Unholy Trinity / Part One

Excerpts from Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Published in 2004 / Chapter 3
The CIA Is Wall Street, And Drug Money Is King

by Michael C. Ruppert
[w/his permission]

The CIA is Wall Street

The CIA is Wall Street.  Wall Street is CIA.  This is perhaps one of the easiest landmarks to establish on our map.  We do it by looking at key players in the CIA’s history and their relationships to America’s financial engine.
Clark Clifford:  The National Security Act of 1947 was written by Clark Clifford, a Democratic Party powerhouse, former secretary of defense, and one-time advisor to President Harry Truman.  In the 1980’s, as chairman of First American Bancshares, Clifford was instrumental in getting the corrupt CIA drug bank BCCI (founded by a Pakistani national) a license to operate on American shores.  His profession: Wall Street lawyer and banker.  BCCI and its particular web of characters have been a virtual cut-and-paste overlay linking up Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and terrorist financing. [3]  It was Clark Clifford who was retained by former CIA Director Richard Helms when the latter was indicted and prosecuted for lying to Congress in 1976. [4]
 
Clifford and his banking partner Robert Altman were eventually indicted on criminal charges for their role in illegally helping BCCI purchase an American bank, First American Bancshares.  At the time BCCI had been connected to both drug money laundering and financial support for Afghan rebels supported by the CIA through its director Bill Casey. [5]
 
John Foster and Allen Dulles: These two brothers “designed” the CIA for Clifford.  Both were active in intelligence operations during World War II.  Allen Dulles had been America’s top Office of Strategic Services (OSS) spy in Switzerland, where he met frequently with Nazi leaders and looked after US investments in Germany.  He also held an executive position with Standard Oil. John Foster went on to become secretary of state under Dwight Eisenhower, and Allan served as CIA director under Ike, only to be fired by JFK after the abortive 1961 US-led covert invasion of Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs.  Their professions:  partners in the most powerful – to this day – Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell.
Enron is only one of Sullivan and Cromwell’s current clients, and it employed a dozen “former” CIA officers before its fall from grace.[6]  Other prominent Sullivan and Cromwell clients are AIG, Global Crossing, ImClone, Martha Stewart, and the Harvard Endowment.
 
After the assassination of JFK in 1963, Allen Dulles became the staff director and lead investigator of the Warren Commission, which asserted that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin who had fired a bullet that had caused JFK’s throat wound, hung suspended in mid-air for several seconds, changed direction twice, then wounded Texas Governor John Connally in the chest, wrist, and thigh only to fall out of his body in nearly pristine condition on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital in Dallas about 30 minutes later.  When asked about how he could have offered the Warren Report, full of inconsistencies, to the American people with a straight face, Dulles is reported to have said, “The American people don’t read.”
 
Bill Casey:  Reagan’s CIA director and the OSS veteran who served as chief covert wrangler during the Iran-Contra years was, under Richard Nixon, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  His profession:  Wall Street lawyer and stock trader.
 
In 1984 ABC News was devoting serious attention to the CIA scandal in Hawaii connected to the investment firm BBRDW (Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham, and Wong).  The BBRDW story was lifting a veil connected to money laundering, drugs, and the failed CIA drug bank named Nugan-Hand.  Bill Casey and the CIA’s general counsel Stanley Sporkin put extreme pressure on both the network and anchor Peter Jennings to stop their coverage.  During the semi-public battle, ABC’s stock dropped from $67 to $59 a share, and by December, the firm Capital Cities was trying to buy the network.  Capital Cities successfully completed the buyout of ABC in March of 1985, after which the CIA conveniently dropped a suit against the network.[7]
 
Bill Casey had helped to found Capital Cities and had served on both as its lawyer and as a member of its board of directors in the years between his service as SEC chairman for Nixon and as director of Central Intelligence for Reagan.  ABC became known thereafter as “the CIA network.”
 
Other sources, including the family of the late Colonel Albert Vincent Carone – about whom I have written extensively – confirm that Casey was a lifelong resident of Long Island and that Carone, a “made” member of the Genovese crime family, retired NYPD detective, and CIA operative, routinely exchanged insider trading information with Casey.  Multiple witnesses have confirmed that Casey attended the christening of Carone’s grandson.
 

Stanley Sporkin:  Sporkin served as the CIA’s general counsel under Casey.  But he had previously served for more than 20 years at the Securities and Exchange Commission, rising to the post of general counsel.  Casey’s right-hand-man, he was one of the first people Casey brought with him to the CIA in 1981.  Almost all of Sporkin’s tenure at the SEC was spent in the enforcement division, charged with prosecuting corporate and stock fraud.

