Dark Shadows: Iran-Contra, Secret Wars & Covert Operations, Part 2

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INTRODUCTION:

This is the second of a five-part series exploring the Iran-Contra Affair and its implications. Part 1 described the Reagan Administration’s secret wars and illegal arms deals exposed in the scandal. Part 2 explains how the constitutional crisis unfolded as a result of Congress’s failure to address the CIA’s power to wage secret wars in the name of avoiding a world-ending nuclear confrontation between the Superpowers. Part 3 will show how this abdication of responsibility backfired in the Bush and Clinton years with bigger wars, even as the Cold War ended with collapse of the Soviet Union. Part 4 will survey the era of global insecurity we entered in the second Bush and Obama Administrations, while Part 5 examines the role key members of the incoming Trump team played in creating this permanent state of war by immunizing themselves from the consequences of past criminality.

The author, Doug Vaughan, spent years as an investigative reporter in Latin America covering the horrors of the 1970s and 80s. In this series, he connects the secret wars and warriors past and present to their most recent incarnation as architects of an aggressive approach to reimpose their will on the world that has escaped their control.

— Russ Baker, Editor in Chief

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“The traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living.” — Marx

Thirty years ago, the Iran-Contra Scandal exposed and connected two of the many sets of secret actions of the Reagan years. The congressional, judicial and media responses to that crisis shaped a public narrative that set the stage for what was to come in wars, both overt and covert, in the subsequent administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and in a contradictory way, Barack Obama.

Iran-Contra also introduced us to many of the future players, neocons and neoliberals who framed the debates over policy for three decades. Now, some survivors of the wreckage have re-emerged from the paneled woodwork of corporate boardrooms and right-wing think-tanks to roam the corridors of the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies.

Like Watergate before that, a newly elected president has immersed himself in a shower of allegations and counter-allegations that pit the legitimacy of his election and the authority of his office against a splintered opposition, including prominent members of his own party, some of his own nominees to head the military and intelligence services, and those appointees against their predecessors and prospective employees.

The emerging fissures in the Intelligence Community’s putative “consensus” about supposed foreign interference in the election and the shaky factual structure undergirding it, already have set factions against each other in the FBI, the Bureau against its co-communicants, with the Director facing an internal investigation and calls for his head, while the new President accuses the CIA of acting like Nazis, yet declares he’s the Agency’s biggest fan. Erosion of the public trust in governing institutions has sunk to an all-time low, if polls can be believed.

If it seems like we’re stuck in a tape loop from the 1970s or 80s it’s because we are reliving a scripted Republican resurgence in a new round of crises for which they as players and we as spectators are unprepared. The suspense may soon be killing us. Pick your metaphor: zombies, vampires or werewolves, warrior-queens and troll-kings stalk the landscape. Is this an episode of Game of Thrones, a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or a rerun of Night of the Living Dead? Or are we watching something unprecedented, unpredictable?

Reality TV this is not: Donald Trump is no longer merely the blustering casino owner, real-estate and gambling mogul, or pitchman for Celebrity Apprentice yelling “you’re fired.” Sworn to uphold and defend a Constitution he does not understand, perhaps has never read, and to faithfully execute the laws he has flouted, now he is POTUS. Like Shiva, creator and destroyer of worlds.¹

What could go wrong? When the Trumpees, echoing Dubya’s taunt to Iraqi insurgents who became Al-Qaeda in Iraq, then morphed into ISIS during Obama’s promised withdrawal, boldly dare the world to “Bring It On”, they’re looking in the rearview mirror at Iran-Contra.

But the past, the chronicler of our national sins told us, “is never dead. It’s not even past.”² Marx went him one better: “History does indeed repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”³ But this? What strange beast is this slouching toward Washington? Better take a look over your shoulder. The most subversive thing in America, a troubadour sang, is a long memory.⁴

Resurrecting Ghosts

Who can watch an aging Oliver North retelling other people’s war stories on Fox, rhapsodizing about some heroic exploit in the age of knightly chivalry, or singing Homeric praise of some newfangled “arms and the man”, and not feel a faint nostalgia for the Reagan years?

