Dark Shadows: Iran-Contra, Secret Wars & Covert Operations, Part 3

The post Dark Shadows: Iran-Contra, Secret Wars & Covert Operations, Part 3 appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

INTRODUCTION:

This is the third of a five-part series exploring the Iran-Contra Affair and its consequences. Part 1 described the Reagan Administration’s secret wars and illegal arms deals exposed in the scandal. Part 2 explained 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 exposes the roots of Iran-Contra in the Watergate scandal, but congressional abdication of responsibility and judicial deference backfired in the restoration of the Imperial Presidency, suppressing civil liberties and expanding wars justified as necessary to fighting the Cold War, 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 re-impose their will on the world that has escaped their control.

— Russ Baker, Editor in Chief

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Triumph of the Will 

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Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. — Lord Acton

The secret dominates this world, first and foremost as the secret of domination. — Guy Debord

Consider:

When the candidate states (hypothetically and hyperbolically, of course) that he could shoot somebody on the streets of Manhattan and nobody would care because he’s so popular, what’s to stop him now that he’s President?

When the candidate suggests we should “bomb everything” and “go after their families,” who will stop him from committing war crimes?

We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop. — David Addington

Less than two weeks into his term of office — why wait for the traditional 100-day mark? —  President Donald John Trump has issued a series of edicts that suggest an intention to rule by fiat:

•  Jeopardizing the fractious alliance battling the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, where US troops are again embroiled in street fighting, interrogations and dismantling a guerrilla infrastructure, he repeated a threat to seize the resources of those countries, a direct violation of international law, as payment for an invasion and 14-year long occupation that he himself has disclaimed as wrong-headed if not illegal.

•  In direct contradiction to allied signatories, he threatened to withdraw from the treaty under which Iran agreed to forsake development of nuclear weapons, imposed economic sanctions unilaterally in arguable breach of that treaty, issued threats of war (also illegal under international law) because Iran tested an intermediate (500-mile) range missile not covered by that treaty, and bombed rebels in Yemen supported by Iran for allegedly firing on a US naval vessel supporting the Saudi invasion of that country.

With little preparation of the enforcers in his Department of Homeland Security or for the consequences abroad, if not the outrage provoked at home, he effectively suspended immigration from seven countries that have little or no connection to terrorist acts in the United States, including employees of US companies and the US military, family members of US citizens who had already been granted visas, refugees granted asylum who had already submitted to severe vetting in extensive interviews over several months, and legal permanent residents with valid work permits who had left temporarily, as required by the law, to renew their visas.

•  He fired the acting Attorney General who refused to enforce his edict on grounds it was illegal, then resorted to Twitter to blast as a coddler of terrorists a “so-called” federal judge (appointed by George W. Bush and confirmed by Congress) who granted a temporary stay of his order so that its illegality might be reviewed by a higher court.

•  He issued a decree reshuffling the National Security Council’s Principals Committee (traditionally consisting of the President, Vice President, Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and the Attorney General) so as to replace the Director of National intelligence and the Chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff with his own political strategist, Stephen Bannon, an advocate of overtly fascist ideology and war against a religion with over a billion adherents.

•  He ordered the agencies responsible for counter-terrorism including the FBI to remove domestic advocates of violence against the government and fellow citizens from their watch-lists in order to concentrate on suspected “radical islamists.”

•  He unilaterally revoked US compliance with terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, repeated threats to somehow force Mexico to pay for a 1,500-mile long wall, perhaps by imposing a tariff or restrictions on repatriation of earnings by Mexican residents in the US, and “joked” about sending troops across that border to deal with “bad hombres” if Mexico does not comply.

•  He has ordered a moratorium on enforcement of the environmental laws and regulations of pollutants and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement that limits carbon emissions that induce global warming and the threat of human extinction.

