The Nexus Between Politcs and Policy

SOPHISTS AND OTHER SCOUNDRELS

SOPHISTS AND OTHER SCOUNDRELS

  

Part I—SCOOTER LIBBY’S MENTOR

©2005 by Linda Minor

The best defense is a good workup.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson had no trouble knowing the difference between truth and falsehood. In a New York Times piece that appeared July 2003 the former ambassador flatly stated:

"President Bush's assertion that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire uranium from the African nation of Niger was false and should have been known by the Bush administration to be false."

The White House handlers then tried to punish Wilson for daring to call a lie a lie by instigating Robert Novak to leak classified information that Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA operative.

This trick, that would have intimidated a man whose grasp of truth versus fiction was less firm, infuriated Wilson, who, instead of backing off, continued to confront those he labeled:

THE CULT THAT'S RUNNING THE COUNTRY

Why did Joe Wilson continue to confront the Bush administration in the wake of disclosures that his wife worked undercover for the CIA? In Socratic response, the former Ambassador would pose yet another question:

Did we go to war under false pretenses?

Wilson was the first person with any clout who had publicly questioned the veracity of the reason Bush gave for precipitating the war in Iraq. Bush claimed in only sixteen words inserted into a speech he gave that Iraq and Saddam possessed actual weapons of mass destruction. Tying the invasion of Iraq to the accusation that it possessed such weapons was an essential legal (not just political) ingredient in being able to finance the war and to collect private loans and claims through the United Nations. (“The Course of Deception.”)

Wilson focused on 

1. the political aspect of the leak and  
2. who was orchestrating it.

Where Politics Intersects with Policy

It did not matter to him what legal or financial agenda was used to justify the motives of those who revealed the classified information to the public. He only wanted the truth, and, as he stated in his book, published in 2004, 

“truth may be found at the nexus between policy and politics in the White House.”

That nexus, according to Wilson, was Dick Cheney's office, where the Vice President with his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, set out to do the “workup” on Wilson that led to the “outing” of Plame. It was a political motive that created a vile policy that dragged the United States into a brutal war, attacking in the process those who would tell the truth about the non-existence of nuclear weapons that justified their attack on Iraq at that time. Perhaps there was a personal motive as well, since the war in Iraq put millions of dollars into the pockets of Cheney's former pals at Halliburton, who benefited from their contracts in that war.

A "Wilson" Problem

The strategy the two men set up in Cheney's office was, as Wilson put it, “to confront the issue as a 'Wilson' problem rather than as an issue of the lie that was in the State of the Union address.” Thus, in the months following the publication of Wilson’s July 2003 article, Scooter Libby openly called Wilson “an ‘asshole playboy’ who went on a boondoggle ‘arranged by his CIA wife’”--an outright lie created to attack the only man who stood in the way of getting away with the pretense given for invading Iraq, and they tried to hide behind the defense that they "did not know the undercover status of Valerie Plame, and therefore, though they may have disclosed her name, they did not commit a crime."

This intimidation was designed to silence Wilson and prevent any further inquiry into who stood to benefit from the war ignited by their lie. But it did not work. Instead, Wilson looked into other men who may have been used as tools to do the leaking ("John Hannah and David Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice president’s office, have both been suggested as sources of the leaks"), and then concluded:

Time will tell if that defense — which strikes me as sophistry and a legal refuge for scoundrels — holds up.

Use of the word “sophistry” by the classically educated ambassador clearly implies that Wilson suspected Scooter Libby to be, like the Sophists who convicted Socrates, in the employ of someone other than duly elected officials of the Republic. [3] To find out who could have been backing their actions necessitates the following research into the network from which they rose.

Scooter Libby's Network

Irving Lewis Libby, Jr., was born in Connecticut in 1950, grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, attended Andover, then Yale, followed by law school at Columbia in Manhattan. His father, known as Irve L. Libby, was a successful men's clothier, active in the National Association of Retail Clothiers and Furnishers. He started out running Nat Greenblatt stores in New Haven and Gemmill-Burnham in Hartford, Connecticut, before relocated his home in 1952 to Washington, D.C. when he bought Grosner's.

Irve L. Libby of Grosner, Inc., men's clothing store

Since becoming an attorney in 1975, Libby passed back and forth between the public and private sectors, with various assignments in the “government” coordinated through his former Yale professor, Paul Wolfowitz. During the private phase of his legal career his guide and mentor was none other than Leonard Garment, who succeeded John Dean as White House counsel for Richard Nixon following the Watergate disclosures.

Though Leonard Garment was Brooklyn born and educated, both his parents were born in Minsk, Russia and spoke Yiddish.[4] Garment received both his undergraduate and law degrees from Brooklyn University and landed his first job as a lawyer in 1949 only one subway stop from his Brooklyn home, at the law firm of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander—then known as Mudge, Stern, Williams & Tucker.[5]

He was still there fourteen years later when Richard Nixon became the firm’s senior partner — a rise in status brokered by two corporate executives — Elmer H. Bobst and Donald M. Kendall. 