Those were the days. Off-the-books, off-the-shelf operations. HAWKs and TOWs and PROFs. Boland I and Boland II. The Belly-Button account. The Courier and The Hammer. Ollie threatening to go mano-a-mano with Abu Nidal. Ollie pulling blank traveler’s checks from his office safe, proceeds of arms sales to the Ayatollah, and padding off on a patriotic mission to buy new snow tires for his wife’s station wagon and fresh underwear for his secretary.

Quaint, no? Now we have PayPal and chip-embedded credit cards that track every transaction and movement of the card-holder, as Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and other victims of self-inflicted kompromat should have known. But for those faded receipts, we might never have heard the testimony.

The alluring, mini-skirted Fawn Hall smuggling Ollie’s notes out of the White House in her pantyhose one thigh-high boot-step away from a subpoena. Ollie and Fawn’s little “shredding party” in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House with their brooding, bespectacled boss, Vice Admiral John Poindexter, National Security Adviser to the POTUS, lending a hand. Or Ollie’s old boss, Robert McFarlane, testifying to Congress that Ollie was a stone-cold liar, then under sneering assault from Dick Cheney, slouching home to attempt suicide.

Like any good contretemps, the tale was punctuated by the odd coincidence and the convenient premature death: CIA Director William Casey, a brain tumor the night before his scheduled testimony; Israeli adviser Amiram Nir, about to be subpoenaed, an airplane crash during an avocado-inspection visit (!) to Mexico.

Steady clawing by the press (yes, there once were newsrooms only recently invaded by computers, and printing presses clanging out lead type daily, circulation in the tens of millions) had stripped away the insulation of the Teflon-coated President. His credibility in tatters, the “Great Communicator” was reduced to feeble excuses, denying the obvious, blaming underlings, firing Poindexter and North, shedding more of the cover they provided. He appointed a commission, chaired by former Republican Senator from Texas, John Tower, to get to the bottom of what proved bottomless illegality.⁵ By January 1987, a federal court had appointed an Independent Counsel (sometimes called Special Prosecutor), Lawrence Walsh, to investigate the spreading pool of lies and corruption. Soon after, Congress opened public hearings.

The Reagan team’s gambit was what had been called in the Watergate scandal a “limited hangout” of the dirty laundry, giving up a little bit of operations already blown to save a lot that were even dirtier, bloodier, more disastrous. At the center of this narrow ambit of the binary Iran-Contra scandal, the connecting tissue, the hyphen itself, was money — money to make war when Congress had refused to authorize it.

In an effort to pre-empt Congress, Reagan, feigning ignorance — it came so easily — tasked the Tower Commission to “find out what happened” but not to identify or punish wrong-doers. The commissioners’ narrow purpose was to improve the performance of the agency at the center of the scandal, the National Security Council, not work up the ladder to the man in the Oval Office. Without taking any sworn testimony, the Commission interviewed 53 sitting, former and future officials, including Presidents Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon; Vice Presidents Bush, Mondale; Secretaries of State Schultz, Haig, Vance, Kissinger, Rogers; Defense Secretaries Weinberger, Clifford, Laird, Schlesinger; Attorneys General Meese, Bell; National Security Advisers McFarlane (who had worked on Tower’s Senate staff), Allen, Brzezinski, Rostow; CIA Directors Turner, Colby, Helms. The staff interviewed many more subordinates and secured documents from relevant agencies. Two key participants, Poindexter and North, declined invitations to appear, invoking their right not to incriminate themselves.

