IT’S PRIVATE. That is now the word from organizers as to whether or not the public can listen-in to the conversation of 16 scientists meeting to remix the theory of evolution at Altenberg, Austria in July. So while Konrad Lorenz Institute where the …

Emperor Augustus’ sacred eel pond

IT’S PRIVATE. That is now the word from organizers as to whether or not the public can listen-in to the conversation of 16 scientists meeting to remix the theory of evolution at Altenberg, Austria in July. So while Konrad Lorenz Institute where the symposium will take place may not exactly resemble the sacred pond of Emperor Augustus where priests read the entrails of eels and advised what was to befall Rome — and evolutionary science is nowhere near as primitive — there is still public concern about the emergence of evo high priests, as reflected in a substantial response to my recent series of evolution stories:

• Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution?
• The Invite — “Altenberg 16″ Evolution Summit
• Richard Dawkins Renounces Darwinism As Religion

Evolutionary biologist, Massimo Pigliucci, a co-architect of the KLI “major event”, emailed me saying “somebody could do a sociological study of science and fringe science just based on the developments from our interview.”

As a rising star on the lecture circuit , Pigliucci knows there is much public interest in a new theory of evolution. Why then must the Altenberg proceedings remain closed?

Here’s my abstract:

The public says a reformulation of the theory of evolution is bigger than the Altenberg 16 — no matter how brilliant the individuals may be. People think a remix of evolution is high priority and say they have a right to know, since scientists are publicly funded. They want open discussion and say such information should not be locked down for future book and lecture DVD sales. There is too much of that kind of industry already corrupting science.

Following is feedback on the evo stories linked above — what developmental biologist Stuart Kauffman might consider part of the “ceaseless creativity” of the universe.

I was happy to see Richard Leakey’s web site pick up the Dawkins story. It was actually Richard Leakey, then director of the Nairobi museum, who secured the plane for my flight into Olduvai to talk with his mother, the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey.

(left to right) Richard, Louis and Mary Leakey – ( Image Source)

A few of the science sites that picked up the Altenberg story include:

• Genome Technology Online
• Geoscience Research Institute
• Nature Publishing Group
• Society of Systematic Biologists

The Altenberg articles have been discussed online in at least a half dozen languages:

• Latvian
• Indonesian
• Portuguese
• Dutch
• Italian
• Spanish

And they’ve been posted to religious sites, such as the Harekrishnas and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Intelligent Designers are apparently some of the most vigorous bloggers on evo, and Paul Nelson’s column on the Altenberg story for Uncommon Descent generated 206 comments.

Democratic Underground, always a fierce political battleground, took up the debate, excerpting natural philosopher and zoologist Stan Salthe’s comments regarding natural selection, i.e., “Summarizing we can see the import of Darwinian theory of evolution is just unexplainable caprice from top to bottom. What evolves is just what happened to happen.”

Michael Purugganan, a professor of genomics and one of the A-16 scientists, emailed from his lab at NYU to say (in jest?) “I’ll have appropriate buttons or pins made that say Altenberg 16 . . . . they will be distributed at the meeting.”

And Yale professor of ecology and evolution Gunter Wagner, another of the A-16 – who I was unable to reach for comment for the original story – wrote “Hey that is great! This is one button I will keep!”

But there have been grumblings elsewhere in the scientific community about who was left out of the A-16 invite. The name most mentioned as crucial to a successful redo of evolutionary theory and missing from the A-16 list is that of Harvard evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin.

Lewontin told me he would not go, however. “No. No way.” Aside from any personal objection to the content of the conference, there may be another reason Lewontin is not attending. According to one admirer, Lewontin doesn’t like to fly.

One of the other giants I interviewed for the first Altenberg piece – paleontologist Niles Eldredge, originator of the punctuated equilibrium theory with Steve Gould – was apparently also not invited. Eldredge told me he only “knows of” Massimo Pigliucci, and actually described himself as “a very conventional evolutionary biologist”. “I disappoint people sometimes,” he said.

Evolution’s star public intellectual Richard Dawkins might have been too much of an anchor for the A-16 discussions. He wasn’t invited as he hinted during our recent Q&A at Barnes & Noble in Tribeca:

“You’ve been taken in by the rhetoric. . . . You asked the question: Have I been invited? I’m sorry to say I get invited to lots of things and I literally can’t remember whether I was invited to this particular one or not.”

But it’s being viewed as a “major event” I told him.

“By whom I wonder?”, he jabbed.

There was a disgruntled posting by “Jim C” from Melbourne on Dawkins.net
saying, “We may indeed know more about the nature of DNA and the complex details of its operations, but it is the height of intellectual arrogance to describe the evolutionary theory moving away from a “population genetic-centered view”.”

With noticeable rivalry in the scientific community then, one of the qualifications for the A-16 no doubt must have been congeniality.

Massimo Pigliucci’s colleague from Stony Brook, evolutionary biologist Doug Futuyma, for instance, is not on the list either.

University of Torono biochemist Larry Moran, who runs a popular website called Sandwalk, which considers itself the rival to SEED blogger PZ Myers’ Pharyngula, asked me: “Why was Doug Futuyma not invited?”

Niles Eldredge shared the following with me about Futuyma’s treatment of him and Steve Gould in his book:

“If you open Doug Futuyma’s book – the guy at Stony Brook who’s probably one of the most famous evolutionary biologists in the country now if for no other reason than he wrote that widely-read text book – you’re not going to find that Steve Gould and I get a very good shake in that book. And you’re not going to find I don’t think an extended discussion of self-organization, if it’s even mentioned.”

Maybe Futuyma’s lack of interest in self-organization – a subject which will be explored at the A-16 meeting – kept him off the list.

That Lewontin, Eldredge, Dawkins and Futuyma will not be a part of the so-called “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” discussion in Austria does diminish the event. But there’s plenty of fresh talent out there as well. And Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd Muller have presumably found some.

Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College and board member of KLI, is presenting his theory of the origins of form at Altenberg — the current Synthesis, remixed 70 years ago, has been without a theory of form. Newman says he doesn’t know half the people who are going to be there and that scientists really need a forum in which to interact with like-minded scientists. Newman added, “These groups are kind of carefully chosen so as not to create fights”.

The real disconcerting issue, though, is the public being shut out. The New York Times has now asked to attend after reading my Altenberg story. They too have been turned away. Not the first time the Times has noted my work, incidentally: “New York Times Fesses Up to Another Rip Off” [see… http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur11182004.html].

Larry Moran at Sandwalk agreed with my suggestion that the conference somehow be made public. Moran linked my posting of the A-16 invite , to which one reader (The Monkeyman) responded:

“It is a shame that this and other conferences that hold interest to many budding scientists who cannot get the money to attend. . . will not be streamed or recorded and put up for download.”

Newman says “private” maybe evokes the wrong kind of image. He says he agrees that a lot of science is publicly funded and he does feel a responsibility to make his research accessible to the public. But he also thinks the event may not be designed for “prime time”.

Says Newman, “If I were to take my undigested ideas and make them accessible to the public, I would lose my reputation very fast because I probably have a lot of stupid ideas also.”

Gunter Wagner commented on Moran’s web site in response to the Altenberg piece, that he didn’t like being lumped together with the likes of philosopher Jerry Fodor and Stuart Pivar.

Fodor wrote the now infamous “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings” story in the London Review of Books arguing that the central story of the theory of evolution is wrong in a way that can’t be repaired, which led to a fierce online exchange among leading evolutionary thinkers hosted by Stan Salthe.

Pivar is the independent scientist whose work has been skewered on the blogosphere for not being a complete theory of evolution.

But despite the controversy, look for more commentary from Jerry Fodor on evolution without adaptation. He’s taken a year off from teaching as State of New Jersey philosopher at Rutgers University to write a book with Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, a professor at the University of Arizona, who Fodor says is handling the biology. Fodor also says he has tenure and is not worried about fallout.

But Salthe also told me he doesn’t like being lumped together with Fodor and Pivar, because he has published papers in the field. On the other hand, this doesn’t seem to make a difference in his attempts to contact A-16′s Gunter Wagner, who Salthe says won’t respond. Salthe, says he thinks his view on natural selection makes him “poison”.

Fodor says the careers of most evolutionary scientists are tied up with natural selection.

Pigliucci, defends the natural selection turf. He told me this:

“So to say that natural selection is out of the picture seems to me to discard literally thousands and thousands of empirical papers. And I don’t think anybody can afford to do that, let alone Fodor, who is apparently not familiar with that literature.”

