

299). Cf. Rachel Bronson, Thicker

than Oil: America’s Uneasy

Partnership with Saudi Arabia

(Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2006), 248–62.

94. Robert F. Worth, “Egypt Is Arena for

Influence of Arab Rivals,” New York

Times, July 9, 2013.

95. “Saudi Arabia Designates

Brotherhood, Nusra Front, ISIS

Terrorist Groups,” Daily Star

(Lebanon), March 8, 2014,

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-

East/2014/Mar-08/249645-saudi-

arabia-designates-brotherhood-

nusra-front-isis-terrorist-

groups.ashx#ixzz30aspV3Vj:

Saudi Arabia has formally designated the

Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist

organization, in a move that could increase

pressure on Qatar whose backing for the

group has sparked a row with fellow Gulf

monarchies.

The U.S.-allied kingdom has also

designated as terrorists the Nusra Front

and the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater

Syria, whose fighters are battling Syrian

President Bashar Assad, the Interior

Ministry said in a statement published by

state media.

For nuanced discussions of aid to

ISIS from wealthy donors in Kuwait,

Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, see Josh

Rogin, “America’s Allies Are

Funding ISIS,” TheDailyBeast. com,

June 14, 2014; “Qatar’s Support of

Islamists Alienates Allies Near and

Far,” New York Times, September 7,

2014.

96. Mohammad Abdel Kader, “Turkey’s

relationship with the Muslim

Brotherhood,” Al-Arabiya, October

14, 2013,

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/alarabiya-

studies/2013/10/14/Turkey-s-

relationship-with-the-Muslim-

Brotherhood.html:

Although the Turkish leadership still

considers that the alliance with the

Brotherhood isn’t as harmful, at the

national level, as ties with any other sort

of Egyptian government, it still sees the

rise to power of (Sunni) Islamic

movements as an opportunity for the

Justice and Development party to rise as a

leader of modern Turkey and the post-

revolutionary Arab region.

7. THE U.S. TERROR WAR

1. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of

Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”

Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs

of Staff, May 1, 1963, NARA

#202-10002-10018, 21,

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=167&relPageId=21;

discussion in Peter Dale Scott,

American War Machine: Deep

Politics, the CIA Global Drug

Connection, and the Road to

Afghanistan (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 193,

196.

2. Terror war evolved out of the

aerial attacks on civilians in World

War II, beginning with Guernica

and ending with the mass bombings

of German and Japanese cities. But

that aerial war was just one phase

of a larger conventional war

between armed forces.

3. But perhaps no single act of terror

committed in the last decade,

whether by Qaddafi in Libya or

Bashir Assad in Syria, has

surpassed or even come close to

the U.S. devastation of the Iraqi city

of Fallujah.

4. George W. Bush, “Statement by the

President in His Address to the

Nation,” September 11, 2001,

http://georgewbush-

whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-

16.html. On September 20, 2001,

Bush said in an address to a joint

session of congress, “Our ‘war on

terror’ begins with al-Qaeda, but it

does not end there. It will not end

until every terrorist group of global

reach has been found, stopped and

defeated.”

5. On this point see the National

Commission on Terrorist Attacks

upon the United States, The 9/11

Commission Report (New York:

W. W. Norton, 2004), 66,

http://www.9-

11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

“To date we have seen no evidence

that . . . Iraq cooperated with al

Qaeda in developing or carrying

out any attacks against the United

States.”

6. Sunday Times (London), May 1,

2005; Mark Danner, The Secret

Way to War: The Downing Street

Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried

History (New York: New York

Review of Books, 2006).

7. 9/11 Commission Report, 272.

8. Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the

Dots (Walterville, OR: TrineDay,

2011).

9. 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271;

Lawrence Wright, The Looming

Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to

9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2006), 352–54; Scott, American

War Machine, 203.

10. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

371, cf. 95.

11. To repeat what I said in a footnote

to the last chapter: A belief that

there was a joint operation

involving both U.S. government and

Saudi officials, along with at least

some of the alleged hijackers can

and perhaps should be

distinguished from a plot to bring

down the World Trade Center

towers.

12. Lutz Kleverman, “The New Great

Game,” Guardian (London),

October 19, 2003,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/oct/20/oil

13. “Rebuilding America’s Defenses:

Strategy, Forces and Resources for

a New Century: A Report of the

Project for the New American

Century,” September 2000, 17, 27,

www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf (site discontinued). Cf. note 24.

14. “US Pulls out of Saudi Arabia,”

BBC News, April 29, 2003,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2984547.stm

15. Richard A. Clarke, Against All

Enemies: Inside America’s War on

Terror (New York: Free Press,

2004), 31.

16. Bradley Graham, By His Own

Rules: The Ambitions, Successes,

and Ultimate Failures of Donald

Rumsfeld (New York:

PublicAffairs, 2009), 290.

17. PNAC, Letter to President Clinton

on Iraq, January 26, 1998,

http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm (site discontinued).

18. Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs:

Neoconservatism and the New Pax

Americana (New York: Routledge,

2004). Bacevich was speaking of a

1992 memo drafted by Wolfowitz

for then Defense Secretary Cheney,

calling for America to retain the

power to act unilaterally. See

Lewis D. Solomon, Paul D.

Wolfowitz: Visionary Intellectual,

Policymaker, and Strategist (New

York: Praeger, 2007), 52; Andrew

Bacevich, American Empire: The

Realities and Consequences of

U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge MA:

Harvard University Press, 2002),

44.

19. Baker Institute, Rice University,

and Council on Foreign Relations,

“Strategic Energy Policy:

Challenges for the 21st Century,”

Task Force Report, 40,

http://www.cfr.org/energy-

policy/strategic-energy-policy-

challenges-21st-century/p3942,

discussion in Scott, Road to 9/11,

189. The Scotland Sunday Herald,

October 6, 2002, claimed that Vice

President Cheney himself

commissioned this Task Force

Report, and that former U.S.

Secretary of State James Baker

delivered the Report to Cheney. I

have been assured that neither

claim is true.

20. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 2002),

131. Much earlier, on the afternoon

of September 11, Department of

Defense official Stephen Cambone

recorded notes from his

conversation with Rumsfeld :

“Near term target needs—Go

massive—Sweep it all up, things

related and not” (Julian Borger,

“Blogger Bares Rumsfeld’s Post

9/11 Orders,” Guardian, February

24, 1006,

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/24/freedomofinformation.september11

21. Wesley Clark, Winning Modern

Wars (New York: PublicAffairs,

2003), 130.

22. Wesley Clark, “Talk to

Commonwealth Club,” October 3,

2007,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=Ha1rEhovONU (site terminated).

23. Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World

Order,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002,

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/04/01/the-

next-world-order.

24. “Rebuilding America’s Defenses—

Strategy, Forces and Resources For

a New Century: A Report of the

Project for the New American

Century,” September 2000, 17, 27,

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

25. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into

Chaos: The United States and the

Failure of Nation Building in

Pakistan, Afghanistan, and

Central Asia (New York: Viking,

2008), 70, 69; citing Ahmed

Rashid, “US Builds Alliances in

Central Asia,” Far Eastern

Economic Review, May 1, 2000:

“The CIA and the Pentagon had

been closely collaborating with the

Uzbek army and secret services

since 1997, providing training,

equipment, and mentoring in the

hope of using Uzbek Special Forces

to snatch Osama bin Laden from

Afghanistan, a fact I discovered on

a trip to Washington in 2000.”

26. See chapter 9.

27. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11:

Wealth, Empire, and the Future of

America (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007), 9.

28. Estimates of annual spending on

Homeland Security range up to a

trillion dollars. See Stephan

Salisbury, “Weaponizing the Body

Politic,” TomDispatch.com, March

4, 2012,

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175511/tomgram%3A_stephan_salisbury%2C_weaponizing_the_body_politic/#more

29. Cf. Simon Johnson, “Too Big to

Jail,” Slate, February 24, 2012,

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/project_syndicate/2012/02/the_robo_signing_settlement_won_t_help_homeowners_and_it_doesn_t_hurt_the_banks_.html The main motivation behind the

administration’s indulgence of serious

criminality evidently is fear of the

consequences of taking tough action on

individual bankers. And maybe officials

are right to be afraid, given the massive

size of the banks in question relative to

the economy. In fact, those banks are

bigger now than they were before the

crisis, and, as James Kwak and I

documented at length in our book 13

Bankers, they are much larger than they

were 20 years ago.

30. John Farmer, The Ground Truth:

The Untold Story of America under

Attack on 9/11 (New York:

Riverhead Books, 2009), 288;

quoted in Anthony Summers and

Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day:

The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama

bin Laden (New York: Ballantine

Books, 2011), 147.

31. Summers and Swan, Eleventh Day,

383–84; cf. Farmer, Ground Truth,

41. Although a Democrat, Berger

was subsequently protected by the

Republican Bush administration

from having to testify to Congress

about his behavior (a condition of

his plea bargain).

32. Summers and Swan, Eleventh Day,

334.

33. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

72–79. Grewe subsequently left

government to work at the Mitre

Corp., a private firm doing CIA

contract work with the CIA and

another private firm, Ptech.

Questions about Ptech and Mitre

Corp’s work on FAA-NORAD

interoperability systems were

raised in 9/11 testimony presented

some years ago by Indira Singh; see

Scott, Road to 9/11, 175.

34. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

78. Kirsten Wilhelm of the National

Archives told Fenton (p. 78) that “It

appears Barbara Grewe conducted

the interviews with ‘John’

[Wilshire] and Jane [Corsi],”

another key figure. Wilhelm could

find no “memorandum for the

record” (MFR) for the Wilshire

interview, which Fenton

understandably calls “about the

most important interview the

Commission conducted” (Fenton,

Disconnecting the Dots, 79).

Summers and Swan, also citing

correspondence with Kirsten

Wilhelm, disagree, saying that the

report of Wilshire’s interview

exists, but “is redacted in its

entirety” (Summers and Swan,

Eleventh Day, 381, cf. 552). This

is an important point to be focused

on in future investigations.

35. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

225.

36. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

38; citing 9/11 Commission Report,

181–82.

37. Michelle has since been identified

on the Internet, but so far basically

by only one source.

38. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

42–45; summarizing Justice

Department Inspector General’s

[IG] Report, 239–42; cf. Wright,

Looming Tower, 311–12.

39. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

50; summarizing Justice Department

IG Report, 242–43; cf. Wright,

Looming Tower, 311.

40. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

45.

41. I do not know whether in fact they

boarded the plane. However I am

now satisfied that al-Mihdhar and

al-Hazmi acted as if they intended

to hijack, as evidenced by their al-

Qaeda contacts in Malaysia and

elsewhere, their attempts to learn to

fly, and so forth. For the record, I

am not and never have been

persuaded that Arabs steered the

9/11 planes into their targets.

42. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

383–86.

43. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

48. Cf. Lawrence Wright, “The

Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and

17, 2006, 68; quoted approvingly in

Peter Dale Scott, American War

Machine, 399.

44. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

371, cf. 95.

45. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

239–42, 310–22. Fenton notes that

Corsi worked at FBI headquarters,

which coordinated “liaisons with

foreign services” (Fenton,

Disconnecting the Dots, 313).

46. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

310.

47. Paul Church, Asia Times Online,

February 11, 2012. The 9/11

Commission Report discounted the

importance of al-Bayoumi ( 9/11

Commission Report, 217–18); but

the Report of the Joint

Congressional Inquiry into 9/11

(173–77), even though very heavily

redacted at this point, supplied

corroborating information,

including a report that Basnan had

once hosted a party for the “Blind

Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman,

involved in the first World Trade

Center bombing of 1993 ( The

Report of the Joint Congressional

Inquiry into Intelligence

Community Activities before and

after the Terrorist Attacks of

September 11, 2001, 107th

Congress, 2nd Session, S. Rept.

107-351 and H. Rept. 107-792,

173–77,

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?

browsePath=107/HRPT/[700%3b799]&granuleId=CRPT-

107hrpt792&packageId=CRPT-

107hrpt792).

48. At first I suspected, as have others,

that the two men were Saudi double

agents. Another possibility is that

they were sent as designated

targets, to be surveilled by the

Saudis and the Americans

separately or together. One of my

few disagreements with Fenton is

when he calls al-Mihdhar “one of

[the hijackers’] most experienced

operatives” (Fenton, Disconnecting

the Dots, 205). My own impression

is that he was either an

inexperienced and incompetent

young spy, or else a low-level asset

deliberately exposing himself to

detection, in order to test American

responses.

49. Summers and Swan, Eleventh Day,

396.

50. 9/11 Commission Report, 184.

51. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret

History of the CIA, Afghanistan,

and bin Laden, from the Soviet

Invasion to September 10, 2001

(New York: Penguin Press, 2004),

456–57.

52. Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B.

Glasser, “U.S. Operated Secret

Alliance with Uzbekistan,”

Washington Post, October 14,

2001.

53. Ricks and Glasser, Washington

Post, October 14, 2001.

54. Michael Klare, Blood and Oil

(New York: Henry Holt, 2004),

135–36; citing R. Jeffrey Smith,

“U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in

Kazakhstan,” Washington Post,

September 15, 1997. Cf. Kenley

Butler, “U.S. Military Cooperation

with the Central Asian States,”

September 17, 2001,

http://cns.miis.edu/archive/wtc01/uscamil.htm

55. In 1957, I myself, as a junior

Canadian diplomat, acquired a

special-access, higher-than-top-

secret clearance to access

intelligence from NATO, a

relatively overt and straightforward

liaison.

56. For the Ali Mohamed story, see

Scott, Road to 9/11, especially

151–60.

57. Scott, Road to 9/11, 158; citing

John Berger, “Unlocking 9/11:

Paving the Road to 9/11,”

Intelwire, [n.d.],

http://intelwire.egoplex.com/unlocking911-

1-ali-mohamed-911.html:

“Mohamed was one of the primary

sources for the infamous Aug. 6,

2001, presidential daily brief

(PDB) entitled ‘Bin Laden

Determined to Strike in U.S.’” The

PDB, often cited as an example of

the CIA’s good performance, is in

my opinion more probably another

example of the Bin Laden Unit

salting the record in preparation for

post-9/11 scrutiny. The PDB,

without naming Ali Mohamed,

refers to him no less than three

times as a threat, despite the fact

that at the time he was under U.S.

government control awaiting

sentence for his role in the 1998

embassy plots. The PDB, in other

words, appears to have been a

performance for the record,

analogous to Wilshire’s

performance in the same month of

August at the FBI.

58. Berger, “Unlocking 9/11,” 20

(Cloonan); 9/11 Commission

Report, 261 (PDB).

59. James Risen, New York Times,

October 31, 1998; in Scott, Road to

9/11, 346–47.

60. Raleigh News and Observer,

November 13, 2001; in Scott, Road

to 9/11, 347. I have added the word

“Army.” The headquarters for

USSOCOM itself is at Fort

MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

61. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin,

“‘Top Secret America’: A Look at

the Military’s Joint Special

Operations Command,” Washington

Post, September 2, 2011,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-

security/top-secret-america-a-look-

at-the-militarys-joint-special-

operations-

command/2011/08/30/gIQAvYuAxJ_story.html

62. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

168–69; Summers and Swan,

Eleventh Day, 371, 550.

63. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

372.

64. Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to

Terror: The Rogue CIA and the

Legacy of America’s Private

Intelligence Network (New York:

Carroll and Graf, 2005), 113–14:

Shackley, who still had ambitions to

become DCI, believed that without his

many sources and operatives . . . the

Safari Club—operating with Helms in

charge in Tehran—would be ineffective.

Shackley was well aware that Helms was

under criminal investigation for lying to

Congress about the CIA in Chile.

Shackley had testified before the same

grand jury. Unless Shackley took direct

action to complete the privatization of

intelligence operations soon, the Safari

Club would not have a conduit to DO

resources. The solution: create a totally

private intelligence network using CIA

assets until President Carter could be

replaced.

65. Scott, American War Machine,

161; Scott, Road to 9/11, 62–63.

66. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant

Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in

Central Asia (New Haven CT: Yale

University Press, 2000), 129.

67. John Prados, Safe for Democracy:

The Secret Wars of the CIA

(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 489;

discussion in Scott, American War

Machine, 12–13.

68. James Risen, State of War: The

Secret History of the CIA and the

Bush Administration (New York:

Free Press, 2006), 188–89.

69. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

104.

70. Summers and Swan, Eleventh Day,

397.

71. Joseph J. and Susan B. Trento, in

Summers and Swan, Eleventh Day,

399. Since I presented a version of

this chapter at a conference in

Toronto on September 11, 2011,

“Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a

Democrat who served on the . . .

9/11 Commission, [has] said in a

sworn affidavit . . . that ‘significant

questions remain unanswered’

about the role of Saudi institutions.

‘Evidence relating to the plausible

involvement of possible Saudi

government agents in the September

11th attacks has never been fully

pursued.’” (“Saudi Arabia May Be

Tied to 9/11, 2 Ex-Senators Say,”

New York Times, February 29,

2012,

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/us/graham-

and-kerrey-see-possible-saudi-9-

11-link.html?_r=3.)