It was a friendly chat amongst a veritable Who’s Who of the American establishment but their statements left most of the big questions unanswered. Not surprisingly, their Report released in February 1987 concluded that the President had been ill-advised and blamed Poindexter and North for “functioning largely outside the orbit of the US government.”⁶

This was a curious circumlocution: How could Reagan’s underlings be outside his orbit? Had they disobeyed his orders, usurped his authority to wage war? Or was the Commander-in-Chief the one who was out of the loop? Or was the ol’ Gipper just getting loopy? With talk of impeachment in the air, some of Reagan’s oldest friends thought it was time for him to throw in the monogrammed towel and cede power to his vice-president, George Herbert Walker Bush. Others counseled Reagan to hang tough.⁷

The Commission had been unable to trace the diversion of funds from the sale of weapons to Iran to finance the Contras, so it deferred the legality of those transactions to the Independent Counsel, Walsh. Predictably, their Report criticized the underlings for excesses and failure to implement policies through established interagency channels and procedures but absolved Reagan of responsibility on grounds he didn’t really know what those subordinates were doing. This further contradicted the President’s own testimony that he liked to set policy, hire the best people and let them do their jobs. Were they authorized or were they not?

In short, the Tower Commission was an evasion of the real issues of life or death for millions of people: War — who had the authority to wage it, and why? How should war be fought, by what rules? Who should pay for it? And the never-asked big one: Do the victims ever get a vote?

These were not idle philosophical questions or academic debates but moral issues with the gravest legal and constitutional implications for democratic self-government. The answers define who we are as a people, what we have become in the world to which we have held ourselves accountable. In a self-proclaimed republic presuming to act as a model for the rest of humanity, the electorate holds itself responsible for the the acts of its representatives and the consequences, seen or unforeseen. After all, within living memory the victors in World War II had tried and executed German and Japanese officials, political and military, for aggressive war, killing non-combatants, torture, genocide and other crimes against humanity. Punishment was intended as a deterrent to future crime. There was to be no more impunity for tyrants, especially for the ultimate crime of war.⁸

Nonetheless, undeclared wars had become ever more popular with presidents⁹ since World War II precisely because they do not require popular support: They are, in fact, proof that sufficient support is lacking to get a declaration of war from Congress, let alone the consent required by the United Nations Security Council before attacking another country: The only justification for war in international law is self-defense. So, reasons had to be given — or invented — excuses made, just as the Nazis and Japanese militarists had before.

The President could order criminal acts, then absolve the criminals of their crimes, then be pardoned himself by his successor; this was the essence of tyranny.

During the Vietnam War, the bloodiest, longest undeclared war in US history, Congress had gradually ceded the power to declare war to Presidents, then, alarmed at the ravages set loose, sought belatedly to protect its constitutional turf — the power to declare war and fund it. The war provoked public opposition and “whistleblowers” emerged to expose fresh outrages and reveal hidden motives, only to be denounced by their government as traitors giving aid and comfort to the enemy.¹⁰

A key event to unlocking access to the inner workings of the government was the release of the Pentagon Papers, a multi-year, multi-volume study of the war in Vietnam by Daniel Ellsberg’s colleagues at Rand Corp. The studies and the supporting documents from State, Defense, NSC and CIA included highly classified cable traffic between embassies and the NSC in which commanders on the ground and diplomats in the field contradicted their superiors about progress in their decades-long effort to impose their will on tiny Vietnam. This provoked a crisis on several levels, political, military and legal; as this structure shifted, like tectonic plates sliding over each other, they exposed other events below the surface.

First, word that the Papers had been removed from the Rand Corp. or the NSC provoked Nixon, already suspicious of the loyalties of his staff, and egged on by Kissinger, angered to near apoplexy at this embarrassing challenge to his mastery of the levers of power, to recruit their own secret police unit, “the plumbers,” to plug leaks and identify the leakers for prosecution, firing or harassment. The Plumbers illegally wiretapped phones and burglarized Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to gather derogatory information to discredit him. Some of Kissinger’s staff quit rather than be polygraphed.

At the political level, Nixon and Kissinger tried to suppress publication of the Papers, only to be rejected by the Supreme Court.  While the case was on appeal, Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) read the Papers into the Congressional Record, in a marathon session without benefit of the cameras of C-SPAN. This effectively placed the classified material in the public domain and preempted accusations that Ellsberg had violated state secrets.