Bobst, chairman of Warner-Lambert Pharmaceuticals (for many years a major client of Mudge, Stern), had first met Nixon in 1952 while campaigning with Dwight Eisenhower, then president of New York’s Columbia University. Bobst and his wife, the former Mamdouha As-Sayyid, a Lebanese social scientist at the United Nations, established a trust fund for Nixon’s daughters, Julie and Tricia, and also became the largest contributors to the Nixon library in California and its New York satellite at the Bobst archive collection at NYU. [6] 

The Bobsts were intimately connected to a myriad of tax-exempt medical and pharmaceutical cancer-related research societies whose boards of directors linked them with a fascinating group of political cronies who achieved passage of the National Cancer Act in 1971. [7] The purpose of this federal statute was to create government funding for cancer research separate from existing research facilities and thus to funnel money through grants to the favorite universities of the persons who were appointed to sit on the cancer boards.  [8]

Such “charitable” conglomerates also afford a means for wealthy persons not only to launder money through non-taxable charities, but at the same time to achieve a high level of prestige for themselves as “philanthropists”. This financial model was set up centuries ago and is still followed today with great success. The descendants of the oligopolists who designed the model are today based in central Europe—namely Switzerland—where the major pharmaceutical corporations, as well as “world peace” organizations, World Court, World Bank, and last but not least the Bank for International Settlements have their headquarters.

These Swiss banks, corporations and non-governmental organizations mentioned above control not only the legal drug trade, but the illegal one as well.  The best way to illustrate how the illegal drug trade is controlled politically is to look at Donald Kendall’s instrumental role in Nixon’s promotion to senior partner of Mudge, Rose in 1963. Kendall, then President of Pepsi-Cola,

 "offered the firm a large retainer if it would make the services of the former Vice President available to his company, which was then in the throes of a drag-out sales battle with Coca-Cola for the cola championship of the world.” [9]

Refining opium in Laos

Pepsi, as a result of Nixon’s détente policies, would eventually control the market in the Soviet Union and China. [10] Pepsi, through Chinese entrepreneur Huu Tim Heng, disguised its heroin refinery in Laos by building a bottling factory on the outskirts of Ventiane, of which Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma’s son, Panya, was president. Construction of the plant began in 1965 by Heng and two other Chinese financiers with funding from USAID.  According to Alfred McCoy, Heng used “his Pepsi operation as a cover for purchases of chemicals vital to the processing of heroin, such as ether and acetic anhydride, and for large financial transactions.” [11]

The Quaker’s “second-class characters”

Once he had been bought and paid for by these ambitious tycoons, Nixon, putty that he was, became easily molded into whatever shape was convenient for those directing the strategy to elect him in 1968.  It is no accident that the law firm chosen to coordinate this campaign was the counsel in the United States for the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (Swisse), S.A. in Geneva. [12] Randall H. Guthrie, who handled the Paribas account in the United States, once told a prospective corporate takeover target being raided by a competitor Guthrie represented: 

“Gentlemen, … you are about to be raped.

Now, why don’t you lay back and enjoy it?” [13]

Guthrie’s sardonic sense of humor was evidenced by a standing joke he shared with international banker and money launderer Michele Sindona, who made numerous visits to Guthrie’s New York office to discuss financial matters involving Paribas. Questioned by Sindona about “the odd Quaker,” whose name had mysteriously appeared in the first position on the door, Guthrie laughingly cautioned Sindona not to become involved in any investment schemes Nixon was peddling for his “oilman client” or the other “second-class characters” he represented. [14]

Guthrie operated within a more cultured milieu, mingling as he did with financiers such as Jean Reyre of Paris, who in 1968 headed an investment syndicate comprised of Paribas (of which Reyre was then managing director), Hambros Bank of London and Lehman Brothers of New York. These foreign investors attempted to join with Sindona as manager in founding a new Italian investment bank which aspired to greatness in international commerce. [15]

David M. Kennedy

Every attempt at this goal, however, failed as a result of—Sindona claimed—interference from Italian leftists such as Enrico Cuccia, head of Mediobanca, Italy's government-owned financial institution. Sindona whined that Cuccia had spread “false rumors” of his laundering Mafia funds through the Chicago commodity exchanges.  Another participant in the money-laundering scheme was Nixon’s first Treasury Secretary David M. Kennedy, formerly president of the Continental Illinois Bank, another illustrious client of Mudge, Rose.

Blackfriars' Bridge, London

More than a decade later, facing prison first in New York and then in Italy, Sindona was still being represented by Mudge, Rose, with the firm’s attorney John J. Kirby assisting other counsel in defending him on charges of fraud, perjury and misappropriation of funds following the looting of Franklin National Bank of New York (purchased by Sindona in 1972).  It was this New York bank failure which triggered the collapse of the Vatican Bank in 1974 and the subsequent death of Robert Calvi, the Vatican banker found hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge in London. [16] Kirby just happened to be in Milan, Italy for court hearings on July 11, 1979, when Giorgio Ambrosoli, liquidator for Sindona’s Banca Privata, was murdered by a confessed hit man from Long Island, New York, who fingered Sindona as the man who had hired him.[17]

So here you have a quick snapshot of the upstanding law firm where Leonard Garment spent more than two decades as a lawyer.  He had another, much shorter career as well—before 1949—as a jazz musician, an occupation shared with fellow clarinet and tenor saxophone player Alan Greenspan. [18] It was Garment, in fact, who first brought Greenspan into public life by introducing Nixon before the 1968 election to the erstwhile reed man and aspiring economist—graduate of Neocon strongholds, New York University and Columbia.  When Garment and law partner John Mitchell accompanied Nixon to the White House in 1969, Greenspan trailed behind as an adviser, later being named chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.  

It was all one big happy family. Then there was Watergate.