During the Iran-Contra investigations it was revealed that Sporkin had routine contact with Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was later convicted on several felony counts including lying to Congress.[8]  At times the e-mails between the two men, alluding to the 1920’s comedy team Laurel and Hardy, read “To Stanley from Ollie.”

After retiring as CIA general counsel in 1986, Sporkin was soon appointed as US district court judge in Washington, DC, where he presided over some of the most important trials (including Microsoft’s) in the country.  He resigned from the bench in January of 2000 and joined the Wall Street law firm of Weill, Gotschall, and Manges, self-described as specializing in “Wall Street Management and Capital.”  Weill, Gotschall, and Manges is currently serving as Enron’s bankruptcy counsel.  Although Sporkin received praise for many of his decisions from anti-corporate critics such as Ralph Nadar, he presided over a number of more nefarious cases, including that of former Federal Housing Commissioner Catherine Austin Fitts, whose firm Hamilton Securites had been targeted for malicious and unfounded harassment after uncovering evidence of covert operations that tied the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to drug operations, slush funds, “friendly” Wall Street interests and political corruption.

A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard:  until he joined the CIA in 1998, Krongard was the CEO of the investment bank Alex Brown.  In 1997 he sold his interest in Alex Brown to Banker’s Trust, where he served as vice chairman until “joining” the CIA.  A close friend of CIA Director George Tenet, the colorful, cigar-smoking former Marine specialized in private banking operations serving extremely wealthy clients.  It has been heavily documented by official US government investigations into money laundering that private banking services are frequently used for the laundering of drug money and the proceeds of corporate crime.[10]  Private banking services were especially criticized in investigations of money laundering connected to the looting of Russia throughout the 1990’s.[11]


John Deutch:  Deutch retired from CIA as its director in December of 1996.  He immediately accepted an offer to join the board of directors of the nation’s second largest bank, Citigroup, which has been repeatedly involved in the documented laundering of drug money.  This includes Citigroup’s 2001 purchase of a Mexican bank known to launder drug money, Banamex.[12]  Deutch narrowly escaped criminal prosecution after it was learned that he had kept a large number of classified CIA documents on non-secure personal computers at his private residence.[13]

[G ~ if John Deutch, CIA and Michael Ruppert sound familiar in a sentence it is likely due to this gem of a clip from Youtube where Mike stood up and told the truth like a warrior.]
 

Maurice “Hank” Greenberg:  The CEO of American International Group (AIG) insurance and manager of the third largest pool of investment capital in the world was floated as a possible CIA director by Bill Clinton in 1995.[14]  From The Wilderness exposed Greenberg’s and AIG’s long connection to CIA drug trafficking and covert operations in a two-part series that was interrupted by the attacks of September 11.  Under Greenberg’s stewardship, an AIG subsidiary severely bent several laws in conjunction with the Arkansas Development Financial Authority (ADFA) to establish what many have alleged was a first-class money laundering operation for drug funds arising from CIA-connected cocaine smuggling into Mena, Arkansas, in the 1980’s.

In that series From The Wilderness reported that AIG employed in its San Francisco legal offices the wife of Medellin Cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder.  I actually went to San Francisco and had lunch with her in the summer of 2001.  Our investigations later disclosed that AIG had been tied to US covert operations going back to World War II and conclusively linked to the heroine trade.[15]  We also reported that AIG owned and operated the largest private fleet of full-sized airliners and cargo planes on the planet.[16]


I was not surprised when Greenburg – a staunch supporter of Israel – was chosen by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2001 to lead an investigation of terrorist financing.  The CFR report, not surprisingly, was extremely critical of Saudi Arabia.[17]