But Salthe says you can’t dismiss the censorship going on in the evo debate. He recently sent me his correspondence with the neo-Darwinian journal TREE (Trends in Ecology and Evolution) in which he asked them to publish his letter arguing to “save the phenomenon of convergent evolution even if it seems inconvenient” to the Darwinian perspective on organic evolution. Salthe was responding to an article TREE published suggesting the concept of convergent evolution be eliminated based on a totally genetic analysis. TREE refused to publish Salthe’s letter.

Convergent evolution he says happens when different species become similar without involving “similar genetic representation”. Examples of this he notes are old world vultures evolving from hawks and new world vultures evolving from storks. Here’s Salthe’s letter to TREE and their responses:

10 February 2008
Dr. Katia Bargum
Acting Editor
Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Sir/Madam

In Volume 23, Number 1, there is an opinion paper by Arendt and Reznick that I think requires comment, in that it redefines Convergent Evolution out of existence. Would it be appropriate/acceptable to submit a short rejoinder of just a few paragraphs?

Stan Salthe
Biological Sciences
Binghamton University

11 Feb. 2008

Dear Dr. Salthe,

Many thanks for your email. In the case of responses to published articles, we generally encourage authors to submit the letter they would be considering, or a summary of their argument. If you would like to send us such an outline, I would be glad to consider it further for publication.

Best regards
Katia

[Salthe sent in his outline. See… Concerning A Proposed Deconstruction Of Convergent Evolution - S.N. Salthe, February, 2008.]

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Dear Stanley,

Many thanks for providing an outline for your letter. However, I regret to say that we have already commissioned a letter presenting a very similar counter-argument to Arendt and Reznick, and this precludes one from commissioning another article on this point.

I am sorry to disappoint you. I intend no criticism of your work, and wish you the best of luck in publishing your letter elsewhere.

Very best wishes,
Katia

Salthe says the TREE people no doubt went to his web site and saw his critique of natural selection and reacted. “And that is it!” – he said. “You know, forget it! This guy is poison.” He then wrote back to TREE saying: “I am glad you have found an appropriate author for this idea.”

PZ Myers/Pharyngula, who Richard Dawkins quoted adoringly at Barnes & Noble last weekend, again trashed Stuart Pivar’s work in his blog after reading the Altenberg 16 story, but liked the fact that I’d interviewed Richard Lewontin.

Pivar says he has in fact taken the advice of NASA minerologist Robert Hazen and early on approached mainstream evo publishers. He has been repeatedly rejected he says, but continues to fight on, making the point that he’s the only one with a model.

Pivar recently offered a research grant to Massimo Pigliucci and his lab to study his Engines of Evolution book, following an exchange of emails with Pigliucci over several months.

Pigliucci said he considered the gesture “bribery” and refused the offer, adding that he does not share Pivar’s enthusiasm about his theory of form.

Richard Milner, Steve Gould’s former editor and author of Darwin’s Universe (forthcoming 2009), told me that Darwin, while terrified of controversy himself, was no shrinking violet in sending out his disciples, Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”), et al., to proselytize for him. Milner said Darwin kept a list of those he converted to his theory and that Huxley was shut down by the police for holding meetings on Sundays where he’d present his science lectures as sermons, calling them “Lay Sermons”.

I also received an email from a microbiologist named Anders in Denmark, who said Pivar’s was not sound science – which I passed on to Pivar to address. Pivar said he emailed Anders, who had not read his book, and told him he was sending him a copy for review.

Pivar says he welcomed a recent email with constructive comment from Stuart Newman on the subject of form.

Stuart Newman – (Image Source)

Newman told me this in a phone conversation about the theory of form he’ll be presenting at the Altenberg meeting:

“The idea is that when multicellularity first emerged [a half billion years ago] the products of a number of genes that existed in single-celled organisms, and had evolved for single cell purposes, began to mobilize physical forces and physical processes that are characteristic of materials at a larger (‘meso’) scale. For instance, single-celled organisms or individual cells can secrete molecules, but it doesn’t really have any consequence for the structure of the organism. But if it’s in a multicellular context, then secreted molecules can form gradients that provide patterns. . . . It’s a simple form of self-organization.

” This can help explain the burst of animal evolution that happened in the Cambrian explosion. Consider, in a more complex example, two very distinct physical processes that existed in the single-celled world, the production of secreted molecules and intracellular biochemical oscillations. When they found themselves together in a multicellular-scale structure, their combined effect was to make segmentation all-but-inevitable. In fact, we know that modern-day embryos, including those of humans, still use these ancient “generic” physical processes to form their segmented backbones.

” When multicellularity emerged, new physics was brought to bear on the formation of organisms. It’s not that these physical processes didn’t exist before multicellularity. They just didn’t pertain to the development of organisms before. . . .

” At the point when the modern animal body plans first emerged [half a billion years ago] just about all of the genes that are used in modern organisms to make embryos were already there. They had evolved in the single-celled world but they weren’t doing embryogenesis. What did it take to get them to do embryogenesis? It took a change in scale. What led that change in scale is that, possibly due to alterations in external conditions, cells became sticky. And once they became sticky, you had multicellular organisms, and mobilization of the self-organizing physical processes of mesoscale materials.”

Newman also said people are working on pre-biotic evolution, but nobody would be presenting a paper on that subject at Altenberg in July.

Fast forwarding a half billion years, Newman’s got a very interesting article in the March 2008 issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism, called “Evolution: The Public’s Problem and the Scientists’ ” in which he observes that, “The nearly exclusive focus on genes to account for biological change at the levels of both individual development and large-scale evolution, like the cash nexus of market economies, collapses quality into quantity, life into symbol.”

Speaking of symbols, Ben Stein’s “Expelled” film people contacted me “to get involved” with the project after reading the Altenberg story. Curiously, they take a pro-war position, and I have not responded to them.

Sam Smith, the inimitable editor of Undernews, the online publication of Progressive Review, excerpted and linked the Altenberg story with pinups of the various evo thinkers not invited to the A-16 meeting (including the late Andy Warhol), plus that of Massimo Pigliucci. The Undernews comments were growing tense last time I looked.

Financial guru Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing in the Bush I administration, included the A-16 invite story on her Solari.com “Top Picks” list.

Canada’s Financial Post and National Post linked the Dawkins story.

New York’s Daily News (cache link) posted the Altenberg piece.

And Fox Television News carried the A-16 story on Sean Hannity’s forum.

So the public is craving evo enlightenment. But Massimo Pigliucci has said he will keep the lid on the Altenberg proceedings regardless and that he and his European co-organizer Gerd Muller will comment for the group only after returning home.

“You’re saying that you’re ruling out even a panel in Altenberg at the end of the conference?” – I asked Pigliucci.

“You mean on the order of: Doctor, how’s the patient doing?” – he responded. “No, the meeting is private.”

Suzan Mazur says her interest in evolution began with a Cessna single engine flight into Olduvai Gorge, across a closed Kenyan-Tanzanian border, to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Their meeting followed discovery of the 3.5 million year old hominid footprints by Leakey and her team at Laetoli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laetoli. Mazur says Leakey was the only reason the Tanzanian authorities agreed to give landing clearance. Her reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

(NOTE: An earlier version of this article was published here.)

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

Hugh Eakin’s recent “Treasure Hunt” story in The New Yorker profiling Marion True, the former Getty curator on trial in Rome for conspiracy to traffic in ancient art, devotes a column to True’s 1991 paper on the destruction of ancient cultural sites, …

Hugh Eakin’s recent “Treasure Hunt” story in The New Yorker profiling Marion True, the former Getty curator on trial in Rome for conspiracy to traffic in ancient art, devotes a column to True’s 1991 paper on the destruction of ancient cultural sites, giving the impression that the Italian government is to blame for looting half of that country’s Greek and Roman history because it may have neglected its sites – Eakin doesn’t note that the entire country is an ancient site. Eakin also suggests that the Italians lack seriousness in prosecuting the two-year old antiquities trial in which dealers Bob Hecht and Giacomo Medici are named as co-conspirators – even though Medici’s already been convicted, sentenced to ten years and is appealing the court’s decision. Moreover, Eakin reduces Italy’s efforts in seeking the return of its cultural patrimony to a sports rivalry between the art carabinieri and ministry of culture – he doesn’t illuminate that from the outset one faction fought to get the loot back from American museums with no strings attached, i.e., it did not want to cave in to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s demands for loans.