72. Wright, Looming Tower, 161; in

Summers and Swan, Eleventh Day,

216.

73. Such corruption is predictable and

very widespread. In the notorious

cases of Gregory Scarpa and

Whitey Bulger, FBI agents in the

New York and Boston offices were

accused of giving their mob

informants information that led to

the murder of witnesses and other

opponents. Agents in the New York

office of the old Federal Bureau of

Narcotics (FBN) became so

implicated in the trafficking of their

informants that the FBN had to be

shut down and reorganized.

74. Ralph Blumenthal, “Tapes Depict

Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in

Trade Center Blast,” New York

Times, October 28, 1993, emphasis

added. The next day, The Times

published a modest correction:

“Transcripts of tapes made secretly

by an informant, Emad A. Salem,

quote him as saying he warned the

Government that a bomb was being

built. But the transcripts do not

make clear the extent to which the

Federal authorities knew that the

target was the World Trade Center

( New York Times, October 29,

1993).

75. Scott, Road to 9/11, 145.

76. Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo,

and Now Libya: The Human Costs

of Washington’s On-Going

Collusion with Terrorists,” Asia-

Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July

29, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-

Peter_Dale-Scott/3578. Evan

Kohlmann has described how a

Zagreb office in support of the

Saudi-backed jihad in Bosnia

received “all orders and funding

directly from the main United States

office of Al-Kifah on Atlantic

Avenue controlled by Shaykh Omar

Abdel Rahman” (Evan Kohlmann,

Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe (New

York: Berg, 2004), 39–41; citing

Steve Coll and Steve LeVine,

“Global Network Provides Money,

Haven,” Washington Post, August

3, 1993).

77. The corruption appears to be

inevitable in superpowers—states

that have accumulated power in

access of what is needed for their

own defense. The pattern is less

discernible in less powerful states

like Canada.

78. “America’s Afghanistan: The

National Security and a Heroin-

Ravaged State,” Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, no. 20 (May

18, 2009),

http://www.japanfocus.org/-

Peter_Dale-Scott/3145. Cf. “U.S.

Looks into Afghan Air Force Drug

Allegations,” CNN, March 8, 2012,

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/08/world/asia/afghanistan-

air-drugs-investigation/index.html?

eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn:

The United States is investigating

allegations that some members of the

Afghan air force have used their planes

to transport drugs, a U.S. military

spokesman said Thursday. Investigators

want to know whether the drug-running

allegations, first reported in the Wall

Street Journal, are linked to the

shooting deaths last year of eight U.S.

Air Force officers at the airport in the

Afghan capital, Kabul. “The allegations

of improper use of AAF aircraft is being

looked into,” said Lt. Col. Tim Stauffer,

referring to the allegations that Afghan

air force equipment has been used to

illegally ferry drugs and arms.

79. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

310.

80. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

371, cf. 95.

81. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of

Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”

in Scott, American War Machine,

196.

82. Washington Post, September 30,

2001; in Summers and Swan,

Eleventh Day, 293; cf. 9/11

Commission Report, 221–22.

83. See Scott, American War Machine,

199–203.

84. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

360–61, 385. There was also

apparent withholding of information

at a high level in the U.S. Joint

Forces Command (USJFCOM):

One official who attended the DO5 [a

USJFCOM intelligence unit assigned to

watch terrorism against the United

States] briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J.

Meyer, the deputy commander in chief

(DCINC), USJFCOM. . . . But despite the

red flags raised during the briefing,

Meyer reportedly told Maj. Gen. Larry

Arnold, the commander of the

Continental United States NORAD

Region (CONR), and other high-level

CONR staffers two weeks before the

9/11 attacks that “their concern about

Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to

America was unfounded and that, to

repeat, ‘If everyone would just turn off

CNN, there wouldn’t be a threat from

Osama bin Laden’” (Jason Leopold and

Jeffrey Kaye, “EXCLUSIVE: New

Documents Claim Intelligence on Bin

Laden, al-Qaeda Targets Withheld From

Congress’ 9/11 Probe,” Truthout, June

13, 2011, http://www.truth-out.org/new-

documents-claim-intelligence-bin-laden-

al-qaeda-targets-withheld-congress-911-

probe/1307986777).

85. Scott, American War Machine,

201.

86. Scott, American War Machine,

200–202.

87. Clarke, Against All Enemies, 30–

33; Summers and Swan, Eleventh

Day, 175–76; James Bamford, A

Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and

the Abuse of America’s

Intelligence Agencies (New York:

Doubleday, 2004), 287.

88. Mark Selden has described the

pattern of “arousing nationalist

passions as a result of attacks out of

the blue” as one that has

“undergirded the American way of

war since 1898” (Mark Selden,

“The American Archipelago of

Bases, Military Colonization and

Pacific Empire: Prelude to the

Permanent Warfare State,”

International Journal of Okinawan

Studies, 2012).

89. Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B.

Glasser, “U.S. Operated Secret

Alliance with Uzbekistan,”

Washington Post, October 14,

2001. Significantly, the proposal

for a joint attack force with

Massoud’s Northern Alliance was

also resisted by Massoud himself

(Peter Tomsen, The Wars of

Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism,

Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures

of Great Powers (New York:

PublicAffairs, 2011), 597– 98,

796n25). The problem of

Massoud’s resistance to an

American troop presence vanished

when he was assassinated on

September 9, 2011, two days

before 9/11.

90. Coll, Ghost Wars, 467–69.

91. Coll, Ghost Wars, 513, 534–36,

553.

92. Coll, Ghost Wars, 558.

93. Coll, Ghost Wars, 573–74.

94. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

108.

95. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

110–14.

96. George Tenet, At the Center of the

Storm: My Years at the CIA (New

York: HarperCollins, 2007), 255.

97. Jeremy Scahill, “Shhhhhh! JSOC is

Hiring Interrogators and Covert

Operatives for ‘Special Access

Programs,’” Nation, August 25,

2010,

http://www.thenation.com/blog/154133/shhhhhh-

jsoc-hiring-interrogators-and-

covert-operatives-special-access-

programs.

98. Summers and Swan, Eleventh Day,

387–88; cf. Fenton, Disconnecting

the Dots, 127–30.

99. Jason Vest, “Implausible Denial II,”

Nation, May 31, 2004,

http://www.thenation.com/article/implausible-

denial-ii.

100. Scott,  Road to 9/11, 216–18.

101. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of

Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”

21,

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=167&relPageId=21; Scott,

American War Machine, 193, 196.

102. Scott,  American War Machine,

195–205; Northwoods document,

Joint Chiefs of Staff, JCS 1969/303

on Northwoods, NARA Record #

202-10002-10104,

https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=1244&relPageId=178,

178ss.

103. Peter Dale Scott, The War

Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the

Deep Politics of War (New York:

Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), 387–

89.

104. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

283–355; Peter Dale Scott, War

Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the

Deep Politics of War (New York:

Skyhorse, 2013), 341–96.

105. Jason Ditz, “Report: CIA Drones

Killed Over 2,000, Mostly

Civilians in Pakistan Since 2006,”

AntiWar.com, January 2, 2011,

http://news.antiwar.com/2011/01/02/report-

cia-drones-killed-over-2000-

mostly-civilians-in-pakistan-since-

2006/. Cf. Karen DeYoung,

“Secrecy Defines Obama’s Drone

War,” Washington Post, December

19, 2011,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-

security/secrecy-defines-obamas-

drone-

war/2011/10/28/gIQAPKNR5O_story.html

(“hundreds of strikes over three

years—resulting in an estimated

1,350 to 2,250 deaths in Pakistan”).

106. Adrian Blomfield and Mike Smith,

“Gorbachev: US Could Start New

Cold War,” Telegraph (London),

May 6, 2008,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1933223/Gorbachev-

US-could-start-new-Cold-

War.html.

107. Uwe Klussmann, Matthias Schepp,

and Klaus Wiegrefe, “NATO’s

Eastward Expansion: Did the West

Break Its Promise to Moscow?”

Spiegel Online International,

November 26, 2009,

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-

s-eastward-expansion-did-the-

west-break-its-promise-to-

moscow-a-663315.html.

108. Peter Dale Scott, “The NATO

Afghanistan War and US-Russian

Relations: Drugs, Oil, and War,”

Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,

August 26, 2012,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3759.

109. Peter Baker, “In Cold War Echo,

Obama Strategy Writes Off Putin,”

New York Times, April 19, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/world/europe/incold-

war-echo-obama-strategy-writes-

off-putin.html?_r=0.

110. “Tom Hayden on Venezuela’s

current crisis,” Tikkun, February

25, 2014,

http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2014/02/28/tom-

hayden-on-venezuelas-current-

crisis/.

8. DEEP POWER TAKES ITS TOLL

ON U.S. PRESIDENTS, 1961–1980

1. A personal disclosure: I am both a

friend of Ray McGovern and an

admirer of his style of spiritually

guided nonviolent resistance.

2. David Swanson, “Police Brutalize

Ray McGovern as Hillary Clinton

Talks Free Speech,” Truthout,

February 21, 2011, http://www.truth-

out.org/police-brutalize-ray-

mcgovern-hillary-clinton-talks-free-

speech67888. Clinton remarked in

her talk, “The rights of individuals to

express their views free . . . are

universal.” Yet she said and did

nothing “while the 71 year old

protester was grabbed by campus

police, pulled to the ground, and

dragged out of the auditorium” (Rory

O’Connor, “Hillary Clinton Talks

Freedom as Protester Ray McGovern

Is Bloodied,” Gather.com, February

17, 2011,

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?

articleId=281474979063740). Four

years earlier, McGovern had

attended a Rumsfeld press

conference and was allowed to

challenge Rumsfeld from the public

microphone, while an unknown

protestor turned his back on

Rumsfeld throughout the length of the

event and was allowed to leave

untouched.

3. Both also are featured in projections

of American power abroad. Some of

those protesting in the 2011 anti-

Mubarak demonstrations in Egypt

had been trained in the techniques of

nonviolent resistance promulgated by

the American Gandhian Gene Sharp

( New York Times, February 16,

2011). The police who shot and

killed the demonstrators were also

U.S.-trained, and were using U.S.

weapons and ammunition.

4. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and

Future: Eight Exercises in Political

Thought (New York: Penguin Books,

1993), 93, emphasis added.

Adapting Arendt’s distinction,

Jonathan Schell made a Gandhian

case in support of nonviolent

persuasive or community power as a

means of challenging top-down

violent power and thus reforming the

world. I developed this case myself

in The Road to 9/11 (Jonathan

Schell, The Unconquerable World:

Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of

the People [New York: Metropolitan

Books, 2003], 227–31; Peter Dale

Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth,

Empire, and the Future of America

[Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2007], 249–66, 269).

5. It is one of the special features of

America’s richly diverse history that

it has seen extreme examples of both

persuasive power (the town meetings

of New England’s Puritan

communities) and violent power (the

oppression of slaves and of Native

Americans).

6. Peter Dale Scott, American War

Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2010), 3.

7. Scott, American War Machine, 31–

34, 175–76, 209–11.

8. Scott, American War Machine, 4,

195. In fact all of the major wars

were preceded by deceptions, except

for the 1980 proxy war in

Afghanistan. There, as Brzezinski

boasted later in print, a series of

U.S. provocations helped draw the

Soviet Union into Afghanistan where

it suffered defeat.

9. Project for the New American

Century, “Rebuilding Americas

Defenses,” 2000,

www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf (site discontinued); discussion in

Scott, Road to 9/11, 23–24, etc.

10. Rachel Bronson, Thicker than Oil:

America’s Uneasy Partnership with

Saudi Arabia (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2006), 168: “After

a decade of détente, a policy Saudi

Arabia never supported, King Fahd

welcomed Reagan’s determination to

confront Soviet pressure more

directly.”

11. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life:

John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

(Boston: Little Brown, 2003), 570–

71; citing Michael R. Beschloss, The

Crisis Years: Kennedy and

Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York:

Edward Burlingame Books, 1991),

544.

12. Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 554–55.

13. David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden

History of the Kennedy Years (New

York: Free Press, 2007), 172–73;

quoted in Andrew Gavin Marshall,

“The National Security State and the

Assassination of JFK,” Global

Research, November 23, 2010,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?

context=va&aid=22071.

14. Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of

Watergate: The Last Crisis of

Richard Nixon (New York: Knopf,

1990), 117, cf. 457–58. J. Anthony

Lukas called the JCS espionage “a

natural response to the increasing

concentration of national security-

making in Kissinger’s NSC”

(Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The

Underside of the Nixon Years [New

York: Viking Press, 1976], 105). But

the objection to Kissinger had to do

with policy as well as with

procedures.

15. See Phyllis Schlafly and Chester

Ward, Kissinger on the Couch (New

Rochelle, NY: Arlington House,

1975). Ward was a retired U.S.

admiral.

16. See for example, Seymour Hersh,

“The Red Line and the Rat Line,”

London Review of Books, April 17,

2014,

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-

m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-

line.

17. William Arkin, American Coup:

How a Terrified Government Is

Destroying the Constitution (New

York: Little Brown, 2013), 34–35.

This may refer in part to Ford’s

signing into law of the National

Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601–

1651) which codified previous

emergency grants of power into the

U.S. Code.

18. See the discussions of the personnel

changes in the so-called “Halloween

Massacre” of October 1975 under

Ford, and the contest between

Brzezinski and Vance under Carter

(Scott, Road to 9/11, 50–92).

19. In 2007 I wrote that they “had a

precedent: Nixon’s secret deals with

Vietnamese president Nguyen van

Thieu in 1968” (Scott, Road to 9/11,

100).

20. Robert Parry, “The CIA/Likud

Sinking of Jimmy Carter,”

Consortiumnews, June 24, 2010,

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/062410.html

“Inside the CIA, Carter and his CIA

Director Stansfield Turner were

blamed for firing for ousting

legendary spymaster Ted Shackley,

and for failing to protect longtime

U.S. allies (and friends of the CIA),

such as Iran’s Shah and Nicaragua’s

dictator Anastasio Somoza.”

21. Tom Wicker et al., “C.I.A.: Maker of

Policy, or Tool?” New York Times,

April 25, 1966; quoted in James W.

Douglass, JFK and the

Unspeakable: Why He Died and

Why It Matters (Maryknoll, NY:

Orbis Books, 2008), 15.

22. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The

History of the CIA (New York:

Doubleday, 2007), 374.

23. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 376.

24. Hugh Wilford, America’s Great

Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists

and the Shaping of the Modern

Middle East (New York: Basic

Books, 2013), 295.

25. Scott, Road to 9/11, 62–63.

26. Ibrahim Warde, The Price of Fear:

The Truth behind the Financial War

on Terror (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007), 133.

27. Robert Sherrill, The Oil Follies of

1970–1980: How the Petroleum

Industry Stole the Show (and Much

More Besides) (Garden City, NY:

Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983).

28. American charge d’affaires Bruce

Laingen had warned from Tehran that

the Shah should not be admitted until

the Embassy had been provided with

a protective force, as “the danger of

hostages being taken in Iran will

persist” (Barry M. Rubin, Paved

with Good Intentions: The

American Experience and Iran

[New York: Oxford University

Press, 1980], 296–97).

29. Details in Scott, Road to 9/11, 80–

92.

30. New York Times, November 18,

1979; Pierre Salinger, America Held

Hostage: The Secret Negotiations

(New York: Doubleday, 1981), 25.

Hamilton Jordan, who was one of

those present and advising for the

Shah’s admission, later gave a more

hypothetical version: “What are you

guys going to advise me to do if they

overrun our embassy and take our

people hostages” (Hamilton Jordan,

Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter

Presidency [NewYork: Putnam,

1982], 32). Earlier, on July 27,

1979, Carter had commented that “he

did not wish the Shah to be here

playing tennis while Americans in

Tehran were being kidnapped or

even killed” (Zbigniew Brzezinski,

Power and Principle: Memoirs of

the National Security Advisor,

1977–1981 [New York: Farrar,

Straus, Giroux, 1983], 474).

31. See Sherrill, The Oil Follies of

1970–1980, 470–80.

9. THE DOOMSDAY PROJECT AND

DEEP EVENTS

1. For “dark force,” see for example,

Peter Dale Scott, “Norway’s Terror

as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik,

the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and

Global Shadow Elites,” Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, August 22,

2011, http://japanfocus.org/-

Peter_Dale-Scott/3590.

2. Tim Weiner, “The Pentagon’s Secret

Stash,” Mother Jones Magazine,

March-April 1992, 26.

3. J. A. Myerson “War Is a Force That

Pays the 1 Percent: Occupying

American Foreign Policy,” Truth-out,

November 14, 2011,

http://www.truth-out.org/war-force-

pays-1-percent-occupying-american-

foreign-policy/1321286925. Cf.

Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11

(Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2007), 1–25.

4. Lewis Powell, “Confidential

Memorandum: Attack on the Free

Enterprise System,” August 23,

1971, quoted in Kim Phelps-Fein,

Invisible Hands: The Making of the

Conservative Movement from the

New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.