After the Fall

Garment, amazingly untouched by the scandal, remained in Washington, giving direction to Gerald Ford, particularly with regard to “Jewish issues,” which he had coordinated for Nixon.  He brought in the Republicans’ first Jewish fund-raiser, Detroit businessman Max Fisher, who quickly set up a back channel of communications between Nixon and Golda Meir of Israel.  Fisher and Garment arranged for Meir to talk to Nixon at the White House in September 1969. [19] According to his Who’s Who biography:

David Ben-Gurion with Max Fisher

“Fisher's life was changed by a trip to Israel with the United Jewish Appeal in 1954 [when he first met David Ben-Gurion]. The experience led to a lifelong commitment to both Israel and the Jewish community at large. He raised money, made donations and held leadership positions in such important organizations as the Council of Jewish Federations (1969-1972), United Israel Appeal (1968-1971) and the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel (1971-1983).”

For seven years Garment would work alongside Fisher, coordinating public relations with Israel and with American Zionists, first for Nixon and later for Gerald Ford. They were particularly busy in early in 1970 preparing for a visit by French President Georges Pompidou and his wife, to no avail. 

Alfred M. Lilienthal described the February events as follows:

Phantom for Israel

“The indignation with which the presidents of American Jewish organizations received word of the cancellation of their New York meeting with President Pompidou can appropriately be described as "chutzpah," the Yiddish word for colossal gall. Weeks before the visit, organized Jewry had gone into action. On January 28 a Jewish delegation visited New York's Mayor Lindsay to make certain there would be no reception there for President Pompidou. A few days later plans were advanced for picketing demonstrations in New York, Westchester County, Chicago, and other cities on the Pompidou route. It was then that certain congressmen, led by Israelists Bertram Podell and Lester Wolff — both [Congressmen] of New York, called for a boycott of the French President's address to the Joint Session of Congress. A full-page advertisement under the aegis of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] which called for Phantoms for Israel to counterbalance Mirages for Libya and was signed by 64 Senators and 243 Representatives, added to the rising temperature.” [20]

Mirages for Libya

Nixon—whether acting on behalf of the American government or at the behest of his former law firm—made a special effort to soothe the couple’s ruffled feathers. Mudge, Rose’s ties to Banque Paribas (founded by James Rothschild in 1872) may have extended to a hidden connection to Pompidou, a former professor personally selected by Guy de Rothschild to be general director of Rothschild Frères before he became President of France, replacing Charles de Gaulle. Both De Gaulle and Pompidou were virulently antagonistic to the interests of the State of Israel—which was, coincidentally, being financed by Guy’s cousin Edmond. [21]

Gerald Ford’s short-lived administration saw the promotion of youthful Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld into public view, as described in an article by Linda Minor, "The Halliburton Riddle."

And a few illegal scoundrels

Garment and Fisher found it expedient to wander away from Washington in order to take care of other pressing problems, although both “court Jews” (as they were sometimes called) actively campaigned for Ford’s reelection in 1976. Once Ford was defeated, Garment returned to his job at Mudge, Rose, which had taken Nixon's name off its masthead.

Fisher was already bogged down in attempting to rescue the Israeli government from a potentially devastating political scandal. In May 1975 Fisher had become chairman of United Brands, a corporation which his predecessor, Eli M. Black, had created from the old CIA-connected United Fruit Co., in which Fisher was a large shareholder. 

Fisher was called in to run United Brands after Eli Black ...

“created a major mystery by smashing a quarter-inch-thick glass window in his Manhattan office and plunging through it to his death on the pavement 44 floors below. Black's relatives said that they knew of nothing that might have driven the executive, who was a descendant of ten generations of rabbis and a former rabbi himself to take his life.” [22]

Black’s self-murder came on the heels of a very bad year for him and the company— suffering from a $47 million corporate loss on sales of more than $2 billion.  Black also found himself

“at the center of an about-to-break case of international bribery that might topple the government of Honduras, hurt U.S. relations with Latin America and cause United Brands still greater losses,” according to the disclosure in Time magazine, which elaborated: “Under its former name of United Fruit Co., United Brands' banana operations had been synonymous with Yanqui imperialism; United Fruit was widely known as el pulpo, or the octopus.” 

Possibly the money disappeared down the same black hole, described later in the same article, which reveals the

“latest developments in a complex contretemps that involves, besides the state of Israel, a Baron de Rothschild, a shady Swiss bank with a record of ties to the Mafia, secret Liechtenstein trust accounts, a hero of the World War II Hungarian underground and scores of millions in missing funds.”

Sounds like a review for the latest Robert Ludlum thriller.  But no, this is non-fiction!

Tibor Rosenbaum

It seems that the International Credit Bank (I.C.B.) in Geneva, created by Tibor Rosenbaum

“was singled out by Life magazine in 1967 as one of the Swiss banks that accepted funds that the Mafia had skimmed from casinos in the U.S. and the Bahamas, then recycled into Mob-controlled American businesses.  At the same time, Rosenbaum, who played a major role in rescuing many of his fellow Jews during the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary, developed close relations with Israeli leaders. I.C.B. financed oil deals and huge, hushed arms transactions for Israel. Rosenbaum was also highly respected by many Jews around the world, who often used his bank to deposit funds for investment in Israel; indeed, until February he was treasurer of the World Jewish Congress.” [23]

Could it be that those Catholic Mafiosi suspected someone of skimming their share of the profits and using them for Israeli defense? Could they have taken their revenge out on Rabbi Black perhaps?  Unfortunately for us, dead men don’t tell tales. [24]

It was only a few months after the dust had settled from the Italian-Israeli mafia gang war that Garment’s name surfaced in connection with the Sindona case.  In fact, he was actually working on the case with white-collar-crime specialist Robert Kasanof, of another New York law firm, only one month after Gerald Ford was defeated (December 1976), at the same time his own wife, Grace Garment, who had been missing for seven weeks, committed suicide in a Boston hotel room, though her body was not identified for almost a week after her death. [25]  Despite the obvious trauma Garment must have suffered, he continued to work on Sindona’s case. 