What New York Times contributor Hugh Eakin particularly fails to do is reveal names, details and sources of information in his 14-page New Yorker cover story — even of the name of the editor of Connoisseur? Or give further insight into the actual looting and trafficking that’s taken place. And nowhere is there mention of the role played for decades by the NYT as an enabler of the trafficking, which Met Ancient Near East expert Oscar Muscarella first exposed years ago. [LINK Antiquities Whistleblower Oscar White Muscarella]

The above fragments, for example – which may serve as clues to the mindset of those charged in the Rome trial – were sold by Hecht in a 1988 Atlantis Antiquities Greek and Etruscan Archaic art show in New York that was highly publicized by the NYT. Times reporter Rita Reif barked dollar amounts in her pre-sale coverage, previously discussed on these pages [LINK Add NYT To Bob Hecht Antiquities Ring Organigram? ] – even of the exhibition’s fragments, noting a starting price of $500. Said Reif:

“Some of the richest detail is on fragments of painted vessels. Among the most compelling are. . .three headless satyrs. . . One of the smallest fragments in the show, less than two inches high, shows a tough-faced Thracian boxer scarred near the eye and jaw, with a hook nose and protruding chin, and with both hands visible – his right hand already wrapped while he draws the thong taut on his left.”

However the fragments that Reif described above in the NYT, and that are pictured at the top of this story, were never assigned a price on Hecht’s list at the time of the actual sale because by then they were already SOLD and disappeared into the market for an undisclosed amount.

Hecht pal and long-time Museum of Fine Arts curator of classical art, Cornelius Vermeule also promoted the sale, writing an introduction to Hecht’s catalog. Vermeule was one of Marion True’s early mentors and first introduced True to Bob Hecht, which Eakin surprisingly does mention in his article.

The boxer fragment Reif refers to (above, left) is from a red figured wine cup, 500 bc, proto-Panaitian painter. It indeed depicts the fierce profile of a boxer wrapping his hand. He bears a nasty scar under his eye and gash under his chin. And knowing what we now know about Bob Hecht’s history of thuggery, the fragment appears to be somewhat autobiographical. [LINK "Bully Bob" Hecht And The Euphronios Questions]

Hecht’s affection for and exhibition of the second piece on the right, three “ithyphallic” silenes (satyrs) reveling, painted by Sophilos, 570 bc, may be Hecht’s personal statement about the conspiracy itself.

One of the silenes carries a drinking cup, a karchesion. Vermeule describes the procession as “woolly” and “charming” with “nymphs on their minds”. Or perhaps a Euphronios vase or two. . .

Suzan Mazur’s stories on art and antiquities have been published in The Economist, Financial Times, Connoisseur, Archaeology (cover) and Newsday. Some of her other reports have appeared on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox television news programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

Much has been written about the CIA cocaine operation at Mena, Arkansas during Bill and Hillary Clinton’s watch as governor and first lady of that state in the 1980s. So I wondered why Carl Bernstein left it out of his book on Hillary Clinton, A Woman …

“Good journalism requires a degree of courage in today’s climate, a quality now in scarce supply in our mass media. Many current assumptions in America–about race, about economics, about the fate of our cities–need to be challenged, and we might start with the media.”
–Carl Bernstein, New Republic, “The Idiot Culture”

*************

Carl Bernstein Booktalk: A Woman in Charge
10/5/2007, Barnes & Noble, 82nd Street & Broadway, New York
(Some of the less glowing excerpts)

“. . .[H]appily I think we have a real biography here and what you end up with is a story and a woman’s struggle that enables you to decide with your own values, I hope, whether or not you think she should be the president of the United States. . . .

I learned that in 1989 Bill Clinton had fallen in love with another woman and wanted to leave the marriage. And Hillary, as Betsy Wright, Bill’s chief of staff in the gubernatorial years, told me, Hillary wouldn’t give him a pass. . . . And Betsy Wright sat down with him and said you have to tell me about the other women and whether or not it is going to cause you and Hillary such harm that you’ll never recover from it. And she told me that she had brought another person with Bill Clinton – a witness – because Clinton had a way of forgetting unpleasant things that he was confronted with. . . .

I first heard of him [Bill Clinton] from mutual friends maybe when I was 30 years old or so. We have many mutual friends. But only Hillary Clinton understood early on his sexual compulsions, as she called them, if they became known — and their effect became known — would make him politically unviable. And so she took it upon herself to try to contain their effect. . . .

So increasingly, she took it upon herself to try and contain and keep him politically viable as more and more of these rumors seeped out. So you have to ask yourself – what does this do to the psyche of a spouse? . . . And it came to occupy more and more — compromising, hiring lawyers, hiring private detectives to find out stuff about the women. And in some cases smearing the women. . .

I say in the last chapter of the book that Hillary Clinton has had a difficult relationship with the truth. . . . What do the missing billing records show? They show that she had a nickel dime law practice and that she wasn’t one of the great lawyers in America.”

[Bernstein also told the audience Hillary Clinton “failed the D.C. bar exam”, the only Yalie of the group of 700 or so to flunk.]

*************

TWO BOOKS ABOUT THE CLINTONS
Carl Bernstein’s —– Roger Morris’s

Much has been written about the CIA cocaine operation at Mena, Arkansas during Bill and Hillary Clinton’s watch as governor and first lady of that state in the 1980s. So I wondered why Carl Bernstein left it out of his book on Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge, when the argument put forth by Clinton biographer Roger Morris in his book, Partners in Power, was a particularly compelling one about the CIA operation taking place.

I decided to ask Bernstein formally for an explanation about this at his Hillary Clinton booktalk last Friday at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the Upper West Side, situated a safe distance from the Columbia University and New York University war protest crowds.

Indeed, it was a restrained standing-room-only audience with neighborhood retirees in attendance and one or two street people to give the mix some real New York flavor.

Bernstein told me in essence during the Q&A following his talk that there is no evidence there ever was a CIA cocaine operation at Mena that “Clinton” was aware of.

Roger Morris, however, stands by his investigation of the Clinton Arkansas years. The award winning journalist and former foreign service officer who also served on the senior staff of the Johnson and Nixon National Security Council, reviewed thousands of documents related to the Mena episode and conducted 100 interviews in Arkansas before reaching the conclusion that the “Clintons” knew of the operation from the inception.

My interview with Roger Morris about Mena ran on these pages in July. [Scoop: Deeper Into The Clintons' CIA Drug Nexus]

Following the Bernstein booktalk, I emailed Roger for his comment on Bernstein’s remarks. Here is Roger’s response:

*** # # # ***

“I may have mentioned to you that I reviewed the CB [Carl Bernstein] book at the behest of the Globe&Mail [ Book Review: The Woman Who Would Be Queen ... Or President], a review that was critical but was actually softer than what I might have said about him and the sad decline he represents. . . . [See also… Undernews: The Crash Of The Democratic Party ]

No one came to us with anything. Sally [Denton] got the [Barry] Seal archive from his widow after much hard work and several trips to New Orleans. The archive, which is now at the University of Nevada at Reno, or should be available there, I think, is what it is–exhaustive, unmistakable. The IRS pursued the widow for years. The CIA IG [CIA Inspector General] admitted to operations at Mena (though never drug trafficking, of course, there or anywhere else). Several law enforcement agencies, local, state and federal, had extensive records. I have rehearsed the documentation so many times. That on top of the corroborative/complimentary evidence from LD Brown, the Lasater connections [Dan Lasater, Arkansas bond dealer and Clinton friend convicted of drug trafficking], etc. etc.

Simply to ignore the story, as the apologists and (what grandma called) the fraidycats have is eloquent of the larger problem. And to believe that anything even a fraction of that magnitude went on there without Clinton being aware at some level beggars all imagination. But then Carl was not writing about him, I realize, and his book, among its many failures, is abysmal on Arkansas politics and the system there. Alas, I was a genuine admirer of Carl in the Watergate reporting (and was a source at one point), much beyond his ever-lightweight and subsequent sell-out co-author. Someday, of course, the Mena story will be opened further. But not from the Carl’s, not from this culture. . . .”

*** # # # ***

I first bumped into Carl Bernstein one late end-of-winter night in 1992 at Rocco’s, an Italian pastry shop on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, although I’d seen him some months earlier running around the warehouses just off Hudson Street wearing white shorts and a teeshirt with a towel around his neck — flashing a huge smile — and looking somewhat like a fish out of water in the then – offbeat West Village.

Bernstein was returning from NYU when he walked into Rocco’s, having just finished teaching a class in journalism. He was a bit overdressed for the mild weather in a navy cashmere coat.