W. Norton, 2009), 158, 160.

5. Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 97.

6. Scott, Road to 9/11, 21, 51–52;

Kristol as quoted in Lewis H.

Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The

Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief

History,” Harper’s Magazine,

September 2004, 36.

7. New York Times, July 14, 1987. See

chapter 3.

8. For example, Peter Dale Scott,

American War Machine: Deep

Politics, the CIA Global Drug

Connection, and the Road to

Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman

& Littlefield, 2010), 204–5.

9. Peter Dale Scott, The War

Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the

Deep Politics of War (New York:

Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), 354.

10. Peter Dale Scott, Oswald, Mexico,

and Deep Politics: Revelations

from CIA Records on the

Assassination of JFK (New York:

Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), 30–33;

Scott, War Conspiracy, 387; Scott,

American War Machine, 152.

11. Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The

Story of an FBI Director (Kansas

City, MO: Andrews, McMeel, and

Parker, 1987), 268, quoted in Scott,

War Conspiracy, 389.

12. Cable at

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/D%20Disk/Domestic%20Intelligence/Item%2045.pdf cf. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics

and the Death of JFK (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

1993), 275; Scott, Oswald, Mexico,

and Deep Politics, 80, 129n.

Stringfellow worked under Jack

Revill in the Vice Squad of the

Dallas Police Department (DPD)

Special Services Bureau. As such he

reported regularly to the FBI on such

close Ruby associates as James

Herbert Dolan, a “known hoodlum

and strong-arm man” on the FBI’s

Top Criminal list for Dallas (Robert

M. Barrett, FBI Report of February

2, 1963, NARA#124-90038-10026,

12 [Stringfellow]; cf. NARA#124-

10212-10012, 4 [hoodlum];

NARA#124-10195-10305, 9 [Top

Criminal]). Cf. Warren Commission,

Hearings, Vol. 14, 601–02 [Ruby

and Dolan]). Robert Barrett, who

received Stringfellow’s reports to

the FBI, had Ruby’s friend Dolan

under close surveil-lance; he also

took part in Oswald’s arrest at the

Texas Theater, and claimed to have

seen DPD Officer Westbrook with

Oswald’s wallet at the site of the

Tippit killing (Dale K. Myers, With

Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the

Murder of Officer J. D. Tippit

[Milford, MI: Oak Cliff Press,

1998], 287–90).

13. It was sent for information to

Washington, which received it three

days later (Scott, Deep Politics,

275; Scott, Oswald, Mexico, and

Deep Politics, 80, 129n; Scott, War

Conspiracy, 382). For another link

between this shadow network and

the JFK assassination, see Larry

Haappanen and Alan Rogers, “A

Phone Call from Out of the Blue,”

Kennedy Assassination Chronicles,

8 no. 2 (2002),

https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

absPageId=223425.

14. Warren Commission Exhibit 1778,

FBI report, November 23, 1963, of

interview of Marina Oswald, Warren

Commission, Hearings, Vol. 23,

383. (Marina’s actual words, before

mistranslation, were quite

innocuous: “I cannot describe it [the

gun] because a rifle to me like all

rifles” [discussion in Scott, Deep

Politics, 168–72].)

15. Stringfellow himself was the source

of one other piece of false

intelligence on November 22: that

Oswald had confessed to the

murders of both the President and

Officer Tippit (Dallas FBI File DL

89-43-2381C; Paul L. Hoch, “The

Final Investigation? The HSCA and

Army Intelligence,” The Third

Decade, 1 no. 5 [July 1985], 3).

16. Warren Commission, Hearings, Vol.

9, 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275–

76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets:

The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful

Forces that Put It in the White

House, and What Their Influence

Means for America (New York:

Blooms-bury Press, 2009), 119–22.

17. Rodney P. Carlisle and Dominic J.

Monetta, Brandy: Our Man in

Acapulco (Denton: University of

North Texas Press, 1999), 128.

18. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of

Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”

Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs

of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-

10002-10018, 12,

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=167&relPageId=12. Cf. pp.

15–16: “The United States should

intervene militarily in Cuba and

could (a) engineer provocative

incidents ostensibly perpetrated by

the Castro regime to serve as the

cause of invasion.”

19. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life:

John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963

(Boston: Little Brown, 2003), 568.

20. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of

Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”

NARA #202-10002-10018, 12.

21. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of

Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”

NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. I see

nothing in this document indicating

that the President should be notified

that these “fabricated provocations”

were false. On the contrary, the

document called for

“compartmentation of participants”

to insure that the true facts were not

leaked (Joint Chiefs of Staff,

“Courses of Action Related to Cuba

(Case II),” NARA #202-10002-

10018, 19).

22. Quoted in Baker, Family of Secrets,

122. One of these, DPD Detective

John Adamcik, was a member of the

party that retrieved a blanket that

was said to have contained

Oswald’s rifle, and was used by the

Warren Commission to link Oswald

to the famous Mannlicher Carcano.

Adamcik was later present at

Mamantov’s interview of Marina

about the rifle, and corroborated

Mamantov’s account of it to the

Warren Commission. There is now

reason to think that Mamantov’s

translation of Marina’s testimony

was tendentious (Scott, Deep

Politics, 268–70, 276).

23. See James Douglass, JFK and the

Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis

Books, 2008).

24. National Commission on Terrorist

Attacks upon the United States, The

9/11 Commission Report (New

York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 259,

271, http://www.9-

11commission.gov/report/911Report. pdf Lawrence Wright, The Looming

Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to

9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2006), 352–54 (FBI agent).

25. James Bamford, A Pretext for War:

9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of

America’s Intelligence Agencies

(New York: Doubleday, 2004), 224.

For a fuller account of the CIA’s

withholding before 9/11, see Kevin

Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

passim; Rory O’Connor and Ray

Nowosielski, “Insiders Voice Doubts

about CIA’s 9/11 Story,” Salon,

October 14, 2011,

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/14/insiders_voice_doubts_cia_911/

26. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 7–

12, 142–47, etc.

27. Scott, American War Machine, 203.

28. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

371, cf. 95. Quite independently,

Richard Clarke, the former White

House Counterterrorism Chief on

9/11, has charged, “There was a

high-level decision in the CIA

ordering people not to share

information” (O’Connor and

Nowosielski, “Insiders Voice Doubts

about CIA’s 9/11 Story”).

29. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret

History of the CIA, Afghanistan,

and bin Laden, from the Soviet

Invasion to September 10, 2001

(New York: Penguin Press, 2004),

467–69.

30. Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots,

107–8.

31. James Bamford, Body of Secrets:

Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret

National Security Agency—From

the Cold War through the Dawn of a

New Century (New York:

Doubleday, 2001), 201. Cf. Fredrik

Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost

Chance for Peace and the

Escalation of War in Vietnam

(Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999), 200, citing John

Prados, The Hidden History of the

Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,

1995), 51.

32. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of

Action Related to Cuba (Case II),”

NARA #202-10002-10018,

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

absPageId=48338.

33. Scott, Deep Politics, 280.

34. Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C.

3056),

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-

90/pdf/STATUTE-90-Pg2475.pdf;

discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul

L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The

Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond

(New York: Random House, 1976),

443–46.

35. Army intelligence agents were

seconded to the Secret Service, and

at this time there was a great

increase in their number. The

Washington Star later explained that

“the big build-up in [Army]

information gathering . . . did not

come until after the shooting of the

Rev. Martin Luther King”

( Washington Star, December 6,

1970).

36. George O’Toole, The Private Sector

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1978),

145, quoted in Scott, Deep Politics,

278–79.

37. Scott, Road to 9/11, 52–53.

38. Scott, Road to 9/11, 53–54.

39. Scott, Road to 9/11, 50–64.

40. Peter Dale Scott, “Northwards

without North,” Social Justice,

Summer 1989. Revised as “North,

Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday

Project: The Original Congressional

Cover Up of Continuity-of-

Government Planning,” Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, February 21,

2011, http://japanfocus.org/-

Peter_Dale-Scott/3491.

41. Scott, Road to 9/11, 132.

42. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott,

and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra

Connection: Secret Teams and

Covert Operations in the Reagan

Era (Boston: South End Press,

1987), 13 (Contras); Richard Coll,

Ghost Wars, 93–102 (mujahedin).

43. Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 457–59,

534–36.

44. This work circulated as a

manuscript, but was never published.

However I learn from the Internet

that “Southeast Louisiana University

has two copies of Peter Dale Scott’s

THE DALLAS CONSPIRACY

listed in their JFK papers archive”

(http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?

showtopic=8785; cf.

http://www.southeastern.edu/acad_research/programs/csls/historical_collections/archival_collections/h_k/kennedy_john_f_assas.html

Supplemental Material Folders 20

and 21).

45. According to testimony from CIA

Deputy Director Vernon Walters,

only “Hunt and McCord had ever

been CIA full-time employees. The

others [including Sturgis] were

contract employees for a short

duration or a longer duration”

(Select Committee on Presidential

Campaign Activities, 93rd Congress,

First Session, Hearings, 3427,

http://archive.org/stream/presidentialcamp09unit/presidentialcamp09unit_djvu.txt Cf. Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The

Iran-Contra Connection, 45 (casino

owners).

46. Peter Dale Scott, “From Dallas to

Watergate,” Ramparts, December

1973; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott,

Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler,

The Assassinations: Dallas and

Beyond, 356, 363. Cf. Scott, Deep

Politics, 38–39, 120.

47. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-

Up (Santa Barbara, CA: Open

Archive Press, 1993), 20.

48. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan

Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs,

Armies, and the CIA in Central

America (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1998), 25–32, etc.

49. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.

Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs,

and the Press (London: Verso,

1998), 308–9; Martha Honey,

Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa

Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville:

University Press of Florida, 1994),

368 (Frigorificos).

50. Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The

Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt

(New York: Viking, 1974), 96–97.

51. Scott, American War Machine, 51–

54. Hunt helped put together what

became the drug-linked World Anti-

Communist League (WACL).

Artime’s Costa Rica base was on

land whose owners were part of the

local WACL chapter (Scott and

Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 87,

220). The Saudi-financed WACL

was composed of unofficial right-

wing CIA assets and served as a

forum for them.

52. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward,

All the President’s Men (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23.

53. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New

York: Random House, 1984), 16,

citing Department of Defense

Directive 5230.7, June 25, 1965,

amended May 21, 1971.

54. James Bamford, A Pretext for War

(New York: Anchor Books, 2005),

72.

55. Peter Dale Scott, “North, Iran-

Contra, and the Doomsday Project:

The Original Congressional Cover

Up of Continuity-of-Government

Planning,” Asia-Pacific Journal:

Japan Focus, February 21, 2011,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3491. Cf. Peter Dale Scott,

“Northwards Without North: Bush,

Counter-terrorism, and the

Continuation of Secret Power,”

Social Justice (San Francisco), XVI,

no. 2 (Summer 1989), 1–30; Peter

Dale Scott, “The Terrorism Task

Force,” Covert Action Information

Bulletin, 33 (Winter 1990), 12–15.

56. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine

Politics, 140–41, 242 (Iran, etc.);

Ola Tunander, The Secret War

against Sweden: US and British

Submarine Deception in the

1980s(London: Frank Cass, 2004),

309 (Sweden).

57. Scott, Road to 9/11, 183–87.

58. John Dean, Worse than Watergate:

The Secret Presidency of George W.

Bush (New York: Little Brown,

2004), 120.

59. “Former White House Attache to

Talk about JFK Assassination,”

Cape Cod Times, October 10, 2013,

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?

AID=/20131010/NEWS/310100345& emailAFriend=1

60. Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.

61. “Statement by Col. John W. Mayo,

Chairman of City-County Civil

Defense and Disaster Commission at

the Dedication of the Emergency

Operating Center at Fair Park,” May

24, 1961,

http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/fallout/dallaseoc.html (link discontinued). Six linear inches

of Civil Defense Administrative

Files are preserved in the Dallas

Municipal Archives; a Finding

Guide is viewable online at

http://www.ci.dallas.tx.us/cso/archives/FindingGuides/08001.html I hope an interested researcher may

wish to consult them.

62. Scott, Road to 9/11, 183–87.

63. Spencer S. Hsu, “ Bush Changes

Continuity Plan,” Washington Post,

May 10, 2007.

64. 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326,

555n9; Scott, Road to 9/11, 224.

65. Scott, Road to 9/11, 226–30. A

footnote in the 9/11 Commission

Report says: “The 9/11 crisis tested

the U.S. government’s plans and

capabilities to ensure the continuity

of constitutional government and the

continuity of government operations.

We did not investigate this topic,

except as needed to understand the

activities and communications of key

officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice

Chair, and senior staff were briefed

on the general nature and

implementation of these continuity

plans” ( 9/11 Commission Report,

555n9).

The other footnotes confirm that

no information from COG files was

used to document the 9/11

Commission Report. At a minimum

these files might resolve the mystery

of the missing phone call that

simultaneously authorized COG, and

(in consequence) determined that

Bush should continue to stay out of

Washington. I suspect that they might

tell us a great deal more.

66. “White House Communications

Agency,” Signal Corps Regimental

History,

http://signal.army.mil/OLD/history/white_house_communications_agency.html

67. The Warren Commission staff knew

of the WHCA presence in Dallas

from the Secret Service (Warren

Commission, Hearings, Vol. 17,

598, 619, 630, etc.).

68. Statement of Secret Service Winston

Lawson, Warren Commission,

Hearings, Vol. 17, 630 (WHCA

radio).

69. Pamela McElwain-Brown, “The

Presidential Lincoln Continental SS-

100-X,” Dealey Plaza Echo, 3, no.

2, 23,

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=16241&relPageId=27 (police

radio); Scott, Deep Politics and the

Death of JFK, 272–75 (Lumpkin).

70. In the 1990s the WHCA supplied

statements to the ARRB concerning

communications between Dallas and

Washington on November 22 (White

House Communications Agency

[WHCA] files, NARA #172-10001-

10002 to NARA #172-10000-

10008). The Assassination Records

Review Board also attempted to

obtain from the WHCA the unedited

original tapes of conversations from

Air Force One on the return trip from

Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited

and condensed versions of these

tapes had been available since the

1970s from the Lyndon Baines

Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.)

The attempt was unsuccessful: “The

Review Board’s repeated written

and oral inquiries of the White

House Communications Agency did

not bear fruit. The WHCA could not

produce any records that illuminated

the provenance of the edited tapes.”

See Assassinations Records Review

Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part

1, 116,

http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-

board/report/arrb-final-report.pdf.

71. See Scott, War Conspiracy, 347–48,

385–87.

72. Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

73. Dick Cheney, In My Time: A

Personal and Political Memoir

(New York: Threshold Editions,

2011), 348: “One of the first efforts

we undertook after 9/11 to strengthen

the country’s defenses was securing

passage of the Patriot Act, which the

president signed into law on [sic]

October 2001.” Cf. “The Patriot Act,

which the president signed into law

on October 2001,” emptywheel,

October 26, 2011,

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/10/26/the-

patriot-act-which-the-president-

signed-into-law-on-october-2001/;

“Questions and Answers about

Beginning of Domestic Spying

Program,” emptywheel, July 16,

2009,

http://www.emptywheel.net/2009/07/16/questions-

and-answers-about-beginning-of-

domestic-spying-program/.

74. Scott, Road to 9/11, 236–45; cf.

chapter 3 of this book.

75. “Memorandum for Mr. Moyers” of

November 25, 1963, FBI 62-

109060, Section 18, p. 29,

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

absPageId=756877. Cf. Nicholas

Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun

(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008),

131–36.

76. Leventhal’s official title is (or was)

“Chief of the Counter-

Misinformation Team, U.S.

Department of State” (http://2002-

2009-fpc.state.gov/44434.htm). In

2010 the U.S. State Department

“launched an official bid to shoot

down conspiracy theories. . . . The

“Conspiracy Theories and

Misinformation” page . . . insists that

Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F

Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon

was not hit by a cruise missile on

9/11” ( Daily Record [Scotland],

August 2, 2010,

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/science-

and-technology/2010/08/02/white-

house-launches-new-website-to-

debunk-conspiracy-theories-86908-

22457938/). The site still existed, in

July 2013, but I was unable to find it

in June 2014. Cf. Robin Ramsay,

“Government vs Conspiracy

Theorists: The Official War on ‘Sick

Think,’” Fortean Times, April 2010,

http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/conspiracycorner/3211/government_vs_conspiracy_theorists.html Robin Ramsay, “The State

Department vs ‘Sick Think’: The

JFK assassination, 9/11, and the

Tory MP spiked with LSD,” Fortean

Times, July 2010,

http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/conspiracycorner/3937/the_state_department_vs_sick_think.html William Kelly, “Todd Leventhal:

The Minister of Diz at Dealey

Plaza,” CTKA, 2010,

http://www.ctka.net/2010/Levanthal.html

77. For Nixon’s sensitivity concerning

the Kennedy assassination, and the

way this induced him into some of

the intrigues known collectively as

Watergate, see for example, Scott,

Hoch, and Stetler, The

Assassinations, 374–78; Scott,

Crime and Cover-Up, 33, 64–66.