•  In his first known military operation abroad, he took time out while dining with his children to sign a National Security Decision Directive authorizing a team of Navy Seals to attack a compound in Yemen where they missed the target, lost a $70 million Osprey vertical-take-off-and-landing (VTOL) airplane, but managed to kill a still-unknown number of civilians including the 8-year old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen (born in Las Cruces NM) who was killed by a Predator drone along with his 16-year old son (born in Denver) in 2011.

•  His newly confirmed Director of Central Intelligence appointed as his top deputy for covert operations a known advocate and alleged participant in torture; indeed, having followed illegal orders to commit war crimes seems to be her main qualification.

Donald, what took you so long?

You would be well-advised to watch what we do, not what we say… This country’s going to go so far to the right you won’t recognize it. — John Mitchell

The pace has been relentless, the reaction fierce but how long it can be sustained is debatable. This flurry of executive orders and presidential memos, contradictory explanations and confusing if not incoherent tweets — all should have been expected. But these are only the known knowns. Unless revealed by some sudden disaster, what has been done in secret may take years to uncover, as the Watergate and Iran-Contra crises showed. Whatever else the Trump team is up to, they are playing by the rules laid out by Dick Cheney in the first term of George W. Bush as lessons learned from earlier adventures in the Imperial Presidency:

“We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.”¹

And as past events show, don’t expect Congress or the courts, those vaunted checks and balances of the Constitution, to stop him until it’s too late. Cheney, having offered his support and advice to Trump after the drubbing of Jeb Bush, may have quibbled with the excess of Trump’s immigration ban but he certainly must have recognized the logic behind it:

It was, after all, an exertion of political will — power that only respects greater power  — an expression of the doctrine of executive authority Cheney himself has championed since he first entered public service as an assistant to Richard Nixon 50 years ago, argued as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in the wake of the Watergate scandal, refined and outlined most clearly during the Iran-Contra scandal 30 years ago, revived as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary Defense, and executed himself — with a vengeance as they say — as Vice President under George W. Bush.

We should have seen it coming. When Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, his campaign manager, law partner, and nominee as Attorney General, John Mitchell, warned, “You would be well-advised to watch what we do, not what we say…² This country’s going to go so far to the right you won’t recognize it.”³

It is no coincidence that Mitchell made the first of those remarks at a meeting with civil rights leaders dismayed by his decision not to endorse the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and to slow the pace of court-ordered desegregation of public schools. Mitchell declared his Justice Department would be a law enforcement agency, not engaged in social work. He was Nixon’s wedge in dividing Democrats after the open appeal to segregationists by the Goldwater campaign in 1964 that led the Republican Party to embrace the “Southern Strategy” of abandoning black voters in the south in favor of former southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, strategists like Lee Atwater and later Trent Lott, and now, the Trump Administration’s nominee for Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. This was a well-modulated, lawyerly and courtly racism without openly espousing the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, a new rejection of Reconstruction like the electoral “Compromise of 1876” without the robes and hoods: The chief law enforcement agency would ignore the enforcement of the law.

Instead, Mitchell called for no-knock raids without warrants, warrantless wiretapping of suspects, stop-and-frisk searches without warrants, defying the constitutional limits of the 4th and 5th Amendments on police power while disclaiming any racial motive yet knowing the effects would be monstrously racist selective enforcement. But they over-reached, at least temporarily.

For criminals in power, every scandal is based on the leak of a secret, and the leak itself demonstrates that the leaker is considered a traitor and the reporter an accomplice to treason. Impunity for the criminal is the necessary solution to the problem of law.

As for the second quote, that was implied by the first: A secret plan revealed in action:

Mitchell had been a bond lawyer who worked closely with the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, to craft a new form of municipal bond that effectively removed the voters from decisions about public debt and put public finance in the hands of bankers and their lawyers, who not only knew better what was good and right for the rest of us but were bound by attorney-client privilege to keep their deliberations secret.⁴ This is now the standard operating procedure in the US and the model extended through US power to the world.