We introduced ourselves, drank some tea – mint, I think, and talked. Bernstein was interested that I’d covered the Gulf War for Newsday’s editorial pages and for The Economist and that I’d recently been in Santa Barbara attending Prince Mohammed bin Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud’s opening a chair in Islamic Studies at USC–Santa Barbara, the prince’s alma mater.

As the conversation progressed, he asked me if I’d like to see his memorabilia at home several blocks away. (His place would later be featured in Architectural Digest.)

It was around midnight and I said no, but told him I was enjoying the conversation and that I’d walk with him in that direction.

We walked along West 4th Street past his AA meeting house, which he pointed out. He commented on how the West Village was the “most tolerant” neighborhood in New York. And we arrived at the Corner Bistro where I had a sherry and Bernstein did not.

It was a short sherry. Bernstein seemed uncomfortable around the drink. He also said something about not being able to sit for long periods of time anymore.

I, of course, could not let the evening end without quizzing him about who Deep Throat was. He gave me the standard answer and then asked for my telephone number, which he entered in his address book as we exited the Bistro and said goodnight.

We had no reason to really speak again until the Friday encounter at Barnes & Noble, which follows:

************

Suzan Mazur: I was wondering — speaking of omissions — why you left out from the book a discussion of the CIA drug operation in Mena, Arkansas.

Carl Bernstein: Why I left out any discussion of the CIA. . .

Suzan Mazur: Wait, let me finish please. Roger Morris, who’s a Liberal and served on the National Security Council senior staff of LBJ, wrote a book called Partners in Power all about the Clintons. He said, in an interview with me back in July in Scoop, the [independent] news agency based in New Zealand — said that there’s a numbing body of evidence based on

Carl Bernstein: I’m going to ask you to ask the question.

Suzan Mazur: based on 100 interviews he did in Arkansas and 2,000 documents that he reviewed that the Clintons knew from the inception of the CIA drug operation in Mena.

Carl Bernstein: I just want to answer your question.

Suzan Mazur: Well why did you leave it out?

Carl Bernstein: Can I answer your question?

Suzan Mazur: Also, I’d like to know . . .

Carl Bernstein: Slow down a second. I wanted to ask you first of all since you wrote a piece who you are

Suzan Mazur: You know me. We had a drink one night on Bleecker Street.

[Audience laughs and some applause.]

Carl Bernstein: It must have been a long time ago.

Suzan Mazur: About 10 [15] years ago. It was around midnight.

Carl Bernstein: But would you tell the people who you are.

[Fromtheaudience: “Ann Coulter.”]

Suzan Mazur: We had a conversation and you asked me if I’d like to come home with you.

Carl Bernstein: Thank you. Good. It couldn’t have been within the last 20 years. . . . Would you tell us your name.

Suzan Mazur: My name is Suzan Mazur. And I’d like to know why you’re shilling for the Clintons and why you’re burying this story.

Carl Bernstein: Okay, let me try and answer your series of so-called questions as well as plead amnesia.

Suzan Mazur: Everyone else [here] is laying back on the issues.

Carl Bernstein: It’s in bad taste. I don’t know what else to tell you.

Suzan Mazur: Bad taste?

Carl Bernstein: Okay, you’ve made the point already. Let’s try and be substantive here. About the so-called CIA operation in Mena, Arizona [sic]. And, indeed, if one wants to read about the so-called CIA operation in Mena, Arizona [sic] — the place to go is what you cite: Roger Morris’s book written about 10, 12 years ago, I believe. And Roger, who served on the National Security Council staff many years ago, I think, really got taken in for some bullshit.

And I say this with great respect for Roger and a lot of his work — that there is absolutely, as far as I could tell, if you want to know why I left it out of the book, because I don’t think there’s any substantive documentation or even indication that there was a CIA-drug running operation that Bill Clinton had either approved of or knew of as governor [of Arkansas]. I think the story is bullshit.

Suzan Mazur: Well he [Roger Morris] reviewed 2,000 documents.

[The organizers of the event are restless and are getting ready to shut me down.
Bernstein tells them: "No, that's okay."]

Carl Bernstein: Well I do want to finish up but I just want to answer your question. I think it’s bullshit.

Suzan Mazur: Well that’s important. . .

Carl Bernstein: Secondly, I don’t think I’m a shill for the Clintons.

Suzan Mazur: Well you are.

Carl Bernstein: I am?

Suzan Mazur: Yes. That’s the way you’re coming across.

Carl Bernstein: Well tell the Clintons that. I think you have no idea what you’re saying — you know what you’re saying, but I think you’re way off.

Suzan Mazur: Well why didn’t you mention that [Mena] in the book? That could have really cleared the Clintons.

Carl Bernstein: I’ll tell you why I didn’t mention it in the book. If you read the book
[One of the Barnes & Noble people comes over to warn me that I "have to stop" with the questions.]

Carl Bernstein: Take it home and read it. You will see. I say in the notes and the sources that when I found things that were not credible, I decided to leave them out of the book.

[Audience applause]

*************

Suzan Mazur’s reports have appeared in the Financial Times (cover), Economist, Forbes, Newsday and Philadelphia Inquirer editorial pages, Archaeology (cover), Connoisseur, CounterPunch, Progressive Review — “How Bush Got Bounced From Carlyle Board”, among others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

Several years ago, when I was trying to make the distinction between Lewis Lapham, the Editor of Harper ‘s Magazine — whose roots are in an old San Francisco banking family — and Lewis Lapham, the Central Intelligence Agency’s man, I was directed …

Richard Helms, chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Clandestine Services, asked the Agency to start funding a biochemical warfare program in 1953 called MKULTRA, which included the drugging of unwitting suspects in New York’s Greenwich Village with LSD and other hallucinogens. One of the safehouses was at 81 Bedford Street across from Chumley’s speakeasy. While many of Greenwich Village’s buildings today bear historic plaques, the CIA’s mind control experiments at 81 Bedford Street go unacknowledged.

Several years ago, when I was trying to make the distinction between Lewis Lapham, the Editor of Harper‘s Magazine — whose roots are in an old San Francisco banking family — and Lewis Lapham, the Central Intelligence Agency’s man, I was directed to author Doug Valentine by Lou Wolf, Editor of Covert Action Quarterly, who described Valentine as one of the most knowledgeable people on the CIA.

Valentine told me the two Laphams were not the same man. I was relieved. But in the next breath he said that Tony Lapham, Harper‘s Editor Lewis Lapham’s brother, had been both a covert CIA agent and General Counsel to the CIA, appointed in 1976 by then Director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush. I was again concerned.

Lewis Lapham has since left Harper‘s to start his own publication.

I’ve kept in touch with Doug, and recently asked him if he’d help me to flesh-out the new CIA book, Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, the New York Times National Security reporter.

Doug Valentine is a poet and also the author of several incredibly rich and revealing books on the workings of National Security. Best known of these is the Phoenix Program
about the Vietnam War and Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs.
His new book, Strength of the Pack, volume two about America’s war on drugs, will be published next year by the University of Kansas Press.

Strength of the Wolf documents the history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The FBN rubbed up against the CIA and FBI until it was finally rubbed out by “the Establishment” in 1968. Valentine attributes the demise of the FBN to the bureau’s success in penetrating the Mafia and the French connection and case-making agents uncovering “the Establishment’s ties to organized crime”.

Click Images For Amazon Purchase Pages

Unlike the Weiner book’s interviews with 10 CIA Directors, Valentine says the CIA did its best to prevent Strength of the Wolf from going forward. My interview with Doug Valentine follows.

Author Douglas Valentine

Suzan Mazur: The New York Times National Security reporter, Tim Weiner, is out with a 60-year history of the Central Intelligence Agency’s failures called Legacy of Ashes. Weiner was recently a guest on the Charlie Rose Show talking about the CIA book. I’d like to use that interview as a backdrop for our conversation.

Over the past 15 years the Charlie Rose Show‘s host and executive producer, the elegant Charlie Rose, has established himself as sort of the US minister of propaganda, using PBS as a platform, and funding from major foundations and major banks to broadcast his public affairs program from New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s Bloomberg News studios in Manhattan.

Sometimes the propaganda is a result of Rose not knowing the material, making it a perfect showcase for the Kissingers, Holbrookes, etc. to maneuver around in.