Professor Dale Scott of the University of California at Berkeley, author of many historically crucial books on covert operations and deep politics, observed in the early 1970’s that six of the first seven CIA deputy directors “under Walter Bedell Smith and Truman, came from New York legal and financial circles.”[18]  The headquarters of the CIA’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, was in the New York financial district..

~~~~~~~

Now take a look at this recent story that broke and try to keep a straight face:
Pentagon outsources War on Drugs to Blackwater


It gets worse…
[Source info below this message]
If you want to read the full story – pick up a copy of Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
now.
It may be the only book you need to read to understand the Matrix.
To understand it is the only way to learn how to unplug from it.
My thanks to Michael Ruppert and staff at Collapsenet.com for allowing me to share this historically important work.  From The Wilderness archives are still accessible for your research.  Consider a membership to Collapsenet to further this important work that can save lives.
Sources:
[3]  Cf. Jean-Charles Brisard, “The Economic Network of the Bin Laden Family,” Appendix VII in Brisard and Dasquie, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden, Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, pp. 181-222.
[4]  Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire, Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
[5]  Ibid. See also Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Lawrence Hill Books, 1991, pp. 445-460.
[6]  Carl Limbacher, et al., “Enron at the CIA,” NewsMax.com, July 30, 2002
[7]  Rodney Stich and T. Conan Russel, Disavow: A CIA Saga of Betrayal, Diablo Western Press, 1995, pp. 268-269.
[8]  “While working on the Finding, North had been advised by Stanley Sporkin, the general counsel of the CIA, that a Finding must specifically enumerate each purpose to be accomplished by a particular action.“  “Cf. Final Report of the Independent Council for Iran/Contra Matters,” Lawrence E. Walsh, Independent Council, August 4, 1993, Washington, DC, “Volume I: Investigations and Prosecutions, Part III: The Operational Conspiracy: A Legal Analysis”, www.afn.org/~dks/i-c/pIII-legal-analysis.html
[9]  Not appearing in this excerpt
[10]  “A former Bank of New York executive and her husband admitted today that they helped launde $7 billion for Russian banks by accessing electronic banking software used by the bank’s customers.“ See Carol Huang, “Bank Exec, Husband Admits Laundering Billions; Moved $7 Billion for Russians Through Bank of New York,” APBNews.com, February 16, 2000. Cf. also James Petras, “‘Dirty Money Foundation of U.S. Growth and Empire,” FTW, Vol. IV, no. 3, May 31, 2001, pp. 3-5
[11] Ibid.
[12]  “All Hell Breaks Loose: Citigroup, the Largest Drug Money Laundering Bank in America Buys Mexican Drug Laundering Bank Banamex,“ FTW, Vol. IV, no. 3, May 31, 2001 (cover story).
[13]  “A CIA investigation earlier this year showed Deutch, like [Wen Ho] Lee, improperly transferred documents containing national security secrets. But Deutch was not jailed.” Cf. Andrew Chang, “The Next Ordeal: Wen Ho Lee is Free From Jail – but Not Problems,” ABCNews, Sept. 14, 2000
[14]  U.S. News & World Report, February 20, 1995, “Washington Whispers,” p. 23.
[15]  Hostages, Part II – A.I.G., From The Wilderness, Vol. IV, no. 5, August 14, 2001.
[16]  Ibid.; see also AIG Financial Report, www.aigcorporate.com/corpsite/about/content/realfinancial.htm [may have changed since 04]
[17]  Douglas Farrah, “Report Decries Saudi Laxity; US Must Act to Dry Up Al Qaeda Funds, Policy Group Says,” Washington Post, October 17, 2002
[18]  Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, p. 193.
[Note that some of these sources dating back are difficult to find on the web – some are still archived.]

A Local Perspective / Russian Fuel Tanker Arrives in Nome

I present a conversation regarding this news story from a fellow trend researcher who hails from Nome.  [With her permission under anonymity as ‘trend researcher’ or TR.]

One thing about the peak oil research I do, is that it has brought me to the most interesting, local perspectives on all things energy related, in a myriad of different places that I’ve never visited.  The connections through internet technology are vast, marvelous and mind-broadening.  In that spirit, I share this conversation – with some incredible photos from the article. [click to full view] ~ GP

Skier crosses the frozen Bering Sea ice to the Russian tanker Renda on Sunday.
Photo by David Dodman, KNOM Radio Mission Da

TR : The Russian fuel tanker arrived at my hometown to save them (temporarily) from $12 a gallon gas and heating fuel.  My brother was hired at 100 bucks an hour to lay an ice road with his cat for two fuel hoses, stretched 700 yards long connecting the tanker to the town tanks (after the shore-ice fasts around the vessel so there won’t be a spill).

They generally get fuel by barge in fall from Washington State refineries (after the crude is shipped from Alaska to Washington!); however, this year the barges could not make it due to the “Epic Alaska Typhoon” that was supposed to kill everyone but did not.  Then the barge could not get in due to an extremely early pack ice descent from the north, part of the global weirding.

Where do they usually get their fuel from?  In the paper, it stated they loaded up in South Korea and stopped in Dutch harbor for gasoline.

TR:  Russia is the only country with a cargo ship capable of moving behind an ice-breaker ship through pack ice a foot thick.  Meanwhile, believe you me, Big Oil is watching closely since the success of the trip adds fuel to their fire as they plan to drill near Nome through the pack-ice and then get the oil to the refineries…

The Renda off the coast of Nome on Monday, January 16.  Photo by Sue Greenly
Why the near mile long hose?
 