More visible than Garment, however, was his associate John J. Kirby, Jr., who handled court appearances while Garment spent his time behind the scenes, lobbying with friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan to make sure that the U.S. Attorneys with whom they had been negotiating on an ad hoc basis would not be replaced once the Carter administration moved into office in 1977. [26]

Scooter Libby, listening to the wild tales Len Garment, his career mentor, may have  regaled him with, perhaps e thought he could never rise to such heights himself. 

But then, there was Marc Rich.

Stay tuned for PART 2—LIBBY’S CLIENT, MARC RICH.

NOTES:

[1] All quotes from Wilson: Joseph Wilson, Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Exposed My Wife's CIA Identity (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), 441-2  An excerpt from the book appears online at Southern Cross Review website.

[2]  The search for truth was the mission which motivated Socrates in the fourth century B.C., and it was his probing which was rewarded with the hemlock cocktail, specially prepared by the sophists of his day.  The decline of Athenian democracy was advanced by paid “intellectuals,” who acted as mouthpieces of hidden oligarchs who compensated them.  Today’s Neocon network is identical to the Athenian network of sophists who destroyed that republic.

[3] With regard to Wilson’s statement above, and  his decision to entitle his book “politics of truth,” see one of Plato’s Dialogues where it is stated: “…how melancholy, if there be such a thing as truth or certainty or possibility of knowledge—that a man should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general: and for ever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose truth and the knowledge of realities.”  Plato, Phaedo, Part III.

[4] The 1920 U.S. Census shows the family of John Garment living at 277 Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn four years before Leonard was born.  John Garment worked as a “ladies tailor” proprietor.  The apartment building tenants were overwhelmingly Russian Jews—both John and his wife Jennie having been born in Minsk.

[5]  Brooklyn Law School’s first forty years was under the sponsorship of the blue-blood upstate St. Lawrence University, whose trustees “had for years been operating the Law School as a profit center, or, in the parlance of law school educators, as a cash cow—milking the school’s earnings and preventing the law school from building even a modest endowment…”  In 1943 St. Lawrence “announced plans to shut Brooklyn Law School down. Later, a legal historian would write:  ‘Perhaps St. Lawrence did not fully realize how much it meant to people struggling for a living to have their [children] enter the professional class and secure a...degree. No sacrifice was too great for this....The great service of the Brooklyn Law School was that it offered a professional education for those who would have found it very difficult and often impossible to get it elsewhere.’  … St. Lawrence’s liquidation plan galvanized many of them [alumni] into action. They saved the school from extinction, but at great cost. Judge [William H.] Carswell and Dean Prince negotiated the repurchase of the school’s assets from St. Lawrence so that the school could continue to operate as an independent institution.”

The bulletin also recognizes Leonard Garment among a list of less recognizable fellow alumni:  “During [the early 1960’s]…, the School continued to produce talented lawyers who would have very distinguished careers:  • Second Circuit Judge Frank Altimari • District Judges Henry Bramwell, Leo Glasser, Arthur Spatt, Mary Johnson Lowe, Sterling Johnson, Jr., and Edward Korman • State Court Judges Allen Beldock, William Thompson, Gilbert Ramirez and Bernard Fried • White House Counsel Leonard Garment • Public Servants David Dinkins, Herman Badillo, Benjamin Ward, Howard Golden, Nicholas Scopetta • Poverty law pioneer Edward Sparer • City Bar Association President and Proskauer partner Robert Kaufman • Metromedia Executive Vice President Stuart Subotnick • Professors Richard Farrell, Nancy Fink, Martin Hauptman, and Robert Pitler.”

[6]  Speaking at the dedication ceremony for The Nixon Center, funded by the Bobsts’ foundation, Tricia Nixon Cox stated:  “An extraordinary person whose life personified the idea of being dedicated to worthy causes was Elmer Holmes Bobst. He was a self-made man whose intelligence, character, loyalty, patriotism, courage and generosity in many areas, including education and cancer research, made him an embodiment of the American dream. A mentor and father-figure to my father in all seasons since 1953, Elmer Bobst, or Uncle Elmer as Julie and I called him, was also a singular friend, who with his wife Mamdouha shared my father's vision of a more just and peaceful world -- a world made possible by hard-headed detente, enlightened self-interest, and a strong America; a world in which democracy would flourish and open new doors to peace and freedom.  Today Mrs. Bobst, a renowned humanitarian, continues the journey faithfully and ably, forwarding the sterling ideals she shared with her husband and with my father. To further these ideals, and in the spirit characterized by my mother as onward and upward, Mrs. Bobst is going to have built on the grounds of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, the Elmer and Mamdouha Bobst Building, which will house the Center for Peace and Freedom. (Applause.) I know that my parents would have been deeply moved by Mrs. Bobst's magnificent gesture, because it was their wish to honor this exceptional friendship in a very meaningful way that would benefit our generation and future generations.”  Leonard Garment also told an almost incoherent story of a night he and Nixon spent together in the Bobsts' pool house in 1965, in an interview with Brian Lamb of Booknotes.