For the record, I appeared on the broadcast in the 1990s when the show first went national, to discuss the crisis in Sudan. The Khartoum government had been overwhelmingly condemned for human rights violations by the UN. It was not letting in Western journalists. Osama bin Laden, Carlos the Jackal and Abu Nidal were all based in Khartoum at the time.

Is it a coincidence that bin Laden was there? Maybe not. Khartoum had been the CIA’s most important outpost in Africa and Sudan’s de facto leader, Hassan Turabi, had an interesting history with the CIA, most visibly through Operation Moses.
I managed to get in and do a videotaped interview in Khartoum with Hassan Turabi.

Hassan Turabi – Image Source

It’s to Charlie Rose’s credit that he attempted a segment on Sudan when nobody else was really. Fortunately, John McLaughlin followed up, inviting me for an in-depth look at the issues.

However, even in those years, the Charlie Rose Show seemed controlled or perhaps bungled so that none of the footage from my conversation in Khartoum with Turabi or discussion of that conversation or even discussion of my visit to Khartoum made it into the broadcast.

Rose’s focus was on starvation, and a decade and a half later we still have starvation – now in Darfur – because the media backed by big money will not look squarely at the problem. It takes work and honesty. As you’ve said so well in the introduction to your book, Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs:

“Much of our history is hidden behind a wall of national security and that sad fact prevents America from realizing its destiny.”

My first question to you is this: In Tim Weiner’s hour-long talk with Charlie Rose about his book on the CIA, Weiner made the point that the late Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, thought it was tragic that the US did not care enough anymore about espionage, which “seeks to know the world” through secrecy and deception. Charlie Rose replied, “I do too.” What is US national security all about really – whose national security is being served?

Doug Valentine: It’s a class issue. The CIA has not been running around the world trying to improve the lives of poor people, to raise their standard of living, even though they say they’re out there trying to bring freedom and democracy to the world. They’re just as likely to back a Pinochet, a despot, as they are to fight a Communist.

Suzan Mazur: What do you suppose the New York Times is up to with the Weiner book? Why is a reporter from one of the most important commercial newspapers, sticking it to the CIA by exposing the CIA’s 60 years of horrific failure, with monarchs and dictators on the payroll (King Hussein of Jordan for 20 years, Mobutu, etc.), when as you note in your richly informative book on the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, “Establishment privateers run the secret government”?

Doug Valentine: Most of what Weiner writes about the CIA is already known. It’s a history book with a bias, not an expose, at least not for the Vietnam generation. He doesn’t even really get into the current Bush administration. He gives us a predictable treatment of William Casey and the Contras, when there was an incredible revival of the CIA under Casey.

William Casey – Image Source

Suzan Mazur: Weiner plays up the fact that long-time CIA counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, was constantly spilling the beans to Kim Philby during their frequent liquid lunches – Philby, a British agent who turned out to be a spy for the Soviet Union.

Doug Valentine: Angleton was key to understanding the CIA. Weiner hasn’t detailed Angleton’s relationship with the underworld through the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He hasn’t gotten past CIA 101.

James Jesus Angleton – Image Source

Angleton had his own mysterious agenda, counterintelligence, seeking out enemy agents inside the CIA. He had liaison to the Mafia through Charles Siragusa, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent – and Mario Brod, a labor lawyer from Connecticut and New York, who as an Army counterintelligence officer had worked with Angleton at OSS – Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

As I say in the book, James Angleton alone possessed the coveted Israeli account. His loyalty was to the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles – then Richard Helms, who was chief of Clandestine Services and later DCI. Director William Colby was his enemy.

Allen Dulles (Image Source) And William Colby (Image Source)

Through Angleton’s relationships with Italian royalty, Tibor Rosenbaum [Mossad agent], Charlie Siragusa [FBN agent], Hank Manfredi [FBN], and Mario Brod, he was certainly aware of Meyer Lansky’s central role as the Mafia’s banker in the Caribbean – where Lansky’s mob associate from Las Vegas, Moe Dalitz, opened an account at Castle Bank – as well as in Mexico, where Angleton’s friend, Winston M. Scott, was station chief, and certainly kept tabs on Lansky’s associate, former Mexican president Miguel Aleman. As ever, Angleton and Lansky were the dark stars of the intelligence and financial aspects of international drug smuggling. Alan Block devotes some pages to this in his book, Masters of Paradise.

Meyer Lansky - Image Source

Angleton thought William Colby might be a mole. Angleton exposed the divisions within the CIA after 1966, the Colby vs. Helms factions. He also represented the literary sensibility the CIA once had, where finding secrets was like teasing the meaning out of a poem. Now we have sledgehammer spies.

Suzan Mazur: What kind of cut do the “privateers” take from the Agency for clearing the way for new markets abroad however they can do it?

Doug Valentine: History here: The feds made it illegal for the government to hire Pinkertons to break up labor unions and so the FBI was formed. These industrialists in America then had no foreign ambitions. They kept President Wilson out of the League of Nations. But other industrialists did have foreign ambitions. Big division.

It shows the class origins of the CIA. How the CIA represents a faction of the United States Establishment that has imperial ambitions as opposed to the nativist faction of the American Establishment which is more concerned about doing business here in the United States.

The original CIA is the Foreign Policy Association, which sent representatives to the League of Nations and survey teams around the world looking for market opportunities for the non-nativist industrialists. Depression brought Franklin D. Roosevelt and social reform. Before WW II, FDR (aristocrat) hired William Donovan (lace curtain Irish lawyer) to start the office of Coordinator of Information and then the OSS.

Who was hired to run these organizations? Representatives of the privateers. This is how to understand the money part of the CIA.

Suzan Mazur: So the current Foreign Policy Association is in essence a CIA?

Doug Valentine: From my point of view, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association are the original CIA. They work for industry that is interested in trade overseas, inviting themselves into the politics of foreign countries. They sent representatives to the League of Nations when the United States government wouldn’t officially do so.

Suzan Mazur: So nothing has changed in that sense.

Doug Valentine: No. It’s a shell game.

Suzan Mazur: Is there a chance Weiner and Rose are looking out for the common good, and pushing for more resources for the CIA in order to prevent a further Shackleyization of intelligence, a further privatization of intel, which disenfranchises most people (the late spymaster, Ted Shackley, operated a political risk group – Research Associates International – after he left the Agency in the late 1970s and ran oil shipments into apartheid South Africa, for example)? (See… Scoop: John Deuss – The Manhattan projects)

Ted Shackley – Image Source

Doug Valentine: Trick question. The CIA created its own privateers, as spying itself became an industry. Weiner and Rose have no say in the matter. Weiner is doing a history book. He’s not a player as far as I know. He’s not someone who’s actually making foreign policy. He hasn’t explained with any depth that would indicate he has any vested interest in either promoting the CIA or not promoting the CIA. It’s a superficial account of something that’s really serious.

Something called “courting the compatible Left” was also a useful instrument of the Agency, created after WWII. That was pretty much devised by a guy named Cord Meyer, who was head of the CIA’s International Operations division.

Suzan Mazur: Speaking of affairs, Weiner’s mention of Cord Meyer on the show had to do with Meyer’s ex-wife (no name), who was one of JFK’s lovers, being mysteriously murdered and Angleton turning up at her house to see if there was a diary. But as you illuminate in Strength of the Wolf, Mary Pinchot Meyer took LSD given to her by Timothy Leary and also distributed it to the Washington Establishment, possibly to JFK as well.

LSD Guru Timothy Leary – Image Source

Doug Valentine: Cord Meyer worked with Angleton and used people like labor leader Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone to travel around Europe in the early 1950s. Despite all the strum and drang about battling the Soviet Union, what the CIA was really trying to do was court Socialists away from Communists to form Social Democracy governments to counter the influence of the Soviet Union. Eventually that strategy worked. That was really what was going on behind the scenes.

The CIA never had to convince right wing governments that they should fight the Soviet Union. It was a battle that was occurring secretly. Even here in the United States, the CIA was always trying to recruit Liberals.

Suzan Mazur: Do you think Weiner and Rose may be hinting that some kind of a global intelligence agency should rise up out of the “ashes” of the CIA, which they repeat has “lost its primacy”? Afterall, the US has merged Defense operations with the UK to a degree, etc. etc.

Doug Valentine: That assumes the CIA is in ashes, I don’t think it is. But technically, the CIA has liaison relations with the intel services of almost every country, so what you see is the “consolidated” CIA running everyone’s intel servces.