10. THE AMERICAN DEEP STATE,

DEEP EVENTS, AND OFF-THE-

BOOKS FINANCING

1. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and

the Death of JFK (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

1993), 6–8.

2. Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and

the Secret Government,” Miami

Herald, July 5, 1987,

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?

id_article=9877.

3. Anthony Summers with Robbyn

Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The

Secret World of Richard Nixon

(New York: Viking, 2000), 198; H.

R. Haldeman, with Joseph DiMona,

The Ends of Power (New York:

Times Books, 1978), 68.

4. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott,

and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra

Connection: Secret Teams and

Covert Operations in the Reagan

Era (Boston: South End Press,

1987), 42–49.

5. Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The

Iran-Contra Connection, 25–30,

36–42, 155–57.

6. Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A

Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an

Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet

Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E.

Sharpe, 1999), 272–75.

7. Peter Dale Scott, The War

Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the

Deep Politics of War (New York:

Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), 341–96.

There I list thirteen similarities; I

have since thought of another dozen.

8. Chapter 9.

9. Charlie Joyce to Clay Whitehead

[director of the White House Office

of Telecommunications Policy under

Nixon], “Emergency Preparedness

for Telecommunications,” attachment

to memo of November 5, 1969,

reproduced at

http://claytwhitehead.com/ctwlibrary/Box%20006/002_Domestic%20Satellite%20Policy%20Working%20Group%20%281%20of%202%20folders%29.pdf

10. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The

Secret World of Intelligence

Outsourcing (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2008), 72–75.

11. Peter Dale Scott, “North, Iran-

Contra, and the Doomsday Project:

The Original Congressional Cover

Up of Continuity-of-Government

Planning,” Asia-Pacific Journal:

Japan Focus, February 21, 2011,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3491.

12. Ben Bradlee, Jr., Guts and Glory:

The Rise and Fall of Oliver North

(New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988),

132.

13. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,

All the President’s Men (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23; Jim

Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York:

Random House, 1984), 16. For more

on WISP, see David Wise, The

Politics of Lying: Government

Deception, Secrecy, and Power

(New York: Random House, 1973),

134–37.

14. Scott, Road to 9/11, 197–235.

15. Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and

the Secret Government,” Miami

Herald, July 5, 1987,

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?

id_article=9877.

16. Congressional Committees

Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair,

Hearings, July 13, 1987, as reported

in New York Times, July 14, 1987.

Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 183–90.

17. John Foster Dulles to Lord

McGowan, Chairman of Imperial

Chemical Industries, in Nancy

Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, A Law

unto Itself: The Untold Story of the

Law Firm of Sullivan & Cromwell

(New York: William Morrow,

1988), 127.

18. Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the

Covert World of Her Majesty’s

Secret Intelligence Service (New

York: Free Press, 2000), 659–60.

19. Lauren Fox, “Spy Game: Why

Congress Is Limited in Its CIA

Oversight,” U.S. News & World

Report, March 12, 2014,

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/03/12/spy-

game-why-congress-is-limited-in-

its-cia-oversight.

20. Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design:

The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and

NSC (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,

1999), 189; citing Christopher

Andrew, For the President’s Eyes

Only (New York: HarperCollins,

1995), 172. See also Church

Committee, Senate Select Committee

to Study Governmental Operations

with Respect to Intelligence

Activities, Final Report; Book IV—

Supplementary Detailed Staff

Reports on Foreign and Military

Intelligence (Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1976),

28–29,

https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=1160&relPageId=34.

21. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross,

The Espionage Establishment (New

York: Random House, 1967), 166;

Scott, Road to 9/11, 13.

22. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The

History of the CIA (New York:

Doubleday, 2007), 28. An analogous

funding source for the CIA

developed in the Far East: the so-

called

“M-Fund,” a secret fund of money of

enormous size that has existed in Japan [in

1991] for more than forty years. The Fund

was established by the United States in the

immediate postwar era for essentially the

same reasons that later gave rise to the

Marshall Plan of assistance by the U.S. to

Western Europe, including the Federal

Republic of Germany. . . . The M-Fund was

used not only for the building of a

democratic political system in Japan but,

in addition, for all of the purposes for

which Marshall Plan funds were used in

Europe.

23. Peter Dale Scott, American War

Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA

Global Drug Connection, and the

Road to Afghanistan (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

2007), 68–96.

24. Fineman, A Special Relationship,

214–15; cf. 206.

25. Scott, American War Machine, 101–

16.

26. William D. Hartung, Prophets of

War: Lockheed Martin and the

Making of the Military-Industrial

Complex (New York: Nation Books,

2011), 126.

27. Anthony Summers with Robbyn

Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The

Secret World of Richard Nixon

(New York: Viking Penguin, 2000),

283. Cf. Ronald Kessler, The

Richest Man in the World: The

Story of Adnan Khashoggi (New

York: Warner Books), 171:

Khashoggi told the prosecutors “that

he churned millions through the tiny

[Rebozo] bank to win favor with the

president.”

28. Cf. Jim Hougan, Spooks: The

Haunting of America: The Private

Use of Secret Agents (New York:

William Morrow, 1978), 457–58.

29. Kessler, Richest Man in the World,

238–41; Scott, American War

Machine, 161–62.

30. The operation kept the name “Safari

Club” even after moving from

Khashoggi’s Club to a permanent

headquarters in Cairo.

31. Christopher Byron, “The Senate look

at BCCI,” New York Magazine,

October 28, 1991, 20–21.

32. Nick Kochan and Bob Whittington,

Bankrupt: The BCCI Fraud

(London: Gollancz, 1991), 220;

quoted in Committee on Foreign

Relations, United States Senate, The

BCCI Affair: BCCI, the CIA and

Foreign Intelligence, A Report to

the Committee on Foreign

Relations, United States Senate by

Senator John Kerry and Senator

Hank Brown, December 1992; 102d

Congress, 2d Session, Senate Print

102–140, Part 11, “BCCI, the CIA

and Foreign Intelligence”

(Washington, DC: U.S. Government

Printing Office),

https://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm

33. Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne,

The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into

the Secret Heart of BCCI (New

York: Random House, 1993), 311:

“Rappaport and the Bank of Oman’s

managing director maintained key

contacts with the Saudis, who were

pumping money through the bank for

the Afghan rebels, at Casey’s

request.” Cf. Alan A. Block and

Constance A. Weaver, All Is

Clouded by Desire: Global

Banking, Money Laundering, and

International Organized Crime

(Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers,

2004), 27–28; Scott, American War

Machine, 163; Scott, Road to 9/11,

325n94.

34. Block and Weaver, All Is Clouded

by Desire, 36–37. Allegedly $10

million obtained from the sultan of

Brunei for Oliver North’s support of

the Contras was deposited by

accident for a while into Bruce

Rappaport’s Swiss bank account

(Block and Weaver, All is Clouded

by Desire, 89–90).

35. Craig Unger, House of Bush, House

of Saud: The Secret Relationship

between the World’s Two Most

Powerful Dynasties (New York:

Scribner, 2004), 59–61. The

opposition of Israel and its

supporters was mitigated in 1983,

when Reagan agreed to preserve

Israel’s “qualitative edge” by

supplying comparable weapons

(Bernard Reich, Securing the

Covenant: United States-Israel

Relations After the Cold War

[Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

1995], 53). Cf. Marshall, Scott, and

Hunter, The Iran-Contra

Connection, 93–95.

36. Unger, House of Bush, House of

Saud, 61; citing Robert Baer, “The

Fall of the House of Saud,” Atlantic

Monthly, May 2003, 60.

37. “Saudi Prince ‘Received Arms

Cash,’” BBC, June 7, 2007,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6728773.stm It is unclear whether payments

continued after 2001, when the U.K.

signed the OECD’s Anti-Bribery

Convention, making such over-

payments illegal.

38. Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, 108.

39. Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror:

The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of

America’s Private Intelligence

Network (New York: Carroll &

Graf, 2005), 102.

40. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret

History of the CIA, Afghanistan,

and bin Laden, from the Soviet

Invasion to September 10, 2001

(New York: Penguin Press, 2004),

82.

41. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin,

False Profits: The Inside Story of

BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt

Financial Empire (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 133.

42. Robert Parry, Secrecy and

Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty

from Watergate to Iraq (Arlington,

VA: Media Consortium, 2004), 112–

38; Scott, Road to 9/11, 99–107.

43. John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars:

Afghanistan, America, and

International Terrorism (London:

Pluto Press, 1999), 26. De

Marenches, through a shadowy Pinay

Circle, was also accused of

interfering in the domestic politics of

France, England, and other European

countries. See Robin Ramsey, “Brian

Crozier, the Pinay Circle and James

Goldsmith,” Lobster 17, November

1988; David Teacher, “The Pinay

Circle and Destabilization in

Europe,” Lobster 18, October 1989.

A more extreme argument is that of

David G. Guyatt, “The Pinay Circle:

An Invisible Power Network,”

Nexus Magazine, August-September

1996.

44. Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1991),

80–83.

45. Committee on Foreign Relations,

United States Senate, The BCCI

Affair, Part 19. “Khashoggi, a Saudi

Arabian who investigators have

found played a significant role in

financing the early US arms

shipments to Iran, was serving as

Fahd’s emissary in the deals, Bamieh

said. . . . ” ( The BCCI Affair, Part

19,

http://fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/19rogers.htm This claim was corroborated by two

Khashoggi associates and Farid

Ghadry, a Saudi dissident in

Washington ( New York Times,

January 17, 1987, 6). Cf. also

Washington Post, March 7, 1987,

A4.

46. There is no published evidence that

Copeland was involved in the Safari

Club covert operations. But it may

be significant that Copeland’s

activity of advising the Egyptian

Army became, after the creation of

the Safari Club a franchise, of a

“private” U.S. firm, J. J. Cappucci

and Associates, owned by Theodore

Shackley (Trento, Prelude to Terror,

150, 247).

47. Draper, A Very Thin Line, 129.

48. Draper, A Very Thin Line, 131. Cf.

Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Every

Spy a Prince: The Complete History

of Israel’s Intelligence Community

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990),

261; Mayn Katz, Song of Spies

(Heliographica Press, 2005), 136–

37.

49. Samuel Segev, translated by Haim

Watzman, The Iranian Triangle: The

Untold Story of Israel’s Role in the

Iran-Contra (New York: The Free

Press, 1988), 10. For the

collaboration of Greenspun,

Schwimmer, and Meyer Lansky in

gunrunning, see Leonard Slater, The

Pledge (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1970). Paul Helliwell may

have been part of this operation; see

Scott, American War Machine, 71,

164.

50. Miles Copeland, The Game Player:

The Confessions of the CIA’s

Original Political Operative

(London: Aurum Press, 1989), 263.

51. Larry J. Kolb, Overworld: The Life

and Times of a Reluctant Spy (New

York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2004),

246.

52. Kolb, Overworld, 247.

53. Kolb, Overworld, 247.

54. Iran-Contra Affair, Report of the

congressional committees

investigating the Iran-Contra Affair

(U.S. Congress, H. Rept. No. 100–

433, S. Rept. No. 100–216), 164.

55. Committee on Foreign Relations,

United States Senate, The BCCI

Affair, Part 11, “BCCI, the CIA and

Foreign Intelligence.”

56. In his 2009 book, Phillip Shenon,

The Commission: The Uncensored

History of the 9/11 Investigation

(New York: Twelve, 2009), 52–55,

184, 309–11, 398–99, New York

Times reporter Shenon discusses

Bayoumi and his ties to the Saudi

government. Cf. David Ray Griffin,

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited:

9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé

(Northampton, MA: Olive Branch

Press, 2008), 224–27.

57. Paul Church, “Was Saudi Arabia

involved?,” Asia Times Online,

February 11, 2012,

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB11Ak03.html

Cf. Anthony Summers and Robbyn

Swan, The Eleventh Day: The Full

Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden

(New York: Ballantine Books,

2011), 410–15, 559–62; cf. David B.

Ottaway, The King’s Messenger:

Prince Bandar bin Sultan and

America’s Tangled Relationship

with Saudi Arabia (New York:

Walker, 2008), 198–99.

58. Let me clarify yet again that what I

mean by “support for alleged 9/11

hijackers” means support for a joint

operation on 9/11 involving both

U.S. government and Saudi officials,

along with at least some of the

alleged hijackers, and not, in my

mind at least, of a plot to bring down

the World Trade Center towers in a

controlled demolition, which I

believe may have involved quite

different plotters.

59. Paul Sperry, “Inside the Saudi 9/11

Coverup,” New York Post,

December 15, 2013,

http://nypost.com/2013/12/15/inside-

the-saudi-911-coverup/: “FBI agents

investigating the connection in 2002

found that visitor logs for the gated

community and photos of license tags

matched vehicles driven by the

hijackers. Just two weeks before the

9/11 attacks, the Saudi luxury home

was abandoned. Three cars,

including a new Chrysler PT

Cruiser, were left in the driveway.

Inside, opulent furniture was

untouched.”

60. Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, 108.

61. Glenn R. Simpson, “Riggs Bank Had

Longstanding Link To the CIA,” Wall

Street Journal, December 31, 2004.

The Journal added that the former

Chilean chief of secret police under

Pinochet, Manuel Contreras, also

banked at Riggs.

62. Peter Maass, “A Touch of Crude,”

Mother Jones, January/February

2005,

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/01/obiang-

equatorial-guinea-oil-riggs.

63. Steve Coll, Private Empire:

ExxonMobil and American Power

(New York: Penguin Press, 2012),

283, 290.

64. The Report of the Joint

Congressional Inquiry into

Intelligence Community Activities

before and after the Terrorist

Attacks of September 11, 2001,

107th Congress, 2nd Session, S.

Rept. 107-351 and H. Rept. 107-

792,

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/page-

details.action?

browsePath=107/HRPT/[700%3b799]&granuleId=CRPT-

107hrpt792&packageId=CRPT-

107hrpt792, 173ss. Discussion in

Ottaway, The King’s Messenger,

198–99.

65. Shenon, The Commission, 398–99.

66. Ottaway, The King’s Messenger,

198–99. Cf. Arab News, July 26,

2003,

http://www.arabnews.com/node/234848

What has been produced is nothing less

than a charter for Saudi-bashing, all the

more so because of the 28 pages

supposedly dealing with Saudi links to the

hijackers, blocked on White House

orders. Anyone who thinks that President

Bush is doing us a favor can forget it.

Whatever the intention, this is an

invitation to the US and other media to

speculate. It would be far better if the

section were published.

This financial involvement from

the supranational deep state is a

dimension overlooked by those who

describe 9/11 as a conspiracy, or

“State Crime Against Democracy”

(SCAD), to be blamed on the U.S.

Government. See Lance deHaven-

Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory:

Patterns of High Crime in American

Government,” American Behavioral

Scientist, 53 (February 1, 2010),

796; and my discussion in The Asia-

Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,

September 23, 2012,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3835.

67. Dana Hedgpeth, “Pentagon Plans

$60 Billion Weapons Sale to Saudi

Arabia,” Washington Post, October

21, 2010.

68. The leader of the congressional

opposition was Rep. Anthony

Weiner of New York. Less than a

year later, in 2011, he was forced to

resign, after exposure of sexually

provocative pictures that he had sent

to female admirers on the Internet.

69. Cf. Jonathan Schell, The

Unconquerable World: Power,

Nonviolence, and the Will of the

People (New York: Metropolitan

Books, 2003), 227–31.

11. AMERICA’S UNCHECKED

SECURITY STATE

1. Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Dear Bess:

The Letters from Harry to Bess

Truman, 1910– 1959 (New York: W.

W. Norton, 1983), 550.

2. Brian Fitzgerald, McCarthyism: The

Red Scare (Minneapolis, MN:

Compass Point Books, 2007), 16.

3. See chapter 3.

4. Patrick A. Thronson, “Toward

Comprehensive Reform of

America’s Emergency Law Regime,”

University of Michigan Journal of

Law Reform, 46, No. 2 (Winter

2013), 737.

5. See “How the Anti-Terrorism Bill

Allows for Detention of People

Engaging in Innocent Associational

Activity,” ACLU, October 23, 2001,

http://www.aclu.org/national-

security/how-anti-terrorism-bill-

allows-detention-people-engaging-

innocent-associational-ac.

6. National Commission on Terrorist

Attacks upon the United States, The

9/11 Commission Report (New

York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 394,

http://www.9-

11commission.gov/report/911Report. pdf

7. Len Colodny and Tom Schachtman,

The Forty Years War: The Rise and

Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to

Obama (New York: HarperCollins,

2009), 390. As we shall see below,

Mitchell blocked implementation of

the Huston Plan at the urging of

Hoover, who was opposed to such

cooperation between the FBI and

CIA.

