- OPEN SOURCEUS/1; ATTN: HD/23; HST/2
Do crocodiles
fly?
[No doubt unbeknownst to this author, but Eugene Meyer, Kay Graham's father, from whom she inherited ownership of the Washington Post in 1959, was the primary financier of young George H. W. Bush's first 1957 foray into the mid-land oil patches of West Texas, which became Bush's Zapato Oil.
[No doubt unbeknownst to this author, but Eugene Meyer, Kay Graham's father, from whom she inherited ownership of the Washington Post in 1959, was the primary financier of young George H. W. Bush's first 1957 foray into the mid-land oil patches of West Texas, which became Bush's Zapato Oil.
In late 1988, Kay
Graham was the secret guest lecturer at CIA's Langley HQ, as the then CIA
director William H. Webster furiously lobbied Graham to lobby her father's
financial benefactee and family friend, former DCI GHW Bush, to keep his
intelligence directorship.
WSM's and his colleague at that time, Mark Perry, asked then Post Outlook Editor David Ignatius if he "would like a transcript?"
With wary surprise on his face, he
not-so-demurely declined to get involved in the high politics between the
Washington Post, the CIA and the White House, putting both hands up in a
stopping motion: "No, no, no..." was all he said. During a subsequent
discussion, however, David did say that he played tennis with Webster, and that
Webster "cheats on line calls..."
"Holy s**t, David--that's his
precise God-damned function as the DCI," both of us practically shouted in unison. David just
shrugged his shoulders. Discussion over...
"And I suppose 'SIRO' is a meaningless State Department cable tag designator for the TS/SCI codeword-cleared "ROGER CHANNEL" for US covert operations traffic?" ... David?
"And I suppose 'SIRO' is a meaningless State Department cable tag designator for the TS/SCI codeword-cleared "ROGER CHANNEL" for US covert operations traffic?" ... David?
He doesn't know, for sure, apparently. He
titled his third spy-thriller, (a quite excellent read), 'SIRO.'
Go figure...
(Separately, his statements either comport
with, or not quite comport with, David's later reputation in certain sensitive
quarters, wherein WSM has labored for the last decade. Combined, they give credence to certain particular members of the
Navy SEAL and SpecOPS communities, who still occasionally refer, perhaps
not-so-fastidiously, to David
as "the
Washington Post Chief of Station.")]
---------------------------------------------------|
14 January 2011
Scandal Almost Sank Secret Cambodia War
BlackNET Intelligence Channel - OPEN SOURCE
US/1
US/1
[ed.note: Corrupt
officials in Afghanistan? US/1 is shocked…shocked.
Bob WOODWARD, back in
the day, used to say that he sought ‘Holy Shit’ stories.
Unbeknownst
to us, sometime Member David IGNATIUS, then the editor of the Washington
Post’s Sunday OUTLOOK section, apparently ambled over to INR-DepSEC Morton
ABRAMOWITZ’s office at the State Department for a verbal brief.
To SIRO or not to
SIRO, that was the question … [Special Intelligence Reporting Office]
ABRAMOWITZ
recorded his outrage at our story about Thai Generals stealing the CIA's
Cambodian resistance money in a TOP SECRET cable we recovered soon
enough thereafter:
“They
HAVE the ROGER CHANNEL…” ABRAMOWITZ declared on the ROGER CHANNEL, the
secret encrypted channel reserved only for the discussion of classified covert
operations.
Member
Tony KIMERY, and retired Member Mark PERRY, and Scott MALONE [US/1] ambled in
to the Washington Post’s OUTLOOK section back in October 1988. After
much cigarette smoke, some yelling, and at least one table pounding, US/1 was
later heard to mutter as he was being escorted off the premises: “Yeah…we got a
‘NO Shit’ story--Thai Generals are corrupt?”Oh
well, never mind. Ben BRADLEE, the Executive Editor of the Washigton Post,
did get himself burned in effigy outside the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, a first
for him.
Needless,
to say, the Thai generals kept the CIA money...]
[ROGER, ROGER -- SIRO Out...]
[ROGER, ROGER -- SIRO Out...]
NO DISSEMINATION [lifted], above. Article below is OPEN SOURCE.
WASHINGTON POST - OUTLOOK
October 30, 1988, Sunday, Final Edition
How Scandal Almost Sank Our Secret Cambodia War
By Mark Perry and William Scott Malone
A $ 3.5-MILLION corruption scandal involving Thai military officers nearly derailed funding last summer for the Reagan administration's covert program to assist non-communist rebels in Cambodia.
The scandal surfaced last spring, when Central Intelligence Agency officers in Thailand involved in running the covert program uncovered evidence that Thai military officers, and perhaps businessmen, had skimmed money from the U.S. covert-assistance program, which totaled $ 12 million in fiscal 1988.
The CIA then informed the Senate Intelligence Committee, which sent a team of auditors to Thailand to review the program. The auditors reported back to the committee on July 12 about "corruption which had been uncovered" in the Cambodia aid program, according to a late July document prepared by the State Department and made available by a source in the executive branch. The theft of U.S. funds appears to have totaled about $ 3.5 million, according to intelligence sources.
The corruption problem emerged at a delicate time, when the Reagan administration was hoping to expand U.S. support for the resistance forces that are fighting Vietnamese troops in Cambodia. The goal of the program isn't simply to drive out the Vietnamese, but to help develop a non-communist alternative to the communist Khmer Rouge -- so that if the Vietnamese eventually withdraw their troops in a negotiated settlement of the war, the Khmer Rouge won't simply fill the vacuum with another bloody dictatorship….