Nixon also wanted Ellsberg and his alleged accomplices, including a future National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake, tried for treason. They had to settle for a conspiracy to violate rules governing the release of classified information, for which the defendants were acquitted. The trials put the war itself on trial, and helped put Nixon himself in the dock.

At the deeper political and military level, the Papers showed how all the imperial Wise Men — Johnson, Defense Secretary McNamara (against his own better judgment, he would later claim) and Clifford; Rusk and Vance at State, National Security Advisers Bundy and Rostow, DCIs McCone and Helms, the Joint Chiefs — told each other winning the war was not only possible but losing was unacceptable. They had escalated, invaded, occupied, bombed relentlessly with nothing but war crimes like My Lai to show for it.

The timing of the leak also suggested that influential figures within the military and intelligence apparatus had also turned against the war and were attacking Nixon’s strategy to force him to abandon the war or they would get rid of him. Here’s the context:

Faced with ever-growing dissent in the streets and his own party, Johnson had quit the race for reelection in March 1968 and suspended bombing to allow the hapless “Happy Warrior”, Hubert Humphrey, to run as a “peace” candidate, but millions of people didn’t buy it. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been shot and killed. Humphrey won the nomination at the Chicago convention that turned into what a presidential commission called “a police riot’ against protestors. Mayor Richard Daley’s police and prosecutors charged eight antiwar leaders with conspiracy and incitement to riot. In this milieu of fear, confusion and division, Nixon narrowly won a three-way race with George Wallace taking votes from both major candidates.

Nixon squeaked through with a promise that he had a “secret plan” to end the war. The bigger secret was Nixon’s October Surprise promise to South Vietnam’s rump President Thieu, that he would get even more help if he backed out of negotiations. In effect, Nixon stole the election by treasonous sabotage of Johnson’s diplomatic effort to get a truce and negotiate an end to the war.

The steady escalation of war coincided with a crescendo of revelations that led to “Watergate” — the break-in at the offices where the Democratic Party was housed by a team of burglars composed of veterans of the CIA, unleashed by the Nixon White House to surveil, intercept communications and subvert the campaign of the antiwar candidate, George McGovern. Their capture in the act triggered efforts by the President to prevent the inquiry from reaching his own closest advisers and himself, destroying evidence, suborning perjury, paying bribes to cover-up even greater crimes. He dug the hole deeper until he buried himself.

And there was more: As companion to bombing the North, Defense Secretary Laird’s plan for “Vietnamization” of the South was an echo of Johnson’s anguished plea that American boys shouldn’t have to do what Vietnamese boys should be doing — fight a peasant war on the side of the landlords, a civil war on the side of the foreign imperialist. At home, a draft “lottery” replaced systematic conscription in hopes of tamping down protests. Troops started coming home. But in Vietnam, the puppet army could not recruit soldiers. The bombing intensified to hold the enemy at bay, morale was eroding to mutinous attacks by grunts on junior officers, heroin addiction was rampant, the US military weakened. By the time of his own reelection in 1972, the real secret was out: There was no plan beyond bombing the Vietnamese to force them to bargain. In short, small war, big war and in-between war had all disastrously failed.

Later it emerged that Nixon contemplated nuking Vietnam, risking nuclear war with the Soviets and possibly Chinese intervention as in Korea, but Kissinger talked him out of it. Instead, they played the China card against the Soviets by abandoning the Nationalist regime in Taiwan, a long-term strategic gamble that cost Nixon support on the right.  At the same time, the Armed Services committees learned from disgruntled GIs and officers that the military had conducted “secret” air and naval strikes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — even scrambled B-52s with nuclear bombs — under orders from the White House and National Security Adviser Kissinger, incredibly by-passing the Joint Chiefs of Staff along with the rest of the military chain-of-command.¹¹