Suzan Mazur: Why is a Times reporter the messenger for this? What does it say about the NYT’‘s compromised relations with the National Security Establishment where Weiner has access to 10 directors and conducts 300 interviews with agency officers? We know from the Church hearings in the 1970s of the CIA’s links to major news organizations and foundations – like the Ford Foundation and Asia Foundation – and dictating content and direction, getting bureau chiefs to assist in the overthrow of governments.

Charlie Rose gets his funding from major foundations, and of course, major corporations – although he’s just announced he’s now also considering Internet funding like PayPal. No doubt because people are disgusted by the right wing noose he’s currently in on public television.

Doug Valentine: Some things never change. The Weiner CIA book is revisionism for a purpose.

Suzan Mazur: More recently, we’ve had Lewis Lapham running Harper’s magazine while his brother Tony Lapham was the CIA’s general counsel. How tight would you say the connections between the CIA and the media are at the moment, including the new media?

Doug Valentine: Tony Lapham was a George H.W. Bush appointee as CIA General Counsel when Bush was DCI. Lapham had also been a covert agent. He ordered the shut down of a CIA MKULTRA New York safe house at 105 West 13th Street in Greenwich Village where the agency did some of its mind control experiments.

George H.W. Bush – Image Source

To answer your question about the connections between the CIA and the media and new media – I’d say they’re tighter than ever. It has to do with the centralization of wealth and influence. News organizations used to be a lot of independent owners of news outlets. There’s now less and less of that.

It goes hand in hand with the consolidation of capital in the United States. The media’s in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and those people are closer and closer to the imperial interests of the United States abroad. Their interests are now more in tune with the interests of the CIA. And they’re more likely to skew, without even being agents of the CIA.

So you don’t have to rely on the old boy system anymore; accommodating the CIA is built into the system because of the consolidation of capital.

It’s been reported that the CIA writes for Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. So establishing and corroborating sources is more important now than ever. Also, since Watergate and Deep Throat, there’s a tendency on the part of CIA-connected journalists like Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh to use anonymous sources. Just another sign of how incestuous it is between the media and the CIA.

Suzan Mazur: Rose and Weiner agree that Bill Clinton had a dysfunctional relationship with the CIA. Would you comment on the Clintons’ relationship with the CIA? First there was Operation Chaos, right? And then Mena? You’ve got a new book coming out this Fall, Strength of the Pack, that refers to the Mena Cartel. Can you name some names – who were the Mena Cartel?

Doug Valentine: Well, I’m actually being facetious in the book about the Mena Cartel. I haven’t been on the ground in Mena researching the drug operation there, so I’d prefer not to get into a detailed discussion about it.

But if anybody should be associated with the goings on at Mena – Barry Seal and his operations – it’s William Casey, George Bush I, and Ronald Reagan. Mena was a CIA operation that existed between 1981 and 1984 but became an issue while Clinton was president and was used to deflect attention from Iran-Contra and the CIA’s own involvement in international drug trafficking. (See… Scoop: Mazur: Deeper Into The Clintons’ CIA Drug Nexus )

Suzan Mazur: Speaking of drugs, Weiner does a Holly-go-lightly over the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control episode. He says the Agency destroyed almost all the MKULTRA records.

But beyond Richard Helms’ and Allen Dulles’ MKULTRA program of random drugging of Greenwich Village Leftists at 81 Bedford Street in the 1950s and 60s after getting them drunk at Chumley’s speakeasy across the street, or around the corner on Cherry Lane at the Lefty Blue Mill tavern – in your book, Strength of the Wolf, you mention the Agency’s involvement on the Colombian Amazon where the celebrated American adventurer Mike Tsalickis, the region’s one-time US Vice Consul, was asked to find some useful tropical drugs for the CIA – probably along the lines of hallucinogenic yaje.

Curiously, in the late 1980s, Tsalickis was busted for smuggling into the US 4.4 tons of cocaine in a shipment of Brazilian lumber; it was the biggest cocaine bust in US history at the time. Tsalickis told me in a phone conversation following the bust that the feds were in the drug business on the Amazon. The DEA told me they’d been tracking Tsalickis’ exploits for 10 years. He was sent to Marion. Believe he’s out now.

I stayed at Tsalickis’ hotel there in Leticia, the Parador Ticuna, months before the drug bust, researching a story. Leticia was indeed the wild frontier, made wilder because of the armed desperados high on drugs. Have fond memories of the night I spent upriver at Tsalickis’ Monkey Island communing with caiman by flashlight and their cooing — nyock, nyock, nyock. . . .

Hand Drawn Map Of Leticia On The Colombian Amazon – Image Source

There were clearly no surveillance cameras in the bird nests along the banks of the Amazon – it was anything goes on the river. Peru on the opposite bank and Brazil a walk across the Colombian border.

Recall sitting around a table at Tsalickis’ Leticia hotel sipping Aguardiente with a British art scholar and a lumber dealer from Manaus, the latter anxious about speaking with Mike about a lumber sale. Kept pacing. .

Weiner does not go into the CIA’s commercial drug exploits. In fact, he quotes Helms in his book as follows:

“We could get money anyplace in the world . . . We ran a whole arbitrage operation. We didn’t need to launder money – ever.”

Would you comment?

Doug Valentine: Angleton ran the CIA’s narcotics operation, in league with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, until 1971, when Helms put it under Tom Karamessines at operations; Karamessines was the former CIA Athens chief.

I know for a fact that Angleton in the counterintelligence division of the CIA was in charge of its relations with law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which is one of the reasons organizationally that he ended up having relations with people like Charlie Siragusa, a high ranking official in the FBN. This is how Angleton enters into relationships with Corsican drug traffickers and uses them for counterintelligence operations.

I know this because I interviewed one of the officers who was on Angleton’s staff and who actually was his liaison to the Bureau of Narcotics. And I’ll be talking more about that in my new book, Strength of the Pack. The guy’s name was Jim Ludlum. People say he’s related to Robert Ludlum.

In 1968 the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was abolished and Lyndon Johnson’s administration created the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Angleton and the CIA continued to have an official relationship with the BNDD until 1971, at which point Nixon declared narcotics law enforcement a national emergency and made it an issue of national security.

And at that point relations switched from Angleton at counterintelligence to the operations branch of the CIA. That’s incredibly important in understanding the history of the CIA’s involvement with drug trafficking, because now it’s no longer a function of counterintelligence, something deep inside the Agency. Now you actually have CIA chiefs of station all around the world becoming actively involved in collecting intelligence on drug trafficking. It became in 1971 a very, very big business – drug trafficking within the CIA.

Suzan Mazur: When you say big business, what exactly do you mean?

Doug Valentine: There was a guy at the CIA who worked with the BNDD. Jim Ludlum then gave up his liaison relationship because he was counterintelligence and the new liaison was an operations officer. His name was Seymour Bolton, the father of Joshua Bolton – now a high ranking official in the Bush administration.

What the CIA drug business is, is controlling how the DEA targets foreign drug traffickers. The CIA’s drug business is the management of how the DEA conducts foreign investigations. The CIA reports directly to the president or the national security council and there are issues to consider in going after traffickers that transcend law enforcement and involve national security. Which is why Nixon made that change. Nixon did not want officials going off and investigating Chinese drug traffickers at the same time he was to trying to secretly form diplomatic relations with China. So he had to put the CIA in control of how the DEA mounted its foreign drug investigations.

Suzan Mazur: And what are your thoughts about that arrangement?

Doug Valentine: If you’re going to go about the business of empire, creating an empire around the world, you don’t want to put it in the hands of a law enforcement agency that’s going to bust Salvador Allende yesterday and General Pinochet tomorrow.

You want to make sure they only bust Allende. And that Pinochet gets away with drug trafficking for 20 years.

How the CIA evolved over the past 60 years in all these different ways in relation to narcotics trafficking, to the media, in relation to foreign policy, etc. – has enabled it to consolidate power. It’s far from being out of business or in descent or rising from the ashes. It’s more powerful than it ever was.

Suzan Mazur: Are you familiar with the Eurasia Group?

Started out as a mini-foreign policy association back in 1998, backed by the CIA – the so-called analyst side – and the Council on Foreign Relations. I attended some of their fascinating meetings. They invited a slew of officials and former officials of the FSU, as well as business leaders to speak – Boris Berezovsky, etc. There’s been a controversial Russian industrialist on the advisory board from the start.

At some point they began charging $100 to attend meetings. And I got an angry phone call from EG because I’d contacted someone I met at one of the meetings regarding an interview.