8. Church Committee, Senate Select

Committee to Study Governmental

Operations with Respect to

Intelligence Activities, Final

Report; Book II—Intelligence

Activities and the Rights of

Americans (henceforth Church

Committee, Book II) (Washington,

DC: U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1976), 91,

https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=1158&relPageId=107. For

whatever reason, the Church

Committee Final Report is silent

about the detention provisions of the

Huston Plan (Church Committee,

Book II, 112–15).

9. Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the

Cold War Consensus: The Political

Economy of U.S. National Security

Policy, 1949–51 (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1998),

153: “Title II of the act authorized

the arrest and detention of suspected

subversives in the event of an

‘internal security emergency.’”

10. See for example Athan Theoharis,

Spying on Americans: Political

Surveillance from Hoover to the

Huston Plan (Philadelphia: Temple

University Press, 1978), 99–100;

Paul D. Borman, “The Selling of

Preventive Detention 1970,”

Northwest Law Review, 65

(January-February 1971), 879–931.

11. A major factor in the rapid decline of

Hoover’s reputation was the

revelation of COINTELPRO

programs, discovered in the burglary

by activists of a suburban FBI office

in Media, PA, on March 8, 1971. See

Mark Mazzetti, “Burglars Who Took

On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows,” New

York Times, January 7, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/burglars-

who-took-on-fbi-abandon-

shadows.html; Betty Medsger, The

Burglary: The Discovery of J.

Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

12. Athan Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A

Comprehensive Reference Guide

(Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1999),

158. We shall see below (in the text

at n. 74) that Hoover had never been

constrained by the procedures of the

Internal Security Act when it was

passed.

13. As we shall see below (in the text at

n. 70) the new Administrative Index

(ADEX) was in turn discontinued in

1978. But the list was again not

destroyed, and remained available

for use by a committee of Continuity

of Government (COG) planners

(including Rumsfeld and Cheney) in

the new Reagan administration. It

has been in active use since 9/11.

14. In three magisterial books

( Blowback, Nemesis, and

Dismantling the Empire) Chalmers

Johnson documented how America’s

imperial overstretch abroad has

become a threat to the republic itself.

This chapter looks at a parallel

threat to the republic that has arisen

from within.

15. The concept of a “war on terror” had

earlier been promoted in 1979 at the

Jerusalem Conference on

International Terrorism organized by

future Israeli Prime minister

Benjamin Netanyahu. George H. W.

Bush spoke there in support of a

“war on terror.” In April 1980 a

follow-up conference in Washington

was addressed by Henry Kissinger,

future National Security Adviser

Richard Allen, and Richard Pipes.

See Raymond L. Garthoff, ed., The

Great Transition: American-Soviet

Relations and the End of the Cold

War (Washington, DC: Brookings

Institution, 1994), 23n14.

16. See Mark Perry, Eclipse: The Last

Days of the CIA (New York:

William Morrow, 1992), 47–49,

319–20; Gregory F. Treverton,

Covert Action: The Limits of

Intervention in the Postwar World

(New York: Basic Books, 1987);

David Aaron, Los Angeles Times,

October 18, 1987,

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-

18/books/bk-15321_1_covert-

action: “CIA Director William

Casey, angry at his experts on

terrorism for coming up with little

evidence linking the Soviet Union to

terror groups, ordered them to read

Claire Sterling’s famous book ‘The

Terror Network.’ They did and found

that virtually all of the examples she

cited turned out to be CIA

disinformation—false stories

planted in the foreign press that she

unwittingly used in good faith.”

17. Lord Acton to the Anglican Bishop

of London, Mandell Creighton, letter,

April 1887, in John Emerich Edward

Dalberg-Acton, Essays on Freedom

and Power (Boston: Beacon Press,

1949), 364.

18. McCarthy’s “certain manic

brilliance” was noted at the time by

commentator Eric Sevareid (Conrad

Black, Richard Milhous Nixon: The

Invincible Quest [London: Quercus,

2007], 310). Cf. Eli Sagan, Citizens

and Cannibals, the French

Revolution, the Struggle for

Modernity, and the Origins of

Ideological Terror (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield), 328:

Richard Nixon . . . manifested many

attributes that can accurately be called

“paranoid.” But when the Watergate crisis

came to its frightful climax, many

sensitive, thoughtful people in Washington

were fearful that the president would go

over the line and move on from paranoid

behavior to paranoia itself. In the last days

before Nixon resigned, Secretary of

Defense James Schlesinger apparently

informed all U.S. commanders that any

orders from the White House concerning

troops or weapons had to be approved by

him, before being executed.

In his important book, A First-

Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi

makes an interesting case that “the

best crisis leaders are either

mentally ill or mentally abnormal”;

however I am completely

unpersuaded by his attempt to prove

that “Nixon was not mentally ill or

abnormal” (Nassir Ghaemi, A First-

Rate Madness: Uncovering the

Links between Leadership and

Mental Illness [New York: Penguin

Press, 2011], 17, 223; emphasis in

original).

19. For Angleton as “the CIA’s manic

molehunter,” see Lori Lyn Bogle, ed.

The Cold War (New York:

Routledge, 2001), 64. For North’s

“nearly manic devotion to duty,” see

Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire:

Water, Aridity, and the Growth of

the American West (New York:

Oxford University, 1992), 153. Cf.

Paul Berman, Power and the

Idealists (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull

Press), 135: “Rumsfeld . . . in the

judgment of his non-admirers . . .

gave off a manic and scary vibe.”

20. Likewise Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s

fellow Vulcan, Paul Wolfowitz, after

leaving the Pentagon, was forced out

of his position as president of the

World Bank because of similar

hubristic excesses, such as granting

his mistress salary raises far in

excess of those allowable under

Bank rules. Both Rumsfeld and

Wolfowitz were ousted after

successful revolts by their own

subordinates. For Rumsfeld’s

downfall after “the revolt of the

generals” against his “reign of

terror,” see Andrew Cockburn,

Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and

Catastrophic Legacy (New York:

Scribner, 2007), especially 210–23.

21. Peter Dale Scott, “Northwards

without North: Bush,

Counterterrorism, and the

Continuation of Secret Power,”

Social Justice, Summer 1989;

revised as “North, Iran-Contra, and

the Doomsday Project: The Original

Congressional Cover Up of

Continuity-of-Government

Planning,” Asia-Pacific Journal:

Japan Focus, February 21, 2011,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3491. I offer the notion of

personal power autointoxication as a

more personalized and more

sympathetic interpretation of the

phenomenon increasingly described

by some criminologists as “state

criminality.” See for example, G.

Barak, “Crime, Criminology and

Human Rights: Towards an

Understanding of State Criminality,”

Journal of Human Justice, 1990;

Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond

Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High

Crime in American Government,”

American Behavioral Scientist,

February 2010, 795–825. Some of

my critique of “state crimes”

analysis can be found in Peter Dale

Scott, “Systemic Destabilization in

Recent American History: 9/11, the

JFK Assassination, and the

Oklahoma City Bombing as a

Strategy of Tension,” The Asia-

Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,

September 23, 2012,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3835.

22. Our economy’s recent recurrent flux

between exaggerated bubble

(moving in Alan Greenspan’s terms

from “irrational exuberance” to

“infectious greed”) and then

recession, has been compared by a

psychologist to “the cycle of manic

depression” (Peter C. Whybrow,

American Mania: When More is Not

Enough [New York: W. W. Norton,

2005], 127).

23. Tim Weiner, “The Pentagon’s Secret

Stash,” Mother Jones Magazine,

March-April 1992, 26.

24. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11:

Wealth, Empire, and the Future of

America (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007), 185–87;

citing Executive Order 12656 of 18

November 1988.

25. Cockburn, Rumsfeld, 88; quoted in

Scott, Road to 9/11, 187.

26. CNN, November 17, 1991, quoted in

Shirley Anne Warshaw, The Co-

Presidency of Bush and Cheney

(Stanford, CA: Stanford Politics and

Policy, 2009), 162.

27. In 2014, at a memorial service for a

member of the University of

California, Berkeley, one of the

speakers was a colleague who was

also an Iranian Muslim, not an Arab.

He told me personally after his talk

that he had been detained without a

warrant right after 9/11, held for

eighty days, and beaten so severely

that there was blood in his urine.

28. Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of

the FBI (New York: Random House,

2012), 419–20.

29. Glenn Greenwald, “Three Key

Lessons from the Obama

Administration’s Drone Lies,”

Guardian (London), April 11, 2013,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/three-

lessons-obama-drone-lies. Cf.

Micah Zenko, “An Inconvenient

Truth: Finally, Proof that the United

States Has Lied in the Drone Wars,”

Foreign Policy, April 11, 2013,

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/10/an_inconvenient_truth_drones#.UWXow7ir6Xk.twitter

30. William Binney, quoted in Jane

Mayer, “The Secret Sharer: Is

Thomas Drake an Enemy of the

State?” New Yorker, May 23, 2011,

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-

secret-sharer.

31. “Even as some senior former

American security officials question

whether the strikes are beginning to

do more harm than good, 65 percent

of Americans questioned in a Gallup

poll last month approved of strikes

to kill suspected foreign terrorists;

only 28 percent were opposed”

(Scott Shane, “Targeted Killing

Comes to Define War on Terror,”

New York Times, April 8, 2013, 3).

As in the McCarthy era, public

xenophobia is trumping common

sense. See Martha Stout, The

Paranoia Switch: How Terror

Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes

Our Behavior—and How We Can

Reclaim Our Courage (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007),

which the publisher describes as “a

groundbreaking clinical,

neuropsychological, and practical

examination of what terror and fear

politics have done to our minds, and

to the very biology of our brains.”

32. See for example, Tom Engelhardt,

“The Enemy-Industrial Complex,”

TomDis-patch, April 15, 2013,

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175687/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_cathedral_of_the_enemy/

All these years, we’ve been launching wars

and pursuing a “global war on terror.”

We’ve poured money into national

security as if there were no tomorrow.

From our police to our borders, we’ve up-

armored everywhere. We constantly hear

about “threats” to us and to the

“homeland.” And yet, when you knock on

the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom

anyone home.

Few in this country have found this

striking. Few seem to notice any

disjuncture between the enemy-ridden,

threatening, and deeply dangerous world

we have been preparing ourselves for (and

fighting in) this last decade-plus and the

world as it actually is, even those who

lived through significant parts of the last

anxiety-producing, bloody century.

Engelhardt accurately blames this

psychotic condition on neocons, who

“needed an American public

anxious, frightened, and ready to

pay.” But his trenchant essay ends of

a note of gloom, even despair:

They may indeed be a crew of

Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in

the cult of terror and global war. . . . It’s

their religion. They are, after all, the

enemy-industrial complex and if we are in

their grip, so are they.

33. Weiner, Enemies, 443. A classified

U.S. intelligence report of around

2006 concluded that Iraq had

become a “cause célèbre for

jihadists, breeding a deep resentment

of U.S. involvement in the Muslim

world and cultivating supporters for

the global jihadist movement” (Mark

Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The

CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at

the Ends of the Earth [New York:

Penguin Press, 2013], 138).

34. The counter-productivity is of course

welcome to those who profit from

the American war machine, as well

as to those multinational

corporations who welcome an

American military presence around

the globe. See chapter 12.

35. FBI manual quoted in Weiner,

Enemies, 447–48.

36. David K. Shipler, “Terrorist Plots,

Hatched by the F.B.I.,” New York

Times, April 28, 2012,

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-

plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html?

pagewanted=all&_r=0. Cf. Trevor

Aaronson, The Terror Factory:

Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War

on Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Ig

Publishing, 2013); Rick Perlstein,

“How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing

‘Terrorists’—and Letting Bad Guys

Off the Hook,” Rolling Stone, May

15, 2012,

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-

affairs/how-fbi-entrapment-is-

inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-

guys-off-the-hook-20120515;

Spencer Ackerman, “Government

agents ‘directly involved’ in most

high-profile US terror plots,”

Guardian, July 21, 2014,

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/21/government-

agents-directly-involved-us-terror-

plots-report.

37. Robert W. Worth, Mark Mazzetti,

and Scott Shane, “Drone Strikes’

Risks to Get Rare Moment in the

Public Eye,” New York Times,

February 5, 2013,

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/middleeast/with-

brennan-pick-a-light-on-drone-

strikes-hazards.html?

pagewanted=all&_r=0. On CIA and

Joint Special Operations Command

(JSOC) killer squads in general, see

Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife.

38. Jonathan Turley, “The NDAA’s

historic assault on American

liberty,” Guardian (London),

January 2, 2012:

The almost complete failure of the

mainstream media to cover this issue is

shocking. . . . On the NDAA, reporters

continue to mouth the claim that this law

only codifies what is already the law. That

is not true. The administration has fought

any challenges to indefinite detention to

prevent a true court review. Moreover,

most experts agree that such indefinite

detention of citizens violates the

constitution.

39. Weiner, Enemies, 24–25, 29, 31.

40. Weiner, Enemies, 15–16.

41. Weiner, Enemies, 28.

42. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The

Man and the Secrets (New York: W.

W. Norton, 1991), 127.

43. Gentry , J. Edgar Hoover, 244–45.

44. Gentry , J. Edgar Hoover, 207.

However Hoover had already begun

to violate Stone’s edict by 1933,

when he began to collect

“derogatory information” on Alfred

Einstein (Fred Jerome, The Einstein

File: J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret War

against the World’s Most Famous

Scientist [New York: St. Martin’s

Press, 2002], jacket,

http://www.theeinsteinfile.com/) and

1934, when on FDR’s urging he

ordered what he termed a “so-called

intelligence investigation” of pro-

Nazi elements, primarily the

German-American Bund (Gentry , J.

Edgar Hoover, 205).

45. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 204. Cf.

Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the

White House: The Shocking True

Story of the Conspiracy to

Overthrow FDR (New York:

Skyhorse Publishing, 2007); Sally

Denton, The Plots Against the

President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis,

and the Rise of the American Right

(New York: Bloomsbury Press,

2012), 200–201.

46. Gentry , J. Edgar Hoover, 205.

47. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 51;

Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 206–8;

Church Committee, Book II, 30.

48. Hoover first named the revived

Division Five of the FBI as the

National Defense Division, then the

Security Division, then the Domestic

Intelligence Division, and then the

Intelligence Division.

49. Marc Aronson, Master of Deceit: J.

Edgar Hoover and America in the

Age of Lies (Somerville, MA:

Candlewick, 2012), 85. Aronson

erroneously attributes FDR’s

authorization to the first Butler

contact with Hoover, instead of the

second.

50. “Intelligence Division operations

were cloaked in secrecy; were less

accountable to public scrutiny . . .

and spilled over into unethical or

illegal conduct. Coexisting with the

professional culture of the criminal

division was a ‘counterculture’ that

developed in the hidden side of the

Bureau’s intelligence operations”

(Theoharis, The FBI: A

Comprehensive Reference Guide,

183).

51. Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin:

The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of

the Little Flower (Boston: Little,

Brown, 1972), 214–17.

52. A. S. Richard Sipe, The Serpent and

the Dove: Celibacy in Literature

and Life (Westport, CT: Praeger,

2007), 44–45.

53. Weiner, Enemies, 144; Gentry, J.

Edgar Hoover, 350n. Cf. Kai Bird,

The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the

Making of the American

Establishment (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1992), 281.

54. Anthony Summers with Robbyn

Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The

Secret World of Richard Nixon

(New York: Viking, 2000), 64–65;

Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 378–80.

55. For Hoover’s role in shaping

Reagan’s political career, see Seth

Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s

War on Student Radicals, and

Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York:

Macmillan, 2012).

56. Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar:

The Historic Face-Off between the

Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover that

Transformed America (New York:

Carroll & Graf, 2007), 15.

57. Robert A. Caro, The Years of

Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of

Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2012), 291. Burton Hersh believes

the allegation that LBJ used

information from Hoover to secure

his position on the 1960 Democratic

ticket (Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar,

15–16).

58. Weiner, Enemies, 179–80. McLeod’s

staff also consisted mostly of former

FBI agents, using extralegal

techniques such as “surveillances,

mail openings, wiretaps, and break-

ins” (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 408–

9). McLeod’s office was established

during the Eisenhower

administration by Presidential

Executive Order 10450 of April 27,

1953

(http://www.archives.gov/federal-

register/codification/executive-

order/10450.html).

59. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 409.

60. James C. Thomson, “How Could

Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy,”

Atlantic Monthly, April, 1968,

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1968/04/how-

could-vietnam-happen-an-

autopsy/306462/. Cf. Christopher

Gerard, “On the Road to Vietnam:

‘The Loss of China Syndrome,’ Pat

McCarran, and J. Edgar Hoover,”

Nevada Historical Society

Quarterly 37 (1994).

61. Hans Morgenthau, “The Corruption

of Patriotism,” New Republic, 1955;

reprinted in Hans Morgenthau, ed.

Politics in the Twentieth Century,

vol. I (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1962), 407. Cf. Eric

Wilson, ed. The Dual State:

Parapolitics, Carl Schmitt and the

National Security Complex

(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 1–3,

21–27, etc.