Nixon had set out to convince the Soviets that he maybe was a little crazy, unpredictable, to scare them and keep them off guard. But, as the Watergate investigations by a Special Prosecutor advanced on Nixon’s closest advisers — Attorney General Mitchell, former Commerce Secretary Stans, his chief of staff  Haldemann, and adviser Erlichman, counselor Colson — all the President’s men turning on him, the paranoia, rancor and lunacy seemed more than a ruse. The attempted cover-up led inexorably to Nixon’s impeachment and resignation. His successor pardoned him for his crimes.¹² The presidential power to pardon became a precedent for impunity, as we shall see: The President could order criminal acts, then absolve the criminals of their crimes, then be pardoned himself by his successor; this was the essence of tyranny.

If “war is the health of the state” as Randolph Bourne postulated after World War I, this State was on life support.

Rogue Elephant or Trained Herd?

Watergate dovetailed with investigations by special committees established by Congress¹³ into what they described as “abuses” by the CIA, FBI and military intelligence agencies at home and abroad, including assassinations of foreign leaders, illegal domestic spying, manipulation of the news media with propaganda (including what was later coined “spin” and “fake news”), use of agents provocateurs, to disrupt legal assemblies, the MK-ULTRA experiments with drugs and biological agents on unwitting victims, even lethal operations against civilian citizens.

Those historic antecedents were part of a list of crimes and failures compiled by the CIA at the request of a new CIA Director James Schlesinger¹⁴ and released by his successor, William Colby¹⁵; 683 pages long, this compendium of crime became known as the “family jewels.” By 1975, this glittering array of lethal plaster, glass and junk included over 900 major “projects” the most notorious of which, Phoenix in Vietnam, killed upwards of 40,000 people in order to dismantle the infrastructure of the communist-led insurgency.¹⁶ Saigon fell anyway, in April 1975, then Laos and Cambodia, but Phoenix became the model for similar programs to be applied elsewhere.¹⁷

Looking over the jewels, even Colby had been forced to admit that the CIA not only exceeded its legal authority, but its interference in elections — or when unsuccessful, the overthrow of elected governments — often fueled the insurgencies with revolutionary momentum. Efforts to suppress popular movements forced desperate people to take up armed self-defense, and that served as a trip-wire to escalations from covert to overt military intervention — all to keep copper coming from Chile and Congo, tin and titanium from Vietnam and Bolivia, oil flowing from Iran and Saudi Arabia, profits flowing to the big banks.

Many thought that, after the departure of Richard Helms, only Colby had the experience and stature within the Agency to fire James Angleton, the Counterintelligence chief who ran an imperium inside the imperium since its inception, wreaking havoc in his obsessive and paranoid search for a double-agent within its ranks.¹⁸

Helms and Angleton made convenient scapegoats for most of the Family Jewels, then Colby himself felt the axe on his neck, along with Schlesinger in what was called the Halloween Massacre. Colby was replaced by George H.W. Bush; Kissinger stayed as Secretary of State but relinquished his job as National Security Adviser to Brent Scowcroft; Ambassador to NATO Donald Rumsfeld took Schlesinger’s job at Defense; Richard Cheney as chief of Ford’s staff. In the coup de grace, Vice President Rockefeller opted out as Ford’s running mate for 1976. When the shuffling was done, Colby was left holding the bag for the Family Jewels.

References

1. I’ve borrowed from Robert Oppenheimer, “father” of the atomic bomb, who borrowed it from The Upanishads to describe the awesome power, newly concentrated in the commander-in-chief, unleashed by the first explosion of the weapon that would annihilate a half-million people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

2. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Viking, 1950). Barack Obama borrowed the phrase for a poignant speech on the lingering effects of racism during the 2008 campaign for the Presidency.

3. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, first published 1852 in Die Revolution, New York, was an essay on the coup d’etat that brought what later analysts called fascism to power in France.

4. The phrase belongs to the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips.

5. The other members of the Special Review Board were former senator and Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft, a former aide to Kissinger who became George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser in 1988.