Like the bond lawyers who effectively ran foreign policy in the Eisenhower Administration, John Foster and Allen Dulles at the State Department and CIA, respectively, Nixon and Mitchell ran their administration like a secret intelligence operation compartmentalized top to bottom on a need-to-know basis. And that, too, has become the model for executive decision-making with rare exceptions that prove the rule.

Criminal conspiracies require secrecy, by definition; but to continue when secrecy is breached, a conspiracy requires impunity for the highly-placed authors of the crimes, not merely a grant of immunity from prosecution to the accomplices but forgiveness in the name of the State. The doctrine of executive privilege reinforces official secrecy:

All acts and communications of the chief executive are official secrets, unauthorized revelation of which is punishable as a crime even if the executive acts are illegal or evidence of illegality by others. But if the President does it in the name of national security, it’s not illegal because the chief executive decides what is or is not legal. And the corollary, what’s called the unitary executive doctrine, extends this principle of official lawlessness to any act authorized by the chief executive. Perversely, this makes secrecy an accomplice to a lie.

And paradoxically, the only check on secrecy is the unauthorized, potentially criminal revelation of the secret, the “leak.” Among the conspirators, however, the adroit if not judicious deployment of the leak confers great power to insulate oneself, to punish rivals or discipline slackers, confuse the enemy, especially when the press or a segment of the public itself is perceived as the enemy.

The Nixon Administration made this an art form in the pursuit of executive power, even to its own undoing. It’s not a far leap from an “enemies list” that includes political opponents and critics and reporters (Nixon’s henchmen even conceived of the kidnapping and possible killing of reporters) to a definition of the media as “the opposition party.” For criminals in power, every scandal is based on the leak of a secret, and the leak itself demonstrates that the leaker is considered a traitor and the reporter an accomplice to treason. Impunity for the criminal is the necessary solution to the problem of law.

Hubris is the usual source of tragedy: The domestic intelligence operation against opponents produced the burglary at the Democratic Party’s offices in the Watergate complex by an illegal secret police unit attempting to plant and retrieve illegal wiretaps on the telephones, a form of surveillance now accomplished by hacking computerized communications. Nixon was impeached, forced to resign, then pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, on the advice of his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, among others. Mitchell, the chief judicial officer in the land, had been convicted and imprisoned for obstructing justice.

The massive and illegal (warrantless), domestic surveillance operation at the heart of Watergate, involved the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, DIA and military intelligence operatives in a secret war against the American people.

Meet the Ench

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“Let’s go see The Ench,” a friend said. It was my second encounter with the Big Enchilada, John Mitchell. After his release from prison Mitchell had divorced his blabbermouth wife Martha and was shacking up with my friend’s aunt in their family’s declasse’ mansion, a bastardized French chateau on a wooded hill in horse country overlooking a big bend of the Potomac. As we came through the big double-door of the portico, the former Attorney General of the United States was slowly shuffling down the staircase, his paunch barely covered by the aunt’s tattered mauve housecoat, nursing a three-day growth of stubble on his famous jowls and a hangover only marginally worse than my own.

“Hey, Ench, how’s it hanging?” my friend offered. Mitchell grunted something unintelligible — not well, judging from his gait — and padded off toward the kitchen in the aunt’s fuzzy slippers, one gout-afflicted hobble and shuffle after the next. My friend poured some orange juice, Mitchell gave him a baleful look, my friend poured a hefty glug of vodka into the glass. The Ench took a sip, gave my friend another skeptical look, another shot was administered; satisfied, Mitchell lifted a “who’s this?” brow towards me. We had met, actually, at my friend’s bachelor party at the old Jockey Club of the Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row, just off Dupont Circle where my friends Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt had been blown up by terrorists hired by the Chilean military empowered by the Nixon administration. But I didn’t mention that operation, which came after Mitchell’s defenestration, when Ford, Kissinger, Cheney and CIA Director Bush were running the show. I wanted to know what only the Ench knew about what he called “the White House horrors” at his trial, and what that might portend for the current horrors now that so many of the unindicted co-conspirators were back in power in the Reagan administration. I wanted a peek in Pandora’s box of still-secret horrors inside the great head of the Sphinx.