TR:  The ship can’t get any closer to land, very shallow there; Outer Continental Shelf.  The alternative was to fly fuel in by plane, all million gallons of it, planeload after planeload and send prices to levels most would be unable to afford.  All this to help a mere 3,000 people make it through a cold ass winter.

We’re glad to hear your hometown will have the fuel they need this winter and hope your brother makes a nice chunk of change.

TR:  He is a hero and that makes him even happier.
The Healy breaks ice near the Nome on Jan. 14. The Healy is assisting the tanker Renda as it moves into final position for offloading nearly 1.3 million gallons of fuel for the city.  U.S. Coast Guard photo by Chief Petty Officer Kip Wadlow
Read more about this 11 day journey and view more amazing photographs at Alaska Dispatch

Occupying Fear and Loathing – A Foreword

by Gabrielle Price

This morning, a good friend of mine – one helluva Marine – sent me a link to check out.  He always sends me anything to do with Hunter S. Thompson as we are both fans [only one of us takes that a little far…though, I’ve read that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery].  I suppose it is a bit different for a woman to have such an affinity for a man known for womanizing, boozing and doping it up.

But Hunter was so much more than his carnal instincts – much more than most would perceive from a movie based on his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  He was a patriot, a serious lover of freedom and the constitution, and one of the best writers, and I believe commentators of a moment in time because of his higher instincts.  He was poised at the edge of a political world on the verge of losing it’s ever-loving mind.  He was passionate.  And sometimes that passion was mistaken for hatred, or anger – though, he had plenty of reasons to be angry – like the rest of us.  I think that’s why he always resonated with me.  He was able to say, without apology, how he felt about what he saw happening to this country…and he purged his disgust and anger in a way that made me feel relieved afterward.  He said it for me – I didn’t have to – and ladies don’t talk like that, dont’cha know?

I come from a family that has its roots in both Virginia and Kentucky [where HST hailed from]. Hunter’s colorful language and flair for humorous descriptions and people, made his writing feel as if I had just sat on the front porch with him and spun yarns over a few beers.  I’ve been told for years that when I am angry, a bit of a southern drawl creeps in and that my writing style can only be described as Gonzo.  I never really embraced that until after he was gone and I began writing during the “stolen term” of the Bush Administration.  9/11 was a very hard time for a lot of people and Hunter spoke a lot about this.  It was really hard for me to see him go in 2005…but there was no need for me to ‘go Gonzo’ when his work was there for all to read.  I thought, who the fuck was I to pick up that baton?  There are other journos out there telling it like it is – maybe even humorous Kentucky colonels covering politics?

Turned out, not so much…but I often imagined what he might say even though I lacked a few colors from his marvelous verbal palette.

Even in 2005, I was terribly naive about a lot of things that he wrote about [i.e. foreign policy, militarism] and I had some learning to do.  LOTS of research if I was going to have the audacity to put those hat and glasses on.

By 2008, when Bush was finally leaving – politics got more personal and just uglier than hell.  I understood more and more…but I didn’t write often about issues when I worked on my music project.  THEN the BP oil spill happened and I got fired up again.  Then I learned about peak oil and sat my ass right back down to study.  Nowadays, I see the political landscape from a safe distance [for my health and to maintain any friendships…agreeing to disagree doesn’t happen like it used to] and I wonder what Doc would have to say about this whole mess.

Then I figure he kinda already did say everything he wanted to say [or could say] about what he knew and saw and got the fuck out while the getting was good.  Wish he could have been here to see Occupy…

I’ve had days where I thought I was going to be done with writing altogether in these last few weeks…just ready to chuck it all in.  Trying to figure out how the hell to share peak oil information that would make grown men with muscle cars weep in a puddle of piss, and make Ikea shoppers go to addiction groups to deal with never being able to buy Swiss-modern petroleum based plastic everything from cups to shitty wall art.  Like Tyler Durden said, “Martha Stewart is polishing brass on the Titanic…it’s going down, man.”

I thought about this recent media trip, Occupy Fear and Loathing – which ended up nothing at all like what was intended; loss of footage, a camera, several missed interviews, didn’t get home for Christmas, a piece of shit truck with no stereo, a nightmare of a travel partner who couldn’t even pump gas who left me stranded in Phoenix…and who still has my documentary footage.

I wondered what the fuck point is there in writing about the trip or anything at all.  And just when I thought I couldn’t stand to read another link…

We come back to this morning’s message with this link that was shared with me.  A report from the Los Angeles Review of Books, called “Love, Boxing and Hunter S. Thompson.”  In the beginning of the report is a synopsis where one of the authors mentions two books – for my purposes, I will mention only the one – and thank the author and my friend from the bottom of my Gonzo heart.

Tom Lutz – “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas […] colossal failure of mission, spectacular performance of the art of being sidetracked, of being shanghaied by errant attention, or, perhaps, [a] perfect example of the way art is, at its best, a perversion, a turning away from more straightforward intentions.”
Ho ho!  Res ipsa loquitur.  Let the good times roll.
Rest in peace, Doc.  I got this.

 