62. Ola Tunander, “Democratic State

versus Deep State: Approaching the

Dual State of the West,” in

Government of the Shadows:

Parapolitics and Criminal

Sovereignty, ed. Eric Wilson and

Tim Lindsey (London: Pluto Press,

2008), 56–72.

63. Scott, Road to 9/11, 252, 258; cf.

Peter Dale Scott, The War

Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the

Deep Politics of War (New York:

Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), 15–16;

Peter Dale Scott, American War

Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA

Global Drug Connection, and the

Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 21.

64. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death

of JFK (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1993), xi–xii;

discussion in Eric Wilson, “The

Concept of the Parapolitical,” in

Wilson, The Dual State, 1–27.

65. Athan G. Theoharis, The FBI &

American Democracy: A Brief

Critical History (Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 2004),

20–21; Church Committee, Senate

Select Committee to Study

Governmental Operations with

Respect to Intelligence Activities,

Final Report, Book III—

Supplementary Detailed Staff

Reports on Intelligence Activities

and the Rights of Americans

(henceforth Church Committee, Book

III) (Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1976)

411–17,

https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=1159&relPageId=417.

66. Church Committee, Book III, 417.

67. Attorney-General Biddle directive to

the FBI, 1943; quoted in Church

Committee, Book III, 420–21.

68. Church Committee, Book III, 420–

21.

69. Weiner, Enemies, 122: “[The

Security Index] included—in

addition to ‘both aliens and citizens

of the United States [of] German,

Italian, and Communist

sympathies’—radical labor leaders,

journalists critical of the

administration, writers critical of the

FBI, and certain members of

Congress.” In 1955 about half the

names on the Security Index were

transferred to a less punitive

Communist Index (later renamed the

Reserve Index), including

“professors, teachers, and educators:

labor union organizers and leaders;

writers, lecturers newsmen and

others in the mass media field;

lawyers, doctors, and scientists;

other potentially influential persons

on a local or national level;

individuals who could potentially

furnish financial or material aid”

(Church Committee, Book II, 55).

Among those included were Norman

Mailer and Martin Luther King, Jr.

(Theoharis, The FBI: A

Comprehensive Reference Guide,

123).

70. FBI, FBI Privacy Act Systems (63

FR 8659, 8671/02-20-98),

http://www.fbi.gov/foia/privacy-

act/63-fr-8659:

The following indices are no longer being

used by the FBI and are being maintained

at FBIHQ pending receipt of authority to

destroy: Black Panther Party Photo Index;

Black United Front Index; Security Index;

and Wounded Knee Album.

Administrative Index (ADEX). Consists of

cards with descriptive data on individuals

who were subject to investigation in a

national emergency because they were

believed to constitute a potential or active

threat to the internal security of the

United States. When ADEX was started in

1971, it was made up of people who were

formerly on the Security Index, Reserve

Index, and Agitator Index. This index is

maintained in two separate locations in

FBI Headquarters. ADEX was

discontinued in January 1978. This list is

inactive at FBI Headquarters and 29 Field

Offices.

71. Weiner, Enemies, 161. Theoharis

asserts however that Truman had

already secretly approved the

detention plan in 1948 (Theoharis,

The FBI: A Comprehensive

Reference Guide, 151).

72. Weiner, Enemies, 160–61. The

primary targets for detention were

Communist Party members and their

supporters. Each detained person

would eventually get a hearing,

which under Hoover’s plan would

“not be bound by the rules of

evidence.” The plan was

declassified in 2007; see “Hoover

plan for mass arrests,” Public record

media, February 2011,

http://publicrecordmedia.com/2011/02/hoover-

plan-for-mass-arrests/. The FBI at

this time became what Victor

Navasky called “the vanguard of an

extraordinary internal-security

bureaucracy” —including the

Subversive Activities Control

Board, established, over Truman’s

veto, by the McCarran Act of 1950

(Victor Navasky, Naming Names

[New York: Penguin, 1981], 22).

That security bureaucracy has

morphed today into a second,

shadow government.

73. Weiner, Enemies, 144–45.

74. Theoharis, The FBI: A

Comprehensive Reference Guide,

151, 158; cf. Church Committee,

Book II.

75. Presidential Proclamation 2914 of

December 16, 1950; reproduced in

Brian Tuohy, Disaster Government:

National Emergencies, Continuity

of Government, & You (San

Bernardino, CA: Mofo Press, 2013),

44–45.

76. For NSA 68/4 of December 14,

1950, see Foreign Relations of the

United States, 1950, vol. 1, 1950,

467–74,

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01

cf. Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of

Iron: Harry S. Truman and the

Origins of the National Security

State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998),

322, etc.

77. Dennis Wainstock, Truman,

MacArthur, and the Korean War

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

1999), 99.

78. William Arkin cites as the first

Presidential Emergency Action

Document (PEAD) Executive Order

10346: Preparation by Federal

Agencies of Civil Defense

Emergency Plans (William Arkin,

American Coup: How a Terrified

Government Is Destroying the

Constitution [New York: Little

Brown, 2013], 238n4).

79. Matthew L. Conaty, “The Atomic

Midwife: The Eisenhower

Administration’s Continuity-of-

Government Plans and the Legacy of

‘Constitutional Dictatorship,’”

Rutgers Law Review, 62, no. 3

(Spring 2010), 7.

80. Federal Emergency Management

Agency [FEMA], FEMA MANUAL

5400.2 (effective Feb. 29, 2000),

http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/5400_2.pdf

111; quoted in Thronson, “Toward

Comprehensive Reform of

America’s Emergency Law Regime,”

762.

81. William Arkin, “National Security

Contingency Plans of the U.S.

Government (Supplement to Code

Names: Deciphering U.S. Military

Plans, Programs, and Operations in

the 9/11 World),” ca. 2005, arkins-

contingency-plans-of-the-us-

government.pdf.

82. Arkin, American Coup, 39.

83. A. H. Belmont to L. F. Boardman,

FBI memo of June 19, 1958 (FBI HQ

file 66-19016-6), reproduced in

Federal Bureau of Investigation

(FBI), Defense Plans—Presidential

Emergency Action Documents, 1958

—1979,

http://www.governmentattic.org/4docs/FBI-

Presid-Emerg-Action-Docs_1958-

1979.pdf.

84. J. Edgar Hoover to Assistant

Attorney General for Administration,

FBI letter of April 22, 1976,

reproduced in Federal Bureau of

Investigation (FBI), Defense Plans—

Presidential Emergency Action

Documents, 1958—1979,

www.governmentattic.org.

85. Arkin, American Coup, 43.

86. Arkin, American Coup, 97.

87. “Ex-agents Describe Spying on

Civilians,” UPI, February 25, 1971,

http://philochs.blogspot.com/2011/02/ex-

agents-describe-spying-on-

civilians.html.

88. Michel Crozier, Samuel P.

Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The

Crisis of Democracy: Report on the

Governability of Democracies to

the Trilateral Commission (New

York: New York University Press,

1975), 113.

89. Two dates are given for the creation

of FEMA: June 1978, and March

1979, the date of its formal

authorization in Presidential Review

Memorandum 32.

90. Diana Reynolds, “The Rise of the

National Security State: FEMA and

the NSC, Political Research

Associates,” Covert Action

Information Bulletin, no. 33 (Winter

1990),

http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/fema/Fema_2.html Earlier, Governor Reagan in

California had authorized the

development of a counterinsurgency

plan (known as Cable Splicer) and

exercises to deal with such crises, in

conjunction with the U.S. Sixth Army

and the Pentagon (Operation Garden

Plot). The cadres developing Cable

Splicer (headed by Louis Giuffrida),

were with Reagan’s elevation to the

presidency transferred into FEMA.

91. Glenn Beck, The Overton Window

(New York: Threshold

Editions/Mercury Radio Arts, 2010),

296. Cf. Robert C. Aldridge,

America in Peril (Pasadena, CA:

Hope Publishing House, 2008), 295.

92. Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and

the Secret Government,” Miami

Herald, July 5, 1987,

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?

id_article=9877: “Some of President Reagan’s top advisers have operated

a virtual parallel government outside

the traditional Cabinet departments.”

93. Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife,” 7–

8.

94. Conaty, “The Atomic Midwife,” 14.

95. Hope Yen, “Eisenhower Letters

Reveal Doomsday Plan: Citizens

Tapped to Take Over in Case of

Attack,” AP, Deseret News, March

21, 2004,

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/595050502/Eisenhower-

letters-reveal-doomsday-plan.html?

pg=all. Other emergency responses

to the launching of the Soviet sputnik

included acceleration of the military

programs to launch an American

satellite, and the creation of the

Defense Department’s Advanced

Research Projects Agency (ARPA,

now DARPA), which developed the

Internet.

96. Charlie Joyce to Clay Whitehead

[director of the White House Office

of Telecommunications Policy under

Nixon], “Emergency Preparedness

for Telecommunications,” attachment

to memo of November 5, 1969,

reproduced at

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/128597200/NSA-

USCSB_1940-1980.

97. Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The

Secret World of Intelligence

Outsourcing (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2008), 72–75. Cf. Arkin,

American Coup, 68.

98. Cf. for example, Office of Secretary

of Defense (OSD), “Promulgation

and Administration of OSD Crisis

Action Packages (CAPs),”

December 13, 1990,

www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a270081.pdf

“The Director. Crisis Coordination

Center shall: . . . d. Develop and

maintain an automated data base

interfacing CAPs [Crisis Action

Packages] with related presidential

emergency action documents

(PEADs), Federal Emergency

Management Agency (FEMA) major

emergency actions (MEAs), and

Joint Staff fact sheets.”

These programs were under the

purview of the Undersecretary of

Defense for Policy, who in 1990 was

the neocon Paul Wolfowitz. Crisis

Action Planning is today intensively

developed inside and outside

government: for example, James L.

Jacobs, Michael C. Dorneich, and

Patricia M. Jones, “‘Activity

Representation and Management for

Crisis Action Planning,’ 1998 IEEE

International Conference on

Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, San

Diego, CA, October 11–14, 1998.

(Invited).”

99. National Commission on Terrorist

Attacks upon the United States, The

9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326;

Scott , Road to 9/11, 228–29.

12. AMERICA’S UNCHECKED

SECURITY STATE AND

LAWLESSNESS

1. Mark Danner, “Cheney: ‘The More

Ruthless the Better,’” New York

Review of Books, May 8, 2014,

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/ruthless-

dick-cheney/?insrc=toc.

2. Brian Glick, War at Home: Covert

Action against U.S. Activists and

What We Can Do about It (Boston:

South End Press, 1999), 34; cf. Curt

Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man

and the Secrets (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1991), 71 (business); Tim

Weiner, Enemies: A History of the

FBI (New York: Random House,

2012), 15–16.

3. Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart

Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover

and the Great American Inquisition

(New York: Bantam, 1990), 224–29;

Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 413; Mike

Forrest Keen, Stalking Sociologists:

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance

of American Sociology (New

Brunswick, NJ: Transaction

Publishers, 2004), 51 (Legion);

Charles R. Geisst, Undue Influence:

How the Wall Street Elite Puts the

Financial System at Risk (Hoboken,

NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 139

(business).

4. Alfred M. Lilienthal, “The Changing

Role of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-

Defamation League,” Washington

Report on Middle East Affairs, June

1993,

http://www.wrmea.org/wrmea-

archives/148-washington-report-

archives-1988-1993/june-

1993/7212-the-changing-role-of-

bnai-briths-anti-defamation-

league.html.

5. Robert Friedman, “The ADL: The

Jewish Thought Police,” Village

Voice, May 11, 1993; citing Henry

Schwarzschild, SF Weekly, April 28,

1993.

6. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 329

(Allen), 432 (Murchison, Kennedy,

Rosenstiel), 470n (Kennedy).

7. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 329.

Burton Hersh claims that Hoover

dined at Clint Murchison’s club in La

Jolla, the del Charro, with John

Roselli (Burton Hersh, Bobby and J.

Edgar: The Historic Face-Off

between the Kennedys and J. Edgar

Hoover that Transformed America

[New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007],

107. Cf. Sanford J. Ungar, FBI

(Boston: Little Brown, 1976), 393:

“Some of the director’s own wealthy

friends were involved in dealings

with the underworld.”

8. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, 49; cf.

198.

9. Athan Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A

Comprehensive Reference Guide

(Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1999),

189. Hoover’s refusal to investigate

American organized crime was

ended by the embarrassing news

stories about the 1957 Apalachin,

New York, crime summit. After

Robert Kennedy, then working for a

Senate Subcommittee, approached

the FBI for information, it developed

that the FBI had no information at all

on about forty of them. The Federal

Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), in

contrast, “had something on every

one of them” (Gentry, J. Edgar

Hoover, 454n). In all, fifty-eight

mobsters were apprehended at

Apalachin, while about fifty more

escaped through the woods and

fields. Cf. Gil Reavill, Mafia

Summit: J. Edgar Hoover, the

Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting

That Unmasked the Mob (New

York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012).

10. Anthony Summers, Official and

Confidential: The Secret Life of J.

Edgar Hoover (New York: G. P.

Putnam’s Sons, 1993), 228.

11. Stephen H. Norwood,

Strikebreaking and Intimidation:

Mercenaries and Masculinity in

Twentieth-Century America

(Durham: University of North

Carolina Press, 2001), 178.

12. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-

Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the

Dallas-Watergate Connection

(Berkeley, CA: Westworks, 1977),

40; citing San Francisco Chronicle,

September 26, 1974; San Francisco

Chronicle, January 11, 1975.

13. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 218–21;

Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of

the Jewish Gangster in America

(New York: Columbia University

Press, 1994), 213.

14. Weiner, Enemies, 487. In like

manner, when Carmine Galante of

the Bonanno family avoided

conviction for the murder of the left-

wing journalist Carlo Tresca in

1943, a sycophantic admirer of

Hoover and Winchell, Guenther

Reinhardt, blamed the murder on the

Communists (Nunzio Pernicone,

Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel

[Edinburgh: AK Press, 2010], 296;

cf. Thomas A. Reppetto,

Battleground New York City:

Countering Spies, Saboteurs, and

Terrorists since 1861 [Washington,

DC: Potomac Books, 2012], 190–

94).

15. Howie Carr, Hitman: The Untold

Story of Johnny Martorano: Whitey

Bulger’s Enforcer and the Most

Feared Gangster in the Underworld

(New York: Forge Books, 2011),

170ss.

16. Boston Globe, September 6, 2006,

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/09/06/fbi_found_liable_for_bulger_flemmi/

17. John Kroger, Convictions: A

Prosecutor’s Battles against Mafia

Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron

Thieves (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 2009), 146–52, etc.

18. Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin

Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the

CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI

—and Why Patrick Fitzgerald

Failed to Stop Him (New York:

Regan, 2006), 221–38, etc.

19. Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock,

The Awful Grace of God (Berkeley,

CA: Counterpoint, 2012), 34.

20. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert

Kennedy and His Times (New York:

Ballantine Books, 1979), 341–50; cf.

Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge:

America in the King Years, 1965–68

(New York: Simon & Schuster,

2006); Henry T. Gallagher, James

Meredith and the Ole Miss Riot: A

Soldier’s Story (Jackson: University

Press of Mississippi, 2012).

21. Richard D. Mahoney, Sons &

Brothers: The Days of Jack and

Bobby Kennedy (New York: Arcade,

1999), 186, 188.

22. Anthony Summers, Not in Your

Lifetime (New York: Marlowe &

Co., 1998), 162.

23. Statement of Miami Detective

Lochart F. Gracey to Detective

Sergeant C. H. Sapp, April 10, 1963,

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/M%20Disk/Milteer%20J%20A/Item%2009.pdf Cf.

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/M%20Disk/Milteer%20J%20A/Item%2012.pdf Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and

the Death of JFK (Berkeley:

University of California Press,

1993), 49–50.

24. A few days before the JFK

assassination, the source, Joseph

Milteer, also told Miami police

informant Willie Somersett that the

President would be shot “from an

office building with a high-powered

rifle” (“Conversation between

William Somersett [Informant] and

Joseph Milteer [Subject],” in Peter

Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and

Russell Stetler, eds., The

Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond

—A Guide to Cover-Ups and

Investigations [New York: Random

House, 1976], 124). FBI

headquarters received this

information on November 10, 1963;

but did not transmit it to the Warren

Commission (in a rewritten form

making it less credible) until August

7, 1964, when the Commission had

already written its report and was

winding up its work. Meanwhile FBI

headquarters had ordered its Miami

office to “amend the reliability

statement to show that some of the

information . . . could not be verified

or corroborated.” See Scott, Deep

Politics, 49–51. Later, in August

1968, the FBI ignored a credible

report from Somersett connecting a

Klan murderer, Tommy Tarrants, to

the murder of Martin Luther King,

Jr., in Memphis four months before

(Wexler and Hancock, The Awful

Grace of God, 95–97).

25. Although the Klan were generally

people with little status in society,

Tommy Tar-rants told Patsy Sims that

one of the people responsible for

planning the White Klan violence in

which he participated was “a high-

ranking military officer” (Patsy

Sims, The Klan [Lexington:

University Press of Kentucky, 1996],

240).