-----------------------------------------
http://WScottMalone.blogspot.com/,
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
[redacted];
US/1 MEMBER CONTRIBUTIONS
[ed.note: (Check how
we spelled Muammar Gadhafi back in the day.)
In 1988-9, Colonel
Gadhafi had supplied some $50 million in Libyan cash to his Panamanian
money-laundering amigo, General Manuel Noriega.
According to then secret
US intelligence documents that had come our way at the time, Gadhafi's $50
million cash infusion helped the Panamanian strong-man withstand the harsh
rhetoric and grand jury indictments emanating from Noriega's once-close amigos
at the Yankee running-dog CIA and military for almost a year.
But as the 1988 US
presidential elections approached, the secret effort to unseat Noriega,
negligible to begin with, was put off until after Vice President Bush was sworn
in a President in January 1989.
As events would
unfold, the provocatively head-lined Washington Post article (below)
could have been entitled "How to start a war against a friendly dictator
without really trying too hard."
There remains much
more back-story still to be written on the escalating repercussions that
followed and metastasized from this one single article.
The George H.W. Bush
Administration, through the auspices of then Secretary of State, James L.
Baker, III, leaked to the US News & World Report the claim
that President Bush 41 had signed a until then quite 'secret,' $10 million
Covert Action Finding authorizing a limited program for "regime
change."
The calculated leak in response to the our article had come on a SATURDAY to a weekly magazine whose deadline is FRIDAY, as was the Washington Post's for Sunday Outlook Section articles. Needless to say, havoc reigned at the Washington Post's fifth-floor newsroom. latest possible Saturday evening "stop-the-presses" deadline moment neared...
Then Outlook Editor David Ignatius rushed over to the Post's 15th Street headquarters, absolute, zero-hour deadline clock tick-toc-ed away. I was ordered not to come anywhere near the Post building, and not even to try to call him there again unless I had a major story-changing, on-the-record quote.
Period. Slam. Dial-tone.
The Sunday Washington Post for April 23, 1989, was an hour and half late in arriving at the distributors. One of the earliest places in DC to catch the widely and much anticipated Sunday Post was the distributor at the corner of 23rd and M Street, just outside of Georgetown, where I lived at the time.
The calculated leak in response to the our article had come on a SATURDAY to a weekly magazine whose deadline is FRIDAY, as was the Washington Post's for Sunday Outlook Section articles. Needless to say, havoc reigned at the Washington Post's fifth-floor newsroom. latest possible Saturday evening "stop-the-presses" deadline moment neared...
Then Outlook Editor David Ignatius rushed over to the Post's 15th Street headquarters, absolute, zero-hour deadline clock tick-toc-ed away. I was ordered not to come anywhere near the Post building, and not even to try to call him there again unless I had a major story-changing, on-the-record quote.
Period. Slam. Dial-tone.
The Sunday Washington Post for April 23, 1989, was an hour and half late in arriving at the distributors. One of the earliest places in DC to catch the widely and much anticipated Sunday Post was the distributor at the corner of 23rd and M Street, just outside of Georgetown, where I lived at the time.
It was a lonely vigil
on that pleasant April evening, but as the minutes turned into an hour, I was
the only one left still standing around waiting for the Sunday paper.
Looking forlorn, and
holding my putz...
But a half an hour
later, the Post truck drove up, and there was the story in black and white.
The next week, General
Noriega, pounding a silver-plated machete on his presidential podium, denounced
the leaked $10 million CIA funding claim, and promptly called off Panama's
first scheduled elections since he had seized power in 1982. (CK-date).
Eight months later, employing whatever little Libyan cash he still had to hand, Noriega fled in to the deposed-dictator mists of confusion, with U.S. Delta and special forces at his heals. Unlike Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi, Manuel Noriega surrendered and lived, though ever since 1990 in a Florida federal prisonand most recently, a French prison.]
Eight months later, employing whatever little Libyan cash he still had to hand, Noriega fled in to the deposed-dictator mists of confusion, with U.S. Delta and special forces at his heals. Unlike Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi, Manuel Noriega surrendered and lived, though ever since 1990 in a Florida federal prisonand most recently, a French prison.]
Sunday, Final Edition
The Panama Debacle -- Uncle Sam
Wimps Out
By William Scott Malone
A YEAR AGO, the United States was trying to intimidate Panama's
Manuel Antonio Noriega and oust him from power. Today, the opposite seems to
have happened: It is Noriega who is intimidating the United States and our
power in Panama that is crumbling.
The Panama fiasco is a
classic lesson in the misuse of American power. Indeed, it seems almost like a
re-run of the 1982-84 Lebanon debacle: the United States faced a challenge from
an intractable foe; administration hardliners responded with aggressive
military options, but without a practical political strategy; the Pentagon,
worried about the risks to U.S. forces, opposed the hardliners. The resulting
policy was a half-hearted middle course that accomplished little and left
America's allies hanging.
Added to this messy
mix was election-year politics. Panama became a political hot potato during the
1988 campaign. The Reagan-Bush administration, which had provoked the
confrontation with Noriega, then walked away from it as the election
approached. They never returned to the fray -- to the point that today, the
United States can't even provide a radio transmitter for the Panamanian
opposition we helped create!
The folly of our Panama policy was captured by New York Sen. Alphonse D'Amato (R), who likened it to "setting your hair on fire and trying to put it out with a hammer."
[US/1’s All Time
Favorite Quote EVER…]
The following
reconstruction of how Noriega outfoxed the United States is based on classified
U.S. documents and interviews with over a dozen American officials and
Panamanian opposition figures. The State Department and the National
Security Council declined to comment on any of the information. Some of the
evidence remains controversial within the U.S. government, which has been
bitterly divided for more than a year about Panama policy. Among the
highlights:
------------------------------
October 11, 1988