~~~~~~~~~~
“I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.  At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey.  It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson / The Rum Diary (1993)
500ed-americosmos
Occupy your fear.
Then let it go.

A Simple Exercise

Official Excerpt from Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

by Michael C. Ruppert

Take a 20-dollar bill out of your wallet and set it in front of you.  Now take a glass of water and set it next to the cash.  Pretend that the glass of water represents a barrel of oil.  Look at them both for a second.  Then ask yourself a question:  What do they represent?  If you keep distilling your answers down to their purest essence, you will see that the money and the oil both represent the same thing: the ability to do work.  Both are useless if there is nothing to buy, drive or eat.
And yet our economic system, what we call capitalism but which is really something else, is predicated on debt, fractional reserve banking, derivative financing, and fiat currency. Therefore it requires that there must be limitless growth into infinity for it to survive.  Growth is not possible without energy.
Now look at the barrel of oil and realize that the earth is a closed sphere, and that without the oil and natural gas, the financial system is doomed.  There is nothing on our horizon – other than wishful thinking – that can completely replace hydrocarbon energy.  The surest way to see this is to realize that, as the human race starts down the inevitable slope of shrinking oil and gas supplies, we have seen no hydrogen powered F 18 Hornets or M1 Abrams tanks.  We have seen no vegetable oil-powered Bradley fighting vehicles or solar powered guided missile frigates.
There are many factors that the rulers of the American empire now have to manage as they read their own delusional map of the world.  They have to:
  • Apportion dwindling resources among competitors, some of whom possess nuclear weapons;
  • Maintain and expand their control over enough of the oil and gas remaining to ensure their global dominance and maintain order among the citizens of the Empire;
  • Simultaneously manage a global economic system, made possible by hydrocarbon energy, that is collapsing and in which the growing population is demanding more things that can only be supplied by using still more hydrocarbon energy;
  • Acknowledge that they cannot save their own economy without selling more of these products;
  • Control the exploding demand for oil and gas through engineered recessions and wars that break national economies;
  • Hide the evidence that they are systematically looting the wealth of all people on the planet – even their own people – in order to maintain control;
  • Maintain a secret revenue stream to provide enough off-the-books capital for purposes of providing themselves a distinct economic and military advantage, improving their technological posture, and funding covert operations;
  • Repress any dissent and head off any exposure of their actions;
  • Convince the population that they are honorable;
  • Kill off enough of the world’s population so that they can maintain control after oil supplies have dwindled to the point of energy starvation.
In the case of the War on Drugs, I infer that the result of some 30 years of effort, fueled by billions of dollars and managed by the “best and the brightest,” is exactly what was intended.  This is the premise from which I began looking at the events of September, 11, 2001, as I watched the second airliner hit the World Trade Center.
I do not claim to have presented or reconciled every fact.  That rarely happens in a complicated homicide investigation.  The tasks of the investigator are to produce a reasonable explanation based upon evidence that establishes probability, and to eliminate reasonable doubt that a crime was committed and that the guilty have been successfully identified.

If I can make a case in this book that explains these events, identifies the suspects, and makes more sense than any other interpretation of the available and demonstrable facts; if I can then get it out in a way that further empowers our collective learning; if that helps to break down the destructively false paradigm that governs so much of our life today – then I have contributed something that is hope-giving for all of us.  Otherwise, the future looks pretty grim.  This is a race against time.

Michael C. Ruppert ~ April, 21, 2004
Got lifeboat?
The Refreshment Center is home of the
Official Excerpts from Crossing The Rubicon

Save Your Seeds / An Eyeopening Graphic

Thanks to our friends at Occupy Monsanto
Click graphic for full view

 

The issue here is more than just corporate takeover of the seed supply. The basic function of evolution’s survival of the fittest is to have biodiversity [see: democracy] to allow life forms to adapt to changing conditions; once we destroy the biodiversity we become 100% responsible for all future adaptations and natural evolution is rendered virtually non-existent.

Please note: This image is based on the seeds available in 1983, what do you think has happened since then?  SAVE YOUR SEEDS!