26. Maryanne Vollers, Ghosts of

Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar

Evers, the Trials of Byron de la

Beckwith, and the Haunting of the

New South (Boston: Little, Brown,

1995), 229–30; quoted in Michael

Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in

Mississippi: A History (Jefferson,

NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), 125.

27. Theoharis, The FBI: A

Comprehensive Reference Guide,

33; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,

Robert Kennedy and His Times

(New York: Ballantine Books,

1979), 313.

28. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and

His Times, 314; citing Church

Committee, Senate Select Committee

to Study Governmental Operations

with Respect to Intelligence

Activities, Final Report; Volume 6

—Hearings on the Federal Bureau

of Investigations (Washington, DC:

U.S. Government Printing Office,

1976), 33,

https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

docId=1168&relPageId=43. “Mr.

Sullivan who was the Assistant

Director of the FBI . . . claims . . . ‘It

so happened that during the war

[Hoover] had five Negro chauffeurs,

so he automatically made them

special agents. . . . none of them

conducted investigations: they were

just drivers.’” This claim, by

William Sullivan, has been disputed.

29. Weiner, Enemies, 247.

30. Glenn Peter Hastedt, ed., Spies,

Wiretaps, and Secret Operations:

An Encyclopedia of American

Espionage (Santa Barbara, CA:

ABC-CLIO, 2011), 180. One of the

agents later commented, “There

would be a Klan meeting with ten

people there, and six of them would

be reporting back the next day”

(Weiner, Enemies, 247).

31. Hastedt, Spies, Wiretaps, and Secret

Operations, 180. By way of

comparison, the FBI COINTELPRO

against the Socialist Workers’ Party,

over a much longer period, involved

only 208 operations.

32. Steven E Atkins, Encyclopedia of

Right-Wing Extremism in Modern

American History (Santa Barbara,

CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 24.

33. Weiner, Enemies, 244.

34. Theoharis, ed., The FBI: A

Comprehensive Reference Guide,

70; Anthony Villano, Brick Agent:

Inside the Mafia for the FBI (New

York: Quadrangle/New York Times

Books, 1977); M. Susan Orr

Klopfer, Fred Klopfer, Barry

Klopfer, Where Rebels Roost:

Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited

([Fort Madison, Iowa?]: M. S. Orr

Klopfer, 2006), 399.

35. Sandra Harmon, Mafia Son: The

Scarpa Mob Family, the FBI, and a

Story of Betrayal (New York: St.

Martin’s Griffin, 2010), 57–64;

Richard H. Stratton, Altered States

of America: Icons and Outlaws,

Hitmakers and Hitmen (New York:

Nation Books, 2005), 226–27.

36. Fredric L. Dannen “The G-Man and

the Hit Man,” New Yorker,

December 16, 1996,

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/12/16/the-

g-man-and-the-hit-man. The

involvement of Scarpa in the two

earlier investigations has been

challenged (Jerry Mitchell, “A

mobster takes on the KKK,” Jackson

Clarion-Ledger, February 17,

2010), but on the basis of evidence

introduced into the trial of Scarpa’s

FBI handler Lindley DeVecchio, the

interpretation of which has itself

been challenged (Brad Hamilton,

New York Post, May 27, 2012,

http://nypost.com/2012/05/27/mafia-

daughter-says-dad-was-grim-

reaper/; Lance, Triple Cross, 421–

25; Jack Cashill, “The Trials of

Angela Clemente: Why the

Department of Justice is Destroying

America’s Best PI,”

WorldNetDaily.com, May 31, 2007,

http://www.cashill.com/twa800/trials_angela_clemente.htm The year 1966 was also when

Hoover authorized the FBI’s

“Operation Hoodwink,” a program

described in its leadoff memo as

“designed to provoke a dispute

between the Communist Party, USA,

and La Cosa Nostra” (Michael

Newton, Encyclopedia of American

Law Enforcement [New York: Facts

On File, 2007], 71).

37. Wexler and Hancock, The Awful

Grace of God, 25: “The FBI would

connect the White Knights with more

than three hundred acts of racial

violence.”

38. Wexler and Hancock, The Awful

Grace of God, 20: “Sam Bowers

had himself targeted King for murder

and . . . was part of a network that

had incited and planned attacks on

King over a period of years.”

39. Wexler and Hancock, The Awful

Grace of God, 275. In contrast

Hoover should be severely faulted

for his obstruction of the

investigation of the Martin Luther

King, Jr., assassination. FBI files

contained evidence that, if “collated

and cross-referenced . . . could have

developed a powerful circumstantial

case for a conspiracy to murder King

[against Bowers and followers of an

allied racist, Wesley Swift].” But

after the FBI had developed

evidence pointing to James Earl Ray

as the assassin, “Hoover issued a

directive to several field offices . . .

to ‘hold all leads in abeyance

concerning whereabouts and

activities of various individuals,

including Dr. Wesley Swift, in view

of the present information regarding

Galt [i.e., Ray]’” (Wexler and

Hancock, The Awful Grace of God,

253, 256).

40. Jack Nelson, Scoop: The Evolution

of a Southern Reporter (Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi,

2013), 147–48.

41. Nelson, Scoop, 146–52. Cf. David

Mark Chalmers, Backfire: How the

Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil

Rights Movement (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 83–

86.

42. Nelson, Scoop, 150, 152. Cf. Wyn

Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The

Ku Klux Klan in America (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1986),

362–63. Tarrants, who became a

repentant born-again Christian while

in prison, later discounted the

entrapment issue: “My feelings are .

. . that I was a willing participant”

(Sims, The Klan, 243; cf. Wade, The

Fiery Cross, 363).

43. Nelson, Scoop, 152.

44. Nelson, Scoop, 150.

45. George Michael, Confronting Right-

Wing Extremism and Terrorism in

the USA (London: Routledge, 2003),

128. Cf. Wexler and Hancock, The

Awful Grace of God, 91–95.

46. Jim Douglass, Gandhi and the

Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis

Books, 2012), 83.

47. Hoover gave increasing signs of

being out of touch, even senile

(Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The

Secret History of the FBI [New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002],

172). Meanwhile leadership in the

once nonviolent Students for a

Democratic Society (SDS) passed to

people like Bernardine Dohrn, who

said in a 1970 address to an SDS

convention, “Offing those rich pigs

with their own forks and knives, far

out! The Weathermen dig Charles

Manson” (Vincent Bugliosi, with

Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: The

True Story of the Manson Murders

[New York: W. W. Norton, 1994],

297).

48. Cf. Ray Wannall’s not wholly

unfriendly assessment of his former

colleague Sullivan: “With respect to

some of Sullivan’s FBI associates

referring to him as ‘Crazy Bill,’ there

surely were signs of certain

irrationalities on his part beginning

about a year before he retired from

the FBI [in 1971]. . . . Those of us

who came to know him well felt that

he may have suffered a mental

collapse the last year or so he was in

the Bureau, perhaps brought on by

his obsession to become FBI

Director” (Ray Wannall, The Real J.

Edgar Hoover: For the Record

[Paducah, KY: Turner, 2000], 146).

49. For example, Anne McClintock,

“Paranoid Empire,” in Russ

Castronovo and Susan Gillman, eds.,

States of Emergency: The Object of

American Studies (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press,

2009), 107. Cf. Jane Mayer, The

Dark Side: The Inside Story of How

the War on Terror Turned into a

War on American Ideals (New York:

Doubleday, 2008), 6: “In the view of

some detractors, such as Lawrence

Wilkerson, the chief of staff to

former Secretary of State Colin

Powell, ‘Cheney was traumatized by

9/11. The poor guy became

paranoid.’”

50. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate

Madness: Uncovering the Links

between Leadership and Mental

Illness (New York: Penguin Press,

2013).

51. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 621; Scott,

Deep Politics, 308–9.

52. Frank J. Donner, The Age of

Surveillance: The Aims and

Methods of America’s Political

Intelligence System (New York:

Vintage Books, 1981), 223; quoted

in Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 621–

22n: “more specifically it [the FBI]

engaged in a conspiracy to deprive

individuals of their constitutionally

protected rights.”

53. “The Hunt for Red Menace:—4,

Information Collection & Sharing,”

Political Research Associates,

http://www.publiceye.org/huntred/Hunt_For_Red_Menace-

03.html.

54. “By 1970 Sullivan was, largely

unbeknownst to Hoover, almost

obsessively pursuing factions of the

New Left, pushing field offices to

open files on every known

individual affiliated with SDS or

living on a commune. Such excesses

were halted only when they were

discovered by another assistant

director, Inspection Division head

W. Mark Felt” (David Cunningham,

There’s Something Happening Here:

The New Left, the Klan, and FBI

[Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2004], 253).

55. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 687–88.

Cf. Wannall, The Real J. Edgar

Hoover, 145–46. The Angleton-

Sullivan alliance may have

developed after their collaboration

in 1964 to establish a common FBI-

CIA version of how John F. Kennedy

was killed. Cf. Gentry, J. Edgar

Hoover, 646; Peter Dale Scott,

Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics:

Revelations from CIA Records on

the Assassination of JFK (Skyhorse

Publishing, 2013), 20. However

Mark Riebling writes that the

Angleton-Sullivan mostly developed

(unknown to Hoover) after Hoover

terminated its formal liaison with the

CIA in 1970 (Mark Riebling, Wedge:

The Secret War between the FBI

and CIA [New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1994], 276).

56. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 670;

Nelson, Scoop, 157 (“ferret”).

57. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 670–72.

Cf. B. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar,

500.

58. Loch K. Johnson, America’s Secret

Power: The CIA in a Democratic

Society (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1989), 145; Joan

Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New

York: Basic Books, 1994), 243.

59. “Huston’s legacy lived on in a way

he could not have anticipated. . . .

Nixon had formally approved this

extension of buggings and break-ins.

. . . The president wanted this

development; some of the official

organs of the state were frustrating

his wishes. . . . When in the

following year the next peril

presented itself, the urge for the

White House to take over and run

some police functions itself was

irresistible” (Fred Emery,

Watergate: The Corruption of

American Politics and the Fall of

Richard Nixon [New York: Random

House/Times Books, 1994], 28;

emphasis in original). Cf. Hoff,

Nixon Reconsidered, 243–44.

60. Dennis Hevesi, “William Anderson,

Navy Hero, Dies at 85,” New York

Times, March 6, 2007.

61. Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, 666.

62. Church Committee, Senate Select

Committee to Study Governmental

Operations with Respect to

Intelligence Activities, Final

Report; Book III—Supplementary

Detailed Staff Reports on

Intelligence Activities and the

Rights of Americans, (Washington,

DC: U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1976), especially 10–11, 33–

61,

https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?

absPageId=149292.

63. The two men (Edward Miller and

Mark Felt) were pardoned by

Reagan in 1981, while their cases

were still on appeal.

64. Michael Crozier, Samuel P.

Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The

Crisis of Democracy: A Report on

the Governability of Democracies

to the Trilateral Commission (New

York: New York University Press,

1976).

65. John Prados, Safe for Democracy:

The Secret Wars of the CIA

(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 435:

“The [Ford] White House saw the

[congressional] inquiries as a major

threat.”

66. Scott, Road to 9/11, 57–64; citing

Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis:

The Committee on the Present

Danger and the Politics of

Containment (Boston: South End

Press, 1983), 61–65, 197–202, etc.;

James Carroll, House of War: The

Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise

of American Power (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 321–27,

etc.

67. David Teacher reports that at a June

1980 Pinay Circle meeting in Zurich,

a German member present (Graf

Huyn) reported on propaganda

arrangements he had made with

“with the head of the Saudi security

service” (David Teacher, “The Pinay

Circle and Destabilisation in

Europe,” Lobster 18, October 1989,

http://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:The_Pinay_Circle cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 98; Edward

S. Herman, The Terrorism Industry:

The Experts and Institutions that

Shape Our View of Terror (New

York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 109,

111.

68. Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein,

Vice: Dick Cheney and the

Hijacking of the American

Presidency (New York: Random

House, 2006), 36. For an extended

analysis of the Ford-Rumsfeld-

Cheney-inspired “counterattack” on

the various congressional

investigations of the FBI and CIA,

and its overall success, see Kathryn

Olmstead, Challenging the Secret

Government: The Post-Watergate

Investigations of the CIA and FBI

(Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1996), 147–89.

69. “Veto Battle 30 Years Ago Set

Freedom of Information Norms:

Scalia, Rumsfeld, Cheney Opposed

Open Government Bill,” National

Security Archive, November 23,

2004,

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB142/index.htm

70. Scott, Road to 9/11, especially 50–

113; Olmstead, Challenging the

Secret Government, 177–78.

71. Cf. Olmstead, Challenging the

Secret Government, 180–81.

72. Scott, Road to 9/11, 132: “Wilson

even put an extra $200 million into

the CIA’s Afghan pipeline in 1991,

after the Russians had withdrawn

from Afghanistan.”

73. Newsweek, November 30, 1964.

Hoover added, off the record, “He is

one of the lowest characters in the

country” (Church Committee, Book

III, 157). For the illegalities in

Hoover’s obsessive campaign to

destroy King, see Gentry, J. Edgar

Hoover, 571–75; Church Committee,

Book III, 158–61.

74. Wexler and Hancock, The Awful

Grace of God, 275, etc.

75. This assumes, as I do, that Hoover

was not personally involved in the

murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Having surprised myself by coming

to this relatively benign assessment

of Hoover, I was pleased and again

surprised to find it corroborated by

Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar,

514–15.

76. Project for the New American

Century [PNAC], Rebuilding

America’s Defenses: Strategy,

Forces and Resources for a New

Century (Washington, DC: Project

for the New American Century,

[2000]), 51. Contrary to what some

have suggested, the focus of this

transformation was clearly on

forcing the Department of Defense,

for the sake of “military

preeminence,” “to exploit the

emerging revolution in military

affairs.” But to fulfill the Rumsfeld-

Cheney-Wolfowitz PNAC agenda of

future preemptive wars, it was also

vital to shift America to the more

robust techniques we have since

seen for silencing antiwar

opposition.

77. Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top

Secret America: The Rise of the

New American Security State (New

York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.

78. Priest and Arkin, Top Secret

America, 277. No fiscal cliff

threatens CACI’s growth. In April

2013 its website advertised 1,014

job openings for people with

security clearances, along with

another 46 job openings with no

clearance required.

79. Katrina vanden Heuvel, “The

Corporate ‘Predator State.’”

Washington Post, March 26, 2013.

80. Priest and Arkin, Top Secret

America, 275; quoting CIA general

counsel John Rizzo.

81. Judge Richard D. Bennett of the

Federal District Court, commenting

on the case of NSA whistleblower

Thomas Drake, whose felony

charges were dropped in exchange

for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor.

Judge Bennett said that it was

“unconscionable” to charge a

defendant with a list of serious

crimes that could have resulted in

thirty-five years in prison, only to

drop all of the major charges on the

eve of trial. For more on the Drake

case, see Jane Mayer, “The Secret

Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an Enemy

of the State?” New Yorker, May 23,

2011,

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-

secret-sharer?currentPage=all.

Obama’s behavior is reminiscent of

Jimmy Carter’s, who was elected

after promising to reduce the defense

budget, but presided instead over a

huge increase. I suspect that neither

president was duplicitous; rather,

they are just less powerful than the

covert processes over which they

preside.

82. Priest and Arkin, Top Secret

America, 132.

83. Some might wish to add to this list:

General MacArthur in 1952 and

General Westmoreland in 1968.

84. “In America in particular the share

of national income going to the top

one percent has followed a great U-

shaped arc. Before World War I the

one percent received around a fifth

of total income in both Britain and

the United States. By 1950 that share

had been cut by more than half. But

since 1980 the one percent has seen

its income share surge again—and in

the United States it’s back to what it

was a century ago” (Paul Krugman,

“Why We’re in a New Gilded Age”

[a review of Capital in the Twenty-

First Century by Thomas Piketty],

New York Review of Books, May 8,

2014,

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-

piketty-new-gilded-age/). Cf. Bill

Moyers and Michael Winship, “Dr.

King’s ‘Two Americas’ Truer Now

than Ever,” Moyers @ Company,

April 10, 2013,

http://billmoyers.com/2013/04/10/dr-

king%E2%80%99s-

%E2%80%9Ctwo-

americas%E2%80%9D-truer-now-

than-ever/: “Walmart’s one of those

companies laying people off, but

according to the website Business

Insider, the mega-chain’s CEO

Michael Duke gets paid 1,034 times

more than his average worker.” As a

matter of fact, “In the past 30 years,

compensation for chief executives in

America has increased 127 times

faster than the average worker’s

salary.”

85. Adam Mordecai, “9 out of 10

Americans Are Completely Wrong

about This Mind-Blowing Fact,”

http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-

10-americans-are-completely-

wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-

fact-2?g=3&c=upw1.