[7]  See National Cancer Act history. 

[8]  See website called Smokers History, linked to other pages. 

[9]  Ovid Demaris, Dirty Business:  The Corporate-Political Money-Power Game (New York:  Avon Books, 1974), 140.

[10] According to Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs website © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College:  “PepsiCo divisions also expanded their operations to new areas of the world, including the former USSR (where PepsiCo was the first foreign consumer product to be sold) and the Peoples Republic of China.” 

[11]  Alfred W. McCoy, with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York:  Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972), 187.

[12]  Ovid Demaris, Dirty Business, 141.

[13] Ibid.  Quoted from Joseph C. Goulden, The Superlawyers (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1971) at 221.

[14] It’s possible this “oilman” client may have been associated with El Paso Natural Gas, a long-term client of the firm.  In 1969 Attorney General John Mitchell “purchased through a law partner a stock interest in El Paso Natural Gas Company” simultaneously with the Justice Department’s dismissal of anti-trust charges against El Paso.  In addition to granting this personal reward for services rendered, El Paso had contributed, along with the Gulf Resources and Chemical Co., to the secret slush fund Mitchell managed for CREEP.  Rodney Stich, Defrauding America (1994), 23.

[15] In 1963, president of the Banco di Credito Commerciale e Industriale was Junio Valerio Borghese.  The bank had been the very first one owned by Sindona.  Under Borghese the bank was involved with the son of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, with Franco's government in Spain, and reactionary circles in the Vatican and the Christian Democratic Party. Ultimately the bank collapsed, but someone covered for the inept Borghese.  See Jack Greene and Alessandro Massignani, The Black Prince and the Sea Devils:  The Story of Valerio Borghese and the Elite Units of the Decima Mas (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2004).

[16]  See BBC story about Calvi’s death.

[17] Nick Tosches, Power on Earth:  Michele Sindona’s Explosive Story (New York:  Arbor House, 1986), 263.

[18] “Even as a saxophone player in a 1940s swing band, Alan Greenspan had a passion for staying in control.  While some of his fellow musicians smoked marijuana or snorted stronger drugs, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve Board kept track of the band's money.  ‘Some people used to complain that the band was smoking these funny hand-rolled cigarettes,’ recalls Washington lawyer Leonard Garment, another sober-sided member of the touring ensemble. ‘But Alan was clean as Clark Kent: he handled the books and never ran a deficit.’”  Time Magazine, April 18, 1994. 

[19]  Peter Golden, Quiet Diplomat:  Max M. Fisher (New York:  Herzl Press, 1992), 195.

[20] Alfred M. Lilienthal, “The Zionist Connection II:  What Price Peace?” (1983). 

[21] The ownership of Paribas has since changed, according to a website which indicates that Nadhmi Auchi’s firm, “General Mediterranean Holdings SA (GMH SA), is stated to be ‘based in Luxembourg, with offices in London, and has business interests in banking, hotels, construction and real estate.’ Yet it is believed that his holdings are far more diverse, sharing ownership in more than 120 companies across the world from British aviation to Kuwaiti energy. For all he is worth, secrecy appears to be a mainstay of Auchi’s business. When in the 1980s socialists took power in France ordering all banks to pass information on the accounts of their customers to the government, it was Auchi’s firm in conjunction with the French bank Paribas that enabled accounts for the super wealthy to remain secret by purchasing a bank in Luxembourg. Later Auchi took a controlling interest in Banque Nationale de Paris which later merged with Paribas to become BNP Paribas, the bank of choice for Saddam Hussein when funneling billions of dollars of often corrupt Oil for Food transactions. In 2003 Auchi was convicted by a French court of illegally accepting more than $120 million in oil kickbacks during the first Gulf War, oddly enough profiting from the Kuwaiti side. And to this date Auchi continues to attract mystery if not controversy. Auchi is the primary financial sponsor of Tony Rezko, wiring $3.5 million to the Syrian-American just one month before the Rezkos purchased land adjacent to Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s home (some speculate Obama received part of the property at a discount). Both properties were sold by the same seller. Rezko, an early and substantial fundraiser for Obama, has since been convicted of fraud and bribery and has become a source of endless pain for the Obama campaign. Perhaps Rezko could have learned a thing or two from Auchi.” 

[22] Transactions of this type are traded in Chicago, and the exchange where they are transacted has undergone tremendous revamping in the last few years. Wikipedia tells us: “The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) (often called "the Chicago Merc," or "the Merc") is an American  financial and commodity derivative exchange based in Chicago. The CME was founded in 1898 as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board. Originally, the exchange was a non-profit organization. The exchange demutualized in November 2000, went public in December 2002, and it merged with the Chicago Board of Trade in July 2007 to become CME Group Inc. The Chief Executive Officer of CME Group is Craig S. Donohue. On August 18, 2008 shareholders approved a merger with the New York Mercantile Exchange.”