6. Tower et al, Report of the President’s Special Review Board, published as The Tower Commission Report, (New York: Bantam/Times Books, 1987). See also, a dissection of the Tower and congressional reports by Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs, (New York: Hill & Wang/Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.

7. Bob Woodward, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).

8. While this argument is drawn from my own unpublished Masters thesis in the joint J.D./M.A. program in International Law at the University of Denver [now Sturm] College of Law and [Korbel] Graduate School of International Studies, 1977, a useful recent collection is Roy Gutman and David Rieff, eds., with Kenneth Anderson, legal ed., Crimes of War: What the Public Needs to Know, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).

9. John Prados, President’s Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II (New York: Morrow, 1986); John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1987); William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II (updated edition, 2014); Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s only Superpower (Common Courage Press, 2005; London: Zed Books, 2006) ISBN: 9781567513745; The CIA: A forgotten history, (London: Zed Books, 1986).

10. Gravel edition (4 Vols.), The Pentagon Papers, (Boston: Beacon, 1971), New York Times edition (NY: Quadrangle, 1971); Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1972), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, (NY: Viking/Penguin, 2002; Len Ackland, Credibility Gap: A Digest of the Pentagon Papers, (Phila.: AFSC, 1972); Peter Schrag, A Test of loyalty, (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1974); Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, (NY: Palgrave, 2001); Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War, (New York: New Press, 1985, 1994); Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, (New York: Pantheon/Random House, 1969); Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology: Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. 2 (Boston: South End Press, 1979); Paul Joseph: Cracks in the Empire: State Politics in the Vietnam War (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (NY: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970); Robert W. Chandler, War of Ideas: The U.S. Propaganda Campaign in Vietnam, (Boulder: Westview, 1981).

11. Two of the Air Force whistleblowers were friends of mine; they also told Seymour Hersh, who mentions the incident in his takedown of Kissinger, The Price of Power, (NY: Summit, 1983).

12. J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York: Viking, 1976); J. Fred Emery, The corruption and Fall of Richard Nixon, (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1994); Stanley J. Cutler, Abuse of Power (NY: Free Press, 1997); Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (NY: Random House, 1984).

13. “Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to lntelligence Agencies,” Vol.1-13; and “Recommendations for the Final Report of the House Select Committee on Intelligence,” H.R. No. 94-833, 94th Congress 2nd Session, February II, 1976, more commonly known as the Church and Pike Committees after their respective chairs, Sen. Frank Church (D·Idaho) and Rep. Otis Pike (D·NY). The lead Senate staffer, Loch K. Johnson, wrote a summary, A Season of Inquiry (U. Kentucky Press, 1985); America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society, (New York, Oxford, 1989) considers the Committee’s work in the context of the Iran-Contra scandal, as does a colleague, Gregory F. Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (NY: Basic Books, 1987).

14. A Harvard-trained economist and Republican, Schlesinger had been director of strategic studies of the RAND (Research and Development) Corp., a think-tank funded by the CIA and DoD; served only briefly as DCI (Feb.-July 1973) after Helms had been shipped off to Iran, then replaced Laird as Secretary of Defense (1973-75), only to be fired for defying Kissinger and Ford’s order to bomb Cambodia in the Mayaguez operation.

15. Colby, like Bill Casey, was a “Jedburgh” in the OSS; his 12 years in Vietnam included management of the Phoenix Program as station chief. He served as DCI from July 1973 to December 1975, when he was shoved aside as collateral damage for George H.W. Bush. Colby with Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978); Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior (New York: Basic Books/Perseus, 2013). Prados, The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy and Presidential Power (Austin: U. Texas, 2013).

16. Valentine, op. cit., Daniel Ellsberg,and others come up with a range of numbers, all of which pale compared to the deaths of non-combatants from bombing, napalm, Agent Orange defoliant and other “conventional” methods.

17. Valentine, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017).

18. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Edward J. Epstein, Deception (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989); David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (NY: Harper & Row, 1980); David Wise, Molehunt (NY: Random House, 1992).

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