Instead of asking directly for secrets, I told him I only had two questions: Did he believe the rumor that his future brother-in-law, my friend’s father, a renowned raconteur of liberal pedigree was “Deep Throat”, the secret source who had revealed key details of the Watergate cover-up to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that ultimately brought down Nixon, the Ench himself and (almost) all the President’s men, based on a violation of whispered whiskied confidences exchanged over that same well-worn bar at the Jockey Club when the Ench was embroiled in Watergate but didn’t want to go home to that nagging wife of his?

“Fuck no!” he said, screwing up his face into a familiar snarling snort of disbelief. I had asked my friend’s father the same question and got the same response, only with a bemused bourbon-y smirk instead of spraying orange juice across that table. But they had both mulled it over, it was plausible, and hashed it out, suggesting other possibilities. Ok, then. Question #2: Casey?

The Ench pursed and puckered his lips, as if the OJ had soured, then nodded his head affirmatively. He had considered that, too. Then he uttered a Mitchellian harrumph of scoffing contempt. “Sneaky son of a bitch.” But no, Mitchell said. His old friend Bill Casey was a schemer capable of almost infinite deception and even greater betrayal, especially in defense of his own credibility, accumulated wealth, or the future field of action that money and reputation held open. But Casey, like the Ench, was a skilled bridge player. Bluffing was for poker, a simpler game. Casey would want to keep his options, and when the Watergate investigators turned from the burglars’ hush-money to the smell of cover-up in the Oval Office, peripheral players bolted for the exits. The Vesco case got Mitchell and Commerce Secretary Stans, another old intelligence operative, indicted. Casey had been an intermediary for the bagmen and launderers of illegal cash but had not purchased his own immunity with evidence of Mitchell’s complicity, of that the Ench was sure. Stans took the fall for that one. Casey had gone back to his tax-advice practice, then resurfaced as Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager and director of Central Intelligence, keeper of secrets, manager of the flow into the White House and out, too, in the form of leaks that concealed even more secret crimes.

Haig? Cheney? Rumsfeld? “I wouldn’t put it past any of ‘em. Self-important assholes but bit players back then. But nah, they were never in the loop.” He paused, took another swig of vodkated breakfast. “Not then, anyway. Not that part of the loop anyway. Bush-leaguers.” He meant baseball novices but I took the cue. My friend poured some more.

Ok, Bush, was he in the loop? No, as chairman [of the Republican National Committee] he was always sticking his nose in the tent but he wasn’t clued in. If he knew anything he knew better than to say so, and kept his mouth shut, biding his time, even at CIA. I think that was ol Pres’s influence. (Sen Prescott Bush, George H.W.’s father.) Like father, like son. Neither one knew when to strike.”

Inman, then? The CIA’s deputy director under Adm. Stansfield Turner in the Carter Administration had been chief of the the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) where Woodward had worked before becoming a reporter. “Too far afield,” said the Ench. “The CIA was so up to their ass in shit and wanted no part of what Hunt and Liddy were up to, that’s why we had to get Helms out of Dodge. Schlesinger [Helms’s successor as DCI for four months before replacing Melvin Laird at Defense] didn’t know squat — that’s why he had his boys round up the ‘Family Jewels’ —  and that boy scout Colby simply let it all out. But none of them were in the loop for Watergate.”