[23] The Rothschild to which reference was made in the Time article was Guy’s cousin, Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild, who created his own “philanthropic” foundation in Geneva in 1982, though the personal foundation of his grandfather, Baron Edmond Benjamin, was set up in 1973.  See a Markus Angelicus article about individual Rothschild assets, as well as the website for Edmond’s charities.  The Baron had also created the Caesarea Foundation in 1962 to fund Israel’s first university, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  See a most interesting panegyric website dedicated to glorification of the Baron. Both Edmonds were descended from James Mayer de Rothschild, founder of the French branch of the five original Rothschild banks.  For a history of the French bank, see Anka Muhlstein, Baron James: The Rise of the French Rothschilds (New York:  The Vendome Press).

[24]  Another expose in Time magazine in 1975 revealed three simultaneous scandals: “In Washington, federal energy officials confirmed suspicions that overcharges by oil suppliers during last year's period of Arab embargo and shortage had cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which the Government has ordered refunded. In New York City, United Brands, famous for its Chiquita bananas, admitted bribing officials of Honduras, setting off an uproar that threatens government stability in that country. In Tel Aviv, the indictment of a highly placed Israeli executive on charges of siphoning cash out of the country opened up a story of troubles in a Geneva bank that could cause heavy losses to investors round the world.

[25] Paul Hoffman, Lions of the Eighties:  The Inside Story of the Powerhouse Law Firms (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982), 63. See also Book Notes interview of Leonard Garment (promoting book, Crazy Rhythm, at C-Span website. 

Nick Tosches, Power on Earth:  Michele Sindona’s Explosive Story (New York:  Arbor House, 1986);

[26] According to Paul Hoffman, that ad hoc judicial selection committee designed by Garment and Moynihan “soon was expanded into a formal judicial screening panel… [and] had national implications.”  The implications of the judicial screening model are clearly apparent today, as the U.S. Senate considers the current nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court John G. Roberts, Jr.  Roberts is a member of the Federalist Society, an organization that has grown from the informal vision hatched by Len Garment and friends during Moynihan’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1976.   Fellow campaigners Irving Kristol and William E. Simon set in motion a funding mechanism called the Institute for Educational Affairs, to provide seed money for the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, organized in 1982 and fronted by three young law students.  Money poured in from “charitable” foundations that have become so ubiquitous in today’s politics. Paul Hoffman, Lions of the Eighties:  The Inside Story of the Powerhouse Law Firms (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982),  63. Also see and Martin Garbus, "A Hostile Takeover," The American Prospect vol. 14 no. 3, March 1, 2003.

Capitalizing Anti-Communism

A GOVERNMENT CULT

© 2005 by Linda Minor
(Updated in 2010)

Credit to Vanity Fair

The havoc caused by just these 16 words:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

President George W. Bush used just sixteen words (quoted above) in his State of the Union Message in January 2003 to justify his military attack on Iraq. It took six months for Ambassador Joseph Wilson to contradict those words in the public media — averring in a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed piece (“What I Didn’t Find in Africa”) that the Bush administration knew, or should have known, almost a year before his January speech that any report claiming that Saddam had obtained uranium from Niger in a quantity capable of using for weapons of mass destruction was a bald-faced lie. [1]

Dementia Admitted

Being called liars by Wilson came as quite a shock to the Bush administration—representing as it did the first time anyone with clout had publicly questioned the veracity of the reason given for precipitating the war in Iraq. Having been an ambassador in Africa (a Bush I appointee) and an envoy in Niger (for the Clinton National Security Council) until 1998, Wilson then returned to Niger early in 2002 at the request of CIA officials to whom Vice President Dick Cheney had posed a question regarding Saddam's access to nuclear weapons.

Hadley

Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, admitted two weeks after Wilson’s article in the Times that he should have deleted the “sixteen words” from Bush’s January speech because, as he later recalled, CIA Director George Tenet had  asked him to do so for a speech Bush gave in Ohio three months before the January speech..But, Hadley explained, he had “forgotten” Tenet’s warning during the intervening time.. 

Hadley’s boss, Condoleezza Rice, claiming the same amnesiatic excuse and sounding like a ditzy California valley girl, stated: 

“What we learned later (and I did not know at the time, and certainly did not know until just before Steve Hadley went out to say what he said last week) was that the director [Tenet] had also sent over to the White House a set of clearance comments that explained why he wanted this out of the speech.  I can tell you, I either didn’t see the memo, or I don’t remember seeing the memo.”  [2]

All that was missing was for Condi to have punctuated her statement with a couple of sideways head nods, a "duh," and perhaps to sprinkle in a "like" or two throughout her sentences.

While the Bush officials were thus admitting their dementia, Robert Novak, in his July 14 syndicated column—citing “two senior administration officials” as his sources—identified Valerie Plame, wife of their only accuser, as a Central Intelligence Agency operative who had worked in the area of weapons of mass destruction. [3]

Senior Administration Officials Spring Leaks

Wilson immediately jumped to the core of the matter, speculating as to the identity of these "senior officials":

“Senior advisers close to the president may well have been clever enough to have used others to do the actual leaking, in order to keep their fingerprints off the crime. John Hannah and David Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice president’s office, have both been suggested as sources of the leaks. I don’t know either, though at the time of the leak, Wurmser, a prominent neoconservative, was working as a special assistant to John Bolton at the State Department. Mid-level officials, however, do not leak information without authority from a higher level.” [4]

Calling them "zealots," and part of a "government cult," Wilson traced the roots back to Albert and Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago— mentors both to Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. The ultimate mission in Iraq, he revealed, "was always about a larger neoconservative agenda of projecting force as the means of imposing solutions." Roberta Mary Morgan's father, Edmund M. Morgan, Jr., a law professor at Yale in 1920, was later a Harvard Law colleague of Felix Frankfurter.