Apparently EG was now selling those contacts the CIA & CFR helped them establish. Eurasia Group has had some affiliation with Lehman Brothers and is considered the world’s largest political risk group.
( http://www.eurasiagroup.net/about/ )

Doug Valentine: One of the great untold stories of the CIA. Privatization of intelligence – as you call it, Shackleyization.

RJ Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of private contractors and US intelligence, recently obtained documents from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000. Currently that spending represents 70 percent of the US intelligence budget going to private companies.

William Casey sort of paved the way for the downfall of the Soviet Union. The CIA officers involved in the Russia division at that time were responsible for recruiting over to our side KGB officers, intelligence officers, government officials who brought about the breakup of that republic. Those relationships still exist. And if anybody was REALLY interested in doing a history of the CIA, that particular aspect would be the most explosive story.

Suzan Mazur: In your book you also tie in Agency drug operations to the JFK assassination. You note that “the CIA protected its drug dealing assets in the Mexican intelligence services” and say further:

“[I]t’s possible that SDECE [French Intel] agents working for the KGB may have sent an assassin into Dallas [to kill JFK] through Angleton’s [Irving] Brown-[Maurice] Castellani drug network, or through Paul Mondoloni [a Corsican who smuggled drugs from Mexico and then from Cuba under Batista's protection].”

You say this assassin may have been the Agency’s own QJ/WIN with Oswald as the patsy:

“The best evidence suggests that this mysterious operative [QJ/WIN] was Jose Marie Andre Mankel, as Mason Cargill (a staff member of vice president Rockefeller’s Commission to Investigate CIA Activities within the United Sates) reported in a 1 May 1975 memo. . . . According to documents contained in his 201-file, QJ/WIN was tall and thin, married (although homosexual), with many friends in well-to-do Parisian circles. He was a conman extraordinaire!”

It’s interesting, Tim Weiner says in his book that President Lyndon Johnson requested all the files on Oswald following his murder by Ruby — who you say was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics informant beginning in the 1940s — and that those files then vanished. You say further in your book:

“JFK wanted to expel Air America, the CIA’s drug smuggling proprietary airline from Laos. And, in 1962 in another attempt to curb the CIA’s drug smuggling activities in East Asia, Bobby [Kennedy] indicted Sea Supply manager Willis Bird. . . . Kennedy’s enemies ensured that the Bird prosecution was blocked, and that Air America kept its contract in Laos, and continued to fly drugs. Meanwhile, General Walker, the far-right American Security Council (including General Lansdale and Air America Chairman Admiral Felix Stump), and the Texas ultras started plotting their coup d’etat in Dallas.”

And you note that Senator Estes Kefauver’s committee investigation was kept away from a discussion of Dallas, Ruby would only tell the committee what he knew about Chicago.

“Was it to deflect attention from the Pawley-Cooke mission in Taiwan, which was funded by ultra Texas oilmen like H.L. Hunt, and which in 1951, was facilitating the CIA-Kuomintang drug smuggling operation that entered the US by crossing the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas?”

You also say that Joseph Civello ran the heroin business in Dallas with John Ormento and the Magaddino family in Buffalo and that they were linked to Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Jr. and Jimmy Hoffa – “the House Subcommitte on Assassination’s three prime suspects in the JFK murder.”

Then you note that Hunt and the other Texas oil men, including the emerging Bush dynasty, were also outraged at JFK for planning to “eliminate the oil depletion allowances” not to mention JFK’s desegregating the South.

Jackie Kennedy in a kind of premonition of Dallas wrote in one of her letters to Clark Clifford that she was concerned about the 50 businessmen in Texas who said: “Why should we do anything to help the Kennedys?” — something I highlighted in one of my FT stories. (See. Financial Times: he President’s Man )

Anything you’d like to add? And are you still of the opinion that QJ/WIN may have been JFK’s assassin and that the best evidence suggests he was Mankel.

Doug Valentine: First of all, I don’t pretend to know who killed Kennedy. For all I know it could have been Lee Harvey Oswald. That chapter on JFK in my book is speculative, that is to say, if the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination, how would it have been involved. And it goes back to the relationship the CIA had with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and in particular with an agent named George White.

George White was the guy the CIA went to when they wanted to start up the MKULTRA program at Bedford Street. But prior to that, in 1947, he was head of the Chicago office and one of his informants was Jack Ruby.

Jack Ruby went to Dallas in 1948 working for White and actually infiltrated Bugsy Siegel’s Mafia drug connection with the Kuomintang in Mexico. As far as I know nobody was ever arrested. Bugsy Siegel was killed because he was getting a little out of control.

Bugsy Siegel – Image Source

The CIA needs to manage drug trafficking in a way of providing internal security for it. It needed to keep the Mafia happy. It needed to keep Mexican officials happy. It needed to keep the Kuomintang financed and so the CIA protected this drug route of Nationalist Chinese heroin going through Mexico through Nuevo Laredo through Laredo and into Dallas into Chicago.

Suzan Mazur: And they protected it for how long? Until when?

Doug Valentine: Well as far as I know .

Suzan Mazur: They’re still protecting it.

Doug Valentine: They never stopped protecting it.

Suzan Mazur: I did a story recently about the Mormon church – which the CIA and FBI have traditionally recruited heavily from – and possible LDS drug money link in Mexico, where the Mormon church doubled its membership beginning in the mid 1980s when the Latin American drug epidemic really hit. (See…Scoop: LDS Church — Mexico Drug Money Connection? )

The treasury of the LDS church is nobody’s business but the LDS church’s. The story followed one about a Roman Catholic bishop who went on television in Mexico announcing that his church was, of course, taking substantial donations from drug traffickers.

One of the LDS temples is right there on the border at El Paso.

Doug Valentine: As far as I’m concerned, the CIA never stopped protecting those drug routes. It’s just an ongoing operation.

Suzan Mazur: Another item Weiner didn’t discuss was that CIA Director Bill Casey turned up in the VIP section of the Mormon church in Salt Lake City one day when author Alex Shoumatoff was visiting, which Shoumatoff writes about in his book, Legends of the American Desert. Shoumatoff said the CIA recruits heavily from the LDS flock because they’re good at surveillance technology and tend to be loyal.

I’ve reported about the FBI recruits from the LDS church, including the former FBI Chief Information Officer, Darwin A. John – a Robert Mueller hiree, coming right from a decade-long job as chief information officer of the LDS church. (See… Scoop: he AZ Polygamy Town Airport Built With Fed $$$Mns )

Doug Valentine: The CIA doesn’t get arrested. So you never really know. It’s an espionage organization.

The Rosenbergs in the United States were tried for espionage and given a death sentence. But this is what the CIA does for its business. It goes around the world and it gets foreign nationals to spy on their government and it has an army of Rosenbergs out there. It’s a group of mafia bosses who are getting people of foreign countries to spy on their own countries and subvert their own countries and they give them masses amounts of dollars to do it.

The CIA people who do these things are no different than the KGB people running the Rosenbergs.

And the issue I referred to earlIer, the “courting of the compatible Left”. This takes us to Bill Clinton and the CIA. If anybody represented the compatible Left, it was Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton destroyed the Democratic party. There used to be a difference between Republicans and Democrats until Bill Clinton came along. If anybody was a CIA agent, it was Bill Clinton.

Suzan Mazur: Well, that’s what Roger Morris is saying in Partners in Power – his book on the Clintons –going back to Bill’s days at Oxford University with Operation Chaos.

Doug Valentine: I don’t see why people say there was a problem between Clinton and the CIA.

Suzan Mazur: “Dysfunctional relationship”, say Weiner and Rose.

Doug Valentine: Clinton and the CIA were hand-in-glove. They may have had a problem getting a director on the payroll for a while, but I think that was more a problem of the Senate, which was under Republican control. Just wouldn’t confirm anybody that he threw up, because they didn’t want anybody who was too cozy with him. That was in domestic politics. But it has nothing to do with the fact that Clinton and the CIA were expanding the American empire.

Suzan Mazur: As in the mad rush for oil in Azerbaijan where we now have a military base? The wild amounts of oil there heavily promoted in the major newspapers and then as I discovered in my interviews in Baku — the dry holes and subsequent resignation of Energy Secretary Pena? Another geostrategic move.

Doug Valentine: Yes, Clinton and the CIA were expanding the American empire gleefully, hand-in-hand.

Suzan Mazur: Plus in the 1990s, when Clinton was so chummy with Boris Yeltsin and money was being thrown at the Russians. And then the Russian economy collapsed. In the 1990s international organized crime made Russia the biggest money laundering operation in the world as it primed the new Russian economy.