This requires some explanation (see Parts 1 and 2): Helms, Director of CIA since JFK fired Allen Dulles in 1962, was named Ambassador to the Court of the Shah of Iran as Watergate ensnared the Ench in 1973. The palace of the Peacock Throne and the massive Embassy became safe-houses for the man who “kept the secrets.”⁵ But Helms was brought back to testify about the long list of illegalities, the Family Jewels compiled on orders of interim DCI James Schlesinger. Helms brought himself down by his own lies to Congress about the secret war that deposed the elected government of Chile in 1973, details of which emerged because Colby released the Family Jewels to congressional committees and publication in their multi-volume reports, trapping his old colleague Helms in a perjury rap. The massive and illegal (warrantless), domestic surveillance operation at the heart of Watergate, involved the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, DIA and military intelligence operatives in a secret war against the American people.⁶

Mitchell was musing over possible suspects for Deep throat at CIA. Angleton, the counter-intelligence maven whose lines went out everywhere? “Now there was one weird son-of-a-bitch. Certainly capable of it. He actually thought the whole Sino-Soviet split was just a ruse, a “strategic deception” and everybody who told us the situation was ripe for exploitation must be a secret Soviet mole, even Kissinger, fer chrissakes! Everybody else figured Angleton‘s paranoia was paralyzing the Agency so maybe he was his own damn mole, hah!” He chewed it over.

“No, I always figured it was that fucking Mormon, Felt.”

No  shit? Mark Felt? Felt had risen to #2 in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and fully expected to be named director by Nixon when Hoover died in May 1972, much to the relief of everyone who had survived his 48-year reign-of-terror. Much to Felt’s disappointment, the job went to Mitchell’s guy, L. Patrick Gray. So, at minimum, Felt had a motive. By then, what Nixon had dismissed to the press as a “third-rate” burglary of the Watergate had already been botched, which begged the question of why two former CIA guys, (Howard Hunt, James McCord) an FBI man (G. Gordon Liddy) and five Cuban gunsels (Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, Frank Sturgis), their pockets stuffed with $100 bills and locksmith tools, were there in first place, that fateful June 17, 1972. Nixon’s inner circle pondered whether the CIA had set them up. They connived to keep their burglars’ mouths shut, the start of the cover-up, the leaks and the loud noises that ended the “quiet option” starting with McCord’s confessional letter to Judge John Sirica. That really bothered the Ench.

In July, Gray unleashed Felt to pursue radical opponents of the Vietnam War: “Hunt to exhaustion. No holds barred.”⁷ Officially, Hoover had banned those black-bag jobs for six years, fearing their exposure could loosen his hold on the Bureau. With Gray’s go-ahead, Felt and the head of the intelligence division, Edwin S. Miller, authorized special units to wiretap and surveill friends and relatives, even break into the homes and offices of suspected “terrorists” to “prevent violence and other subversive acts rather than to wait until the bomb has exploded.” A diversion? Concocted by Gray to keep Felt out of the Watergate loop or vice versa, there were more theories than facts but plenty of facts pointing in many directions. No, that was something the Ench had been trying to get Hoover to do since they came in.    

References

1. Statement attributed to Cheney’s legal adviser, David Addington, by Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 330.

2. [unsigned editorial],”Watch What We Do,” Washington Post, July 7, 1969, p. A22.

3. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/10/obituaries/john-n-mitchell-dies-at-75-major-figure-in-watergate.html?pagewanted=all

4. Joseph Mysak and George Marlin, Fiscal Administration: Analysis and Applications for the Public Sector. (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks, 1991); William P. Kittredge and David W. Kreutzer, “We Only Pay the Bills: The Ongoing Effort to Disfranchise Virginia’s Voters” (2001)..

5. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, (New York: Knopf, 1979).

6. Seymour Hersh’s expose’ of Operation CHAOS, the Huston Plan (the “Plumbers’ unit) and link to Watergate appeared in a series including  “Underground for the CIA in New York: An Ex-Agent Tells of Spying on Students, New York Times, Dec. 29, 1974, p.1; “Hunt Tells of Early Work for a CIA Domestic Unit,” Dec. 31, 1974, p. 1.

7. Gray’s note to Felt quoted in Woodward, The Secret Man, op. cit.

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