Extremism in the Defense of Liberty 

John Robert Bolton II, like many of his College Republican counterparts, became a Republican almost before he could tie his shoes, though he was not a member of the College Republican National Committee.[5]  Young Johnny was instead active in the Young Republican organization at Yale for four years—1966 to 1970.  He had cut his teeth, however, in the 1964 Goldwater campaign at his prep school in Baltimore—the McDonogh School—where he was awarded one of the scholarships to poor (in the financial sense) students for whose education the school was originally created. In 1964, when John Bolton was sixteen years old and his peers were thinking about girls, cars, football or baseball, Johnny was meditating upon Barry Goldwater’s classic statement: 

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Bolton would never thereafter be ascribed with the virtue of moderation. The vice of extremism is another matter.

Bolton fit the profile which the College Republican (CR) organization was seeking. Led by Morton Blackwell, CR was recruiting young political operatives in 1971, while Blackwell's fellow Virginia attorney, Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. (later appointed to the Supreme Court), was writing in his “Confidential Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” addressed to his next-door neighbor, Eugene Sydnor (then in charge of the education committee for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [6]) that the immediate goal of recruitment was to ascertain “avenues of action” which could be pursued to correct the “imbalance” on campus and the public at large in order to save the free enterprise system. [7]

Pendulum Swings to the Right

Morton Blackwell, mentor for the College Republican organization, was trained by Tea Party hero, Richard Viguerie, who as a young man in his twenties, earned his living working for Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)—founded in 1960 by William F. Buckley, Jr. (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1950). Buckley had previously served as a Central Intelligence Agency operative in Tokyo and Mexico City. [8]

Though Buckley’s National Review claimed to be the voice of proponents for free enterprise, evaluated on that basis alone, it was 

“a dud.

In its brief history, it has spent some $860,000 more than it has taken in.” [9] 

Since free enterprise operates on the profit motive, we have to assume that, since it continued to operate without profit, it was being subsidized by someone or something. 

Buckley started the magazine with $125,000 from his family and $300,000 “raised elsewhere.” [10]  Who was paying Buckley to run this right-wing rag so soon after his book God and Man at Yale had attacked the so-called leftist administration and faculty at Yale?

Bundy

In 1951 fellow Bonesman McGeorge Bundy “gleefully accepted an assignment from The Atlantic Monthly to attack William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. Buckley, Bundy charged, was a ‘twisted and ignorant young man.’ Buckley, in turn, ridiculed Bundy as a ‘haughty totalitarian’ and a ‘Court Hatchet-Man.’” [11] Skull and Bones men must have been delighted to witness the Hegelian dialectic at work and play.

Skull and Bones at Play?

Equally as intriguing as Buckley’s ability to continue such a money-losing operation for so long is the list of names he attracted to serve on the board of YAF. Ronald Reagan was on the YAF’s national advisory board in 1962, and retired Major General Charles A. Willoughby was there by 1963. 

Willoughby, whose German birth and parentage are shrouded in ambiguity, enlisted in the Army as Adolf Charles Weidenbach, then changed his surname to Willoughby in 1910. [12] He served as General MacArthur's Chief of Intelligence in the General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Area for the decade beginning 1941 and later joined the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture (ICDCC), a major funder of which was Nelson Bunker Hunt, son of Texan H.L. Hunt, who had been Willoughby’s friend since the 1950’s. [13]

Direct mail was a part of the advertising and public relations industry, and Viguerie was therefore working for these right-wing idealogues on YAF's board while he handled mail order operations. They sent mailings and fundraising letters out to the mailing list, hoping either to convince Americans of the need to pursue the cold war militarism against Communism in the Soviet Union and China or to raise funds for candidates. In 1964 Viguerie began his own direct-mail company, using the YAF and Goldwater’s mailing lists. Long before personal computers, iPhones or bloggers, he taught Morton Blackwell how to do direct mail and to train others under the auspices of the College Republican National Committee. Once Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, Morton Blackwell had a White House office as “liaison with conservative groups.” [14]  

Dolan

Such conservative groups included the National Conservative Political Action Committee, whose director—one of Blackwell’s College Republican trainees, John T. "Terry" Dolan—poured more than $7 million into Republican campaign coffers in 1980. [15] That was a lot of money in those days. Where did it really come from?  Could “direct mail” have been a cover for laundering illicit funds through the intricate layers of political action committees set up to flaunt the spirit of campaign finance legislation?  That’s a subject for further research. 

World Anti-Communist League

What our research to date does reveal, however, is that the career of Richard Viguerie—described in Time magazine as a “direct-mail conglomerateur” in Falls Church, Virginia (who, like Buckley at National Review, could afford to operate his monthly Conservative Digest at more than a million dollar per year loss) had suspicious connections early on to the World Anti-Communist League. [16] One time editor at Conservative Digest was Lee Edwards, who

“had a practice of starting up organizations like the ‘Underground Bible Fund’ or ‘Friends of the FBI,’ which were very good at soliciting donations but not so good at actually fulfilling their promises to distribute Bibles behind the Iron Curtain or defend the good name of J. Edgar Hoover.” 