86. Barton Gellman, Angler: The

Cheney Vice Presidency (New York:

Penguin Press, 2008), 299–326

(2004); David S. Cloud, Eric

Schmitt, and Thom Shanker,

“Rumsfeld Faces Growing Revolt by

Retired Generals, New York Times,

April 13, 2006,

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/washington/13cnd-

military.html?_r=0.

87. Young India, December 15, 1921; in

Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential

Gandhi: His Life, Work, and Ideas:

an Anthology (New York: Vintage,

1963), 150.

88. Mahatma Gandhi, “Towards

Realization,” in Works (Delhi:

Publications Division, Ministry of

Information and Broadcasting, Govt.

of India, [1958]–1994), Vol. 88, 185.

13. WHY AMERICANS MUST END

AMERICA’S SELF-GENERATING

WARS

1. E.g., Jonathan S. Landay, “Do U.S.

drones kill Pakistani extremists or

recruit them?” McClatchy

Newspapers, April 7, 2009,

http://truth-

out.org/archive/component/k2/item/83464:do-us-drones-kill-pakistani-extremists-

or-recruit-them.

2. Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle,

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the

War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism

and Class Struggle in Colombia

(New York: Monthly Review Press,

2011); Peter Watt and Roberto

Zepeda, Drug War Mexico: Politics,

Neoliberalism and Violence in the

New Narcoeconomy (London: Zed

Books, 2012); Mark Karlin, “How

the Militarized War on Drugs in

Latin America Benefits

Transnational Corporations and

Undermines Democracy,” Truthout,

August 5, 2012, http://truth-

out.org/news/item/10676-how-the-

war-on-drugs-in-latin-america-

benefits-transnational-corporations-

and-undermines-democracy.

3. Peter Dale Scott, American War

Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA

Global Drug Connection, and the

Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 217–

37.

4. Patrick Cockburn, “Opium: Iraq’s

Deadly New Export,” Independent

(London), May 23, 2007,

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-

east/opium-iraqs-deadly-new-

export-449962.html.

5. Scott, American War Machine, 134–

40.

6. See Karlin, “How the Militarized

War on Drugs in Latin America

Benefits Trans-national Corporations

and Undermines Democracy.”

7. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From

Plassey to Partition: A History of

Modern India (New Delhi: Orient

Longman, 2004), 231.

8. Kevin Phillips, Wealth and

Democracy: A Political History of

the American Rich (New York:

Broadway Books, 2002), 185.

9. “The seed of imperial ruin and

national decay—the unnatural gap

between the rich and the poor. . . .

the swift increase of vulgar, jobless

luxury—are the enemies of Britain”

(Winston Churchill, quoted in

Phillips, Wealth and Democracy,

171).

10. John A. Hobson , Imperialism

(London: Allen and Unwin, 1902;

reprint, 1948), 6. The book’s chief

impact in Britain at the time was to

permanently stunt Hobson’s career

as an economist.

11. Hobson, Imperialism,

12. Cf. Arthur M. Eckstein, “Is There a

‘Hobson–Lenin Thesis’ on Late

Nineteenth-Century Colonial

Expansion?” Economic History

Review, May 1991, 297–318,

especially 298–300. 12. Cf. Robert

Hall, Plato (Political Thinkers)

(New York: HarperCollins, 1981),

4.

13. Some in the establishment share this

anxiety: see Loren Thompson, “Four

Ways the Ukraine Crisis Could

Escalate to Use of Nuclear

Weapons,” Forbes, April 24, 2014,

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2014/04/24/four-

ways-the-ukraine-crisis-could-

escalate-to-use-of-nuclear-

weapons/.

14. See Ralph Raico, “Introduction,”

Great Wars and Great Leaders: A

Libertarian Rebuttal (Auburn, AL:

Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010),

http://mises.org/daily/5088/Neither-

the-Wars-Nor-the-Leaders-Were-

Great.

15. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope:

A History of the World in Our Time

(San Pedro, CA: GSG & Associates,

1975); Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-

American Establishment (GSG &

Associates Publishers, 1981),

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_World_Order/Anglo_American_Estab.html Discussion in Laurence H. Shoup

and William Minter, The Imperial

Brain Trust: The Council on

Foreign Relations & United States

Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly

Review Press, 1977), 12–14;

Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions:

The Michael Parenti Reader (San

Francisco: City Lights Books, 2007),

332.

16. For the little-noticed interest of oil

companies in Cambodian offshore

oilfields, see Peter Dale Scott, The

War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the

Deep Politics of War (New York:

Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), 216–37.

17. Thomas Pakenham, Scramble for

Africa: The White Man’s Conquest

of the Dark Continent from 1876–

1912 (New York: Random House,

1991).

18. See books by Barbara Tuchman,

notably The Guns of August (New

York, Macmillan, 1962), and The

March of Folly: From Troy to

Vietnam (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1984).

19. Pakenham, Scramble for Africa.

20. E. Oncken, Panzersprung nach

Agadir: Die deutsche Politik

wehrend der zweiten Marokkokrise

1911 (Düsseldorf, 1981).

Panzersprung in German has come

to be a metaphor for any gratuitous

exhibition of gunboat diplomacy.

21. Thom Shanker, “Global Arms Sales

Dropped Sharply in 2010, Study

Finds,” New York Times, September

23, 2011.

22. Thom Shanker, “U.S. Arms Sales

Make Up Most of Global Market,”

New York Times, August 27, 2012.

23. Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower:

Soldier and President (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1990), 325.

24. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life:

John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963

(Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,

2003), 50.

25. William Arkin: American Coup:

How a Terrified Government Is

Destroying the Constitution

(Boston: Little Brown, 2013), 14.

26. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The

Inside Story of How the War on

Terror Turned into a War on

American Ideals (New York:

Doubleday, 2008), 114.

27. Richard J. Aldrich, “America Used

Islamists to Arm the Bosnian

Muslims,” Guardian (London),

April 21, 2002; summarizing Cees

Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in

Bosnia (Münster, DE: LIT Verlag,

2003).

28. Shanker, “U.S. Arms Sales Make Up

Most of Global Market,” New York

Times, August 27, 2012.

29. David E. Spiro, The Hidden Hand

of American Hegemony:

Petrodollar Recycling and

International Markets (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press), 1999, x;

Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11:

Wealth, Empire, and the Future of

America (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2007), 41–42.

30. Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren,

“Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at

U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times,

November 29, 2010. Cf. Nick

Fielding and Sarah Baxter, “Saudi

Arabia is Hub of World Terror: The

Desert Kingdom Supplies the Cash

and the Killers,” Times (London),

2007,

hhttp://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article74750.ece

31. The United Nations has listed the

branch offices in Indonesia and the

Philippines of the Rabita’s affiliate,

the International Islamic Relief

Organization, as belonging to or

associated with al-Qaeda.

32. “A former head of intelligence for

the Transitional National Council in

Libya . . . said that extremist militia

in Libya were financing militant

groups in Mali and al Qaeda in the

Islamic Maghreb as well as

providing them with logistical

support” (Paul Cruickshank and Tim

Lister, “Algeria Attack May Have

Link to Libya Camps,” CNN,

January 23, 2013,

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/18/world/africa/algeria-

attackers/).

33. Mayer, The Dark Side, 114.

34. See Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs:

Britain’s Collusion with Radical

Islam (London: Profile, 2011), 237–

47; also Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia,

Kosovo, and Now Libya: The

Human Costs of Washington’s On-

Going Collusion with Terrorists,”

Asian-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,

July 29, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-

Peter_Dale-Scott/3578; Paul L.

Williams, The Al Qaeda

Connection: International

Terrorism, Organized Crime, and

the Coming Apocalypse (Amherst,

NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), 68–

89; William Blum, “The United

States and Its Comrade-in-Arms, Al

Qaeda,” Counterpunch, August 13,

2012,

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/13/tales-

of-an-empire-gone-mad/.

35. Christopher Boucek, “Yemen:

Avoiding a Downward Spiral,”

Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, 2009, 12.

President Saleh was using al-

Qaedists to combat dissident

remnants from the former socialist

republic of South Yemen, with which

North Yemen had nominally merged

in 1990.

36. “In Yemen, ‘Too Many Guns and Too

Many Grievances’ as President

Clings to Power,” PBS Newshour,

March 21, 2011,

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/jan-

june11/yemen_03-21.html.

37. Robert Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia

and the House of Sa’ud (New York:

Avon, 1981), 346–47, 361.

38. John Kerry, Al Qaeda in Yemen and

Somalia: A Ticking Time Bomb: A

Report to the Committee on Foreign

Relations (Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 2010),

10.

39. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 152–56.

40. Curtin Winsor, “Saudi Arabia,

Wahhabism and the Spread of Sunni

Theofascism,” Islam Daily, August

3, 2007,

http://www.islamdaily.org/en/wahabism/5807.saudi-

arabia-wahhabism-and-the-spread-

of-sunni-the.htm.

41. Shane and Lehren, “Leaked Cables

Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy.”

42. Nick Fielding and Sarah Baxter ,

“ Saudi Arabia is Hub of World

Terror,” Sunday Times (London),

November 4, 2007: “Extremist

clerics provide a stream of recruits

to some of the world’s nastiest

trouble spots. An analysis by NBC

News suggested that the Saudis make

up 55% of foreign fighters in Iraq.

They are also among the most

uncompromising and militant.”

43. Rachel Ehrenfeld, “Al-Qaeda’s

Source of Funding from Drugs and

Extortion Little Affected by bin

Laden’s Death,” Cutting Edge, May

9, 2011,

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?

article=51969&pageid=20&pagename=Security

44. Sunday Times (London), November

4, 2007.

45. BBC, July 17, 2012,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-

africa-18870130.

46. Al Jazeera, July 19, 2012,

http://m.aljazeera.com/SE/201271012301347496

47. “Newsweek, Richard Cohen, and

More,” The Weekly Standard, May

30, 2005,

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/642eforh.asp Cf. Newsweek, May 30, 2005.

48. David Ottaway, “The King and Us:

U.S.-Saudi Relations in the Wake of

9/11,” Foreign Affairs, May-June

2009. Cf. David B. Ottaway, King’s

Messenger: Prince Bandar bin

Sultan and America’s Tangled

Relationship with Saudi Arabia

(New York: Walker, 2008), 236–38,

262–63.

49. Barak Ravid, “U.S. Envoy: Arab

Peace Initiative Will Be Part of

Obama Policy,” Haaretz, April 5,

2009; Ottaway, “The King and Us.”

50. Charles Krauthammer, “At Last,

Zion: Israel and the Fate of the

Jews,” Weekly Standard, May 11,

1998.

51. The term “War on Terror” is no

longer officially used by the Obama

administration (which instead uses

the term Overseas Contingency

Operation). But it is still commonly

used by politicians, in the media and

by some aspects of government

officially, such as the United States’s

Global War on Terrorism Service

Medal. The continuity with past

policies of the global war on

terrorism is unmistakable.

52. “We have no idea how such a war

would end,” [Brzezinski] said. “Iran

has military capabilities, it could

retaliate by destabilizing Iraq”

(Salon, March 14, 2012,

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/former_bush_official_warns_against_iran_attack/

53. See Jennifer Daskal and Stephen I.

Vladek, “After the AUMF,” Harvard

National Security Journal, 2014,

115–46, http://harvardnsj.org/wp-

content/uploads/2014/01/Daskal-

Vladeck-Final1.pdf.

54. See Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183–

242; also chapter 3 of this book.

55. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and

War: The United States in

Afghanistan, Colombia, and

Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman

& Littlefield, 2003), 40, 100; Scott,

The War Conspiracy, 324, 377.

56. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183–87.

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Permissions

Earlier versions of these chapters

originally appeared as follows:

Chapter 1: “The Doomsday Project,

Deep Events, and the Shrinking of

American Democracy,” Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, January 24, 2011,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3476.

Chapter 2: “The Deep State and the

Wall Street Overworld,” Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, March 10, 2014,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/4090.

Chapter 3: “Is the State of Emergency

Superseding our Constitution? Continuity

of Government Planning, War and

American Society,” Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, November 28,

2010, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3448.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6: “The Falsified

War on Terror: How the US Has

Protected Some of Its Enemies,” Japan

Focus: Asia-Pacific Journal, October 7,

2013, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/4005.

Chapter 7: “Launching the U.S. Terror

War: The CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and

Central Asia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal:

Japan Focus, March 15, 2012,

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3723.

Chapter 9: “The Doomsday Project and

Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-

Contra, and 9/11,” The Asia-Pacific

Journal: Japan Focus, November 21,

2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3650.

Chapter 10: “The American Deep State,

Deep Events, and Off-the-Books

Financing,” The Asia-Pacific Journal:

Japan Focus, April 7, 2014,

http://japanfocus.org//-Peter_Dale-

Scott/4104.

Chapter 11: “The Unchecked Security

State: Part I: The Toxic Legacy of

Hoover’s Illicit Powers,” The Asia-

Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 29,

2013, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3932.

Chapter 12: “The Unchecked Security

State: Part II: The Continuity of COG

Detention Planning, 1948–2001,” The

Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,

April 29, 2013, http://japanfocus.org/-

Peter_Dale-Scott/3933.

Chapter 13: “Why Americans Must End

America’s Self-Generating Wars,” Asia-

Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, August 26,

2012, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-

Scott/3819.

About the Author

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian

diplomat and professor of English at the

University of California, Berkeley, is a

poet, writer, and researcher. His

diplomatic service included two years

of work at the U.N. General Assembly

and U.N. conferences and two years in

Poland. An antiwar speaker and

nonviolent activist during the Vietnam

and Gulf Wars, he was a cofounder of

the Peace and Conflict Studies Program

at UC Berkeley.

Scott’s books have been translated

into seven languages, including Russian

and Bahasa Indonesia. His articles and

poetry have been translated into twenty

languages, including Turkish, Arabic,

Farsi, Chinese, and Japanese. His most

recent political books are The Road to

9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of

America (2007), American War

Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA

Global Drug Connection, and the Road

to Afghanistan (2010), and The War

Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep

Politics of War (2008, 2013).

Other political books have focused on

war, covert operations, the politics of

crime, and the international drug traffic.

They include The Politics of Escalation

in Vietnam (in collaboration, 1966);

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

(1993, 1998); The United States and the

Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965–1967

(published four times in Indonesian);

The Iran-Contra Connection (in

collaboration, 1987); Cocaine Politics:

Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central

America (in collaboration, 1991); and

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States

in Afghanistan, Colombia, and

Indochina (2003).

Further books on the John F. Kennedy

assassination include Crime and Cover-

Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the

Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977);

Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

(1995, 2013); and The Assassinations:

Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration,

1976).

Peter Dale Scott is also a poet and in

2002 received the Lannan Poetry Award.

His poetry volumes include Coming to

Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (1989),

Listening to the Candle: A Poem on

Impulse (1992), Crossing Borders:

Selected Shorter Poems (1994),

Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the

Year 2000 (October 2000), Mosaic

Orpheus (2009), and Tilting Point

(2012). With Czeslaw Milosz, he

translated and published the first

translations into English of the Polish

poet Zbigniew Herbert.

The former U.S. poet laureate Robert

Hass has written ( Agni, 31/32 [1990],

335) that “Coming to Jakarta is the

most important political poem to appear

in the English language in a very long

time.”

WAR AND PEACE

LIBRARY

Series Editor: Mark Selden

Protesting Power: War, Resistance, and

Law

by Frances A. Boyle

Overwhelming Terror: Love, Fear,

Peace, and Violence among the Semai of

Malaysia

by Robert Knox Dentan

Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping

edited by Dyan Mazurana, Angela

Raven-Roberts, and Jane Parpart

The American Deep State: Wall Street,

Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S.

Democracy

by Peter Dale Scott

American War Machine: Deep Politics,

the CIA Global Drug Connection, and

the Road to Afghanistan

by Peter Dale Scott

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States

in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina

by Peter Dale Scott

War and State Terrorism: The United

States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the

Long Twentieth Century

edited by Mark Selden and Alvin Y.

So

Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers: East

Timor, Indonesia, and the World

Community

edited by Richard Tanter, Mark

Selden, and Stephen R. Shalom

Biological Warfare and Disarmament:

New Problems/New Perspectives

edited by Susan Wright

Zen at War, Second Edition

by Brian Daizen Victoria

Document Outline

Acknowledgments

Note about the Cover Image

1 The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy

2 The Deep State, the Wall Street Overworld, and Big Oil

3 The Doomsday Project: How COG on 9/11 Subordinated the U.S. Constitution

4 The Falsified War on Terror: The Deep History of U.S. Protection for al-Qaeda Terrorist Ali Mohamed

5 The Falsified War on Terror II: How the Deep State Has Protected Gulf Arab States Rather than the American People

6 Deep State Uses and Protection of al-Qaeda Terrorists

7 The U.S. Terror War: The CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia

8 Deep Power Takes Its Toll on U.S. Presidents, 1961–1980

9 The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11

10 The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing

11 America’s Unchecked Security State: The Continuity of COG Planning, 1936–2001

12 America’s Unchecked Security State and Lawlessness

13 Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars

Epilogue—Greek Theater: Mario Savio and the Socratic Quest

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Permissions

About the Author