In 1970 Edwards had also set up the first United States affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League called the “American Council for World Freedom.”  Edwards’ activities were mentioned in a book by another member of the New Right, Alan Crawford as follows: 

Then there is Lee Edwards, once a Young Americans for Freedom activist, the first editor of Viguerie’s Conservative Digest. When the Justice Department brought suit against the American-Chilean Council in 1978, it came out that one of the organization's activities had been to plant material favorable to the Pinochet government of Chile with Edwards, then a Washington-based public relations man, who writes and distributes his own newspaper column. Edwards included the information in his newspaper articles. The accomplishment was reported back to the Chileans by the Washington officer of the American-Chilean Council, L. Francis Bouchey, another product of Young Americans for Freedom, who had shared office space with Edwards back in 1975 when Edwards was working closely with representatives of the Taiwan government. (p. 197) [17]

Another book, Inside the League, written in 1986, described Edwards’ associates as neo-Nazis:

Bankrolling themselves by running “charities” with exorbitant operating costs, they sought out others who shared their apocalyptic vision of the takeover of the world by communists and their “fellow travellers,” whether in the American Independent Party or in the World Anti-Communist League. Today Edwards is president of the Center for International Relations, a conservative think tank funded by the Reagan Administration.... With the resignation of the American Council for World Freedom in 1975, the door was open for an energetic neo-Nazi to transform the face of the League in the United States and Europe, plunging it even further into the depths of fanaticism. [18]

NOTES:

[1] Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (Carroll & Graf,  2004),  p. 1.  The July 6 New York Times article appears at the Common Dreams News Center website.

[2] Wilson, The Politics of Truth, p. 353.

[3] Novak stated: “Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.... All this was forgotten until reporter Walter Pincus revealed in the Washington Post June 12 that an unnamed retired diplomat had given the CIA a negative report. Not until Wilson went public on July 6, however, did his finding ignite the firestorm.”

[4] Wilson, The Politics of Truth, p. 445.

[5] We saw in a recent Sanders Research article, “Killer Political Instincts,” that while Karl Rove was in high school in Utah he was working on the campaign of Republican Senator Wallace Bennett, whose son controlled a public relations firm that employed career intelligence operatives who were hired to re-elect Richard Nixon.  The article also mentioned that Rove’s recruiters, the College Republican National Committee, also trained Ralph Reed, Terry Dolan, Roger Stone, Grover Norquist, Lee Atwater, and Jack Abramoff (Tom Delay’s fund-raiser recently indicted for dirty tricks)—indoctrinating them into their future roles in political consulting and mail-order to elect extreme right wing candidates.

[6] The Chamber of Commerce was a pro-business lobby founded by Skull and Bones member, William Howard Taft in 1911 with a mission to create a “social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility." Chamber history, according to its website. The quote was attributed to Taft in a press release dated April 22, 2002 and is now the Chamber's Mission Statement.

[7] Before being named to the Supreme Court by President Nixon, Powell had served on a “Blue Ribbon Defense Panel” chaired by Gilbert W. Fitzhugh, Board Chairman of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had made recommendations for restructuring military procurement procedures, as well as intelligence resources.  Powell’s memo is reminiscent of how Skull and Bones at Yale began in 1832 to take control of every facet of America’s established institutions.  See Antony C. Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment (1986).

[8]  Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much p. 191.

[9] Time, Oct. 31, 1960.

[10] Time, Nov. 3, 1967.

[11]  Alfred S. Regnery, Upstream: the ascendance of American conservatism, Volume 2007 (Simon and Schuster, Inc.  2008), p. 50.

[12] Frank Kluckhohn, The Reporter (New York Journal) August 19, 1952.  In 1913, “having reached the rank of sergeant, he left the service to enter the senior class of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Graduated from Gettysburg, he studied for an M.A. at the University of Kansas at Lawrence and then taught languages at the Howe School for girls, in Howe, Indiana, and at Racine College in Wisconsin. Then in 1916 he re-entered the Army and was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry. He served on the Mexican border and later was sent to France, where he took aviation training, flew as a pursuit pilot, and helped train Allied fliers.”  While in Manila, “Willoughby became known as the close friend of Andres Soriano, the Spanish Club's most influential member and one of the richest men in the Philippines.... Soriano was not only Willoughby's friend; he was also the good friend of General MacArthur and of another principal MacArthur assistant, Major General Courtney Whitney, who before the war was a lawyer and promoter in Manila. Soriano had—and still has—mining interests, breweries, airlines, shipping, radio stations, textiles, jute plants, and the Philippine concessions for the products of many great American firms.”

[13] Dick Russell, p. 322.

[14] Time, July 5, 1982.

[15] Terry’s brother Anthony, incidentally, was a Reagan speechwriter.  Dolan’s name had been first mentioned in Time in 1979. 

[16] Time, December 8, 1961.   

[17] Crawford’s book is called Thunder on the Right.  A review appears in an article written by  Corey Panshin.

[18] Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League  (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986).  The connection between Viguerie, Rev. Billy James Hargis, the John Birch Society, and Buckley’s YAF was hinted at by the authors:  “The first American League Chapter was the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF), founded in 1970 in Washington, D.C. The main force behind its creation, and its first secretary, was Lee Edwards, head of a public relations firm and former director of Young Americans for Freedom, the youth arm of the John Birch Society.  Edwards was a stalwart of the emergent New Right in American politics and brought his own questionable background and motives into the World Anti-Communist League as a professional fund-raiser. Along with a handful of other New Right fund-raisers such as Richard Viguerie and Patrick Gorman, Edwards was in the business of raising donations for charitable or nonprofit organizations and then keeping a large chunk of the 'money, sometimes over ninety percent, for his ‘operation expenses.’ ”