Weiner also does not mention the CIA-linked banks like Nugan Hand or founding CIA father Clark Clifford’s role in BCCI.

Doug Valentine: Drugs again.

Suzan Mazur: But you cite in Strength then-general counsel for the Thai Consulate in Miami, Paul Helliwell, establishing and directing a “string of drug money-laundering banks for the CIA. And you mention Vanguard Services set up as a front in 1962 “for yet another batch of CIA-financed, drug-related anti-Castro operations.”
Can you say more about these outlaw banks?

Doug Valentine: A little. Drugs again, and Nugan Hand, and Golden Triangle stuff, among other things. The Mafia connection to Trafficante and JFK. Angleton.

Paul Helliwell had been in the OSS. When Nugan died in 1980 or 1981, he had William Colby’s business card on his body. William Colby was providing legal counsel for the Nugan Hand bank and it had on its board numerous generals, retired US generals who had been in Vietnam. AND ALL THESE GUYS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY.

And if they can get the money selling drugs, they get the money selling drugs. If they can get the money breaking up the Soviet Union, and then cutting deals with the Mafia and robbing the Russian treasury, then they’ll do it that way.

THE CIA IS REALLY INTERESTED IN FINANCIAL CRIME. And one of their stronger suits is financial intelligence and following the money. Something they’re light years ahead of the FBI or DEA on.

The CIA was able to put together strong boxes full of $750 million dollars and bring them over to Iraq for paying off Iraqi officials in $20 bills. Where did this covert cash come from?

They’ve got a diversified portfolio after 60 years in the business: The institutions they started building up from Ford franchises in the Philippines, kickbacks from Westinghouse for helping them get contracts in Korea, deals with the Mafia, drug traffickers and arms dealers.

The CIA gets oodles of money from the arms business. Most of their income comes from criminal activity.

The Russian Mafia operates with a sort of impunity. And so does the Israeli Mafia. And one of the reasons they have this sort of impunity is that they’re sharing their profits with the CIA.

And I think a lot of CIA money is capital investments. They’re like movie producers. They want to overthrow the Iraqi government, they go to companies like Halliburton and others who are going to profit from the overthrow of Iraq. And like the executive producers of some movie, they get them to ante-up some cash. Telling them, don’t worry about it, the government contracts you get in return will cover your investment. Plus they have the old boy network – which now is so far flung.

Suzan Mazur: Plus some of the military contractors are organized crime and have had contracts since the 50s.

Doug Valentine: Exactly. Which bring us back to Barry Seal (Iran-Contra). Because in 1972, Barry Seal was to fly some arms and some explosives into Mexico. What the Brooklyn Drug Task Force found out is that this guy named Murray Kessler, who was involved with the Gambino family in Brooklyn, had an arms manufacturing company in New Jersey where the guns and the bombs came from.

Suzan Mazur: And some of these arms merchants also had security clearance during the McNamara and Clifford years of heading the Defense Department. They make weapons for the US government and some for whoever they feel like.

Doug Valentine: From my perspective, the spy industry and especially the arms industry, is the foundation on which the American empire is built. The United States has a military budget of I think $300 billion dollars and the CIA budget is like $50 billion – that’s a year. Together that’s bigger than the gross national product of any country in the world. And in the meantime we’re worried about 20 guys in Al-Qaeda.

Suzan Mazur: And the American people are largely innocent captives of this ever-turning screw.

Weiner considers Helms the greatest of the CIA directors. He notes: “When Richard Helms was in charge, the agency spoke the truth to Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara about the war in Vietnam and they listened.” Even though in another breath Weiner says Helms (like George Tenet) “caved”: Regarding the reporting of numbers of Vietcong irregulars, Helms said the numbers “didn’t mean a damn”. “Helms felt a crushing pressure to get on the team — and to trim the CIA’s reporting to fit the president’s policy.” Weiner says the agency officially accepted the falsified figure of 299,000 enemy forces or fewer.
What are your thoughts about Helms?

Doug Valentine: A patrician, old school, but destroyed by Kissinger and the neo-con Nixon wave.

Suzan Mazur: Former DCI Robert Gates, now serving as Secretary of Defense, who Weiner says was the Agency’s chief Kremlinologist but had never been to the Soviet Union?

Doug Valentine: Boy, you ask a lot of questions.

Suzan Mazur: How about Frank Carlucci? Weiner citing an oral history of Carlucci’s describes him as instrumental in ending the Cold War as a result of his “disarming” talk to some Soviet generals in Moscow in 1988 in which he was asked how the US knew so much about them. Carlucci said the US had to do it from satellites and it would be “a lot easier” if the Soviets would publish their military budget. The generals laughed; it dawned on them America did not want to kill them and that even if they were stronger militarily, the system of secrecy left them weaker. A closed society couldn’t match an open one — end of game.
Doug Valentine: The Russian people may have a different view.

Suzan Mazur: Which exploits of the agency do you consider the most diabolical – aside from the fact that one of its founding fathers molested two of his own children – and a reason why the CIA should have been dismantled years ago?

Doug Valentine: Your readers don’t want to know that answer. The most dastardly thing that the CIA has done is to wage this campaign of psychological warfare against the American people. Where the American people don’t see the CIA for a bunch of basically American KGB agents who are conducting criminal activities around the world. There’s a movie called The Usual Suspects with a much feared criminal named Keyser Soze. And Keyser is talking to a cop and he says the greatest trick that the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.

And this is what people like Weiner are doing with books about the CIA that don’t explain it for what it really is. They’re part of a propaganda machine that’s making the American people see the CIA in mythological terms as good guys, crusaders, as Lawrence of Arabia – when, in fact, they’re criminals. They’re part of THE GRAND LIE.

Suzan Mazur has traveled widely as a journalist. Her reports have appeared in the Financial Times, Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, CounterPunch and Progressive Review, among others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

“Ask them what happened to Barry Seal,” Jon Kwitny, the late investigative journalist of Nugan-Hand Bank and other CIA-linked mysteries, said with a Cheshire grin as I left The Kwitny Report television show’s offices in New York and boarded an Avianca …

L to R – Barry Seal, Mena Airport (Map), Mena Airport (Image)
[CIA asset Barry Seal, abandoned by the Agency, was assassinated in February 1986, reportedly by the Medellin cartel, outside a Salvation Army halfway house in New Orleans where Seal was serving a six-month sentence for trafficking in Quaaludes. He operated for years as the CIA’s point man in a $3 billion - $5 billion drugs for arms business based in and around the Intermountain Regional Airport at Mena, Arkansas on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s watch as Governor and First Lady.]

“Ask them what happened to Barry Seal,” Jon Kwitny, the late investigative journalist of Nugan-Hand Bank and other CIA-linked mysteries, said with a Cheshire grin as I left The Kwitny Report television show’s offices in New York and boarded an Avianca flight to Colombia in 1989. Seal, a CIA operative had been gunned down, supposedly by the Medellin cartel, a few years earlier in New Orleans where he was serving a sentence for trafficking in Quaaludes. Seal ran the drugs for arms business for the Agency in Mena, Arkansas during Governor Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton’s watch in the 1980s.

I never did get any answers in Colombia about Barry Seal, Kwitny’s show was cancelled and Colombian drug politics became exponentially convoluted.

The Mena story died in the commercial media. And even though the crimes of Mena resulted in the drug poisoning of millions of Americans, Bill and Hillary Clinton moved into the White House.

With the Clintons again running for President, it is crucial that we now look hard at Mena.

My interest in the drugs smuggling story began with a chance meeting of a polo player from Bogota – David Puyana – a young Jack Kennedy look-alike, from one of the handful of families then controlling Colombia. He was the brother-in-law of Andres Pastrana, the former president of the country, who at the time had been overwhelmingly elected the first mayor of Bogota following his kidnapping and escape from the Medellin cartel.

Pastrana currently serves as Colombia’s ambassador to Washington and comes from an important political dynasty – his father, Misael, having been president in the 1970s.

In 1991 David’s father, businessman Eduardo Puyana – who was Andres Pastrana’s father-in-law and someone I knew and liked – was kidnapped and murdered. His body turned up two years later followed by stories like this.
[LINK]

I was told by violentologists I interviewed at one of the universities in Colombia that two million people were involved in the drug trade at the time. But what were the comparable numbers in the US?

Some of the most astute reporting of the crimes of Mena has been done by historian and investigative journalist Roger Morris. Morris is a former foreign service officer and has also served on Presidents Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s National Security Council senior staff. He resigned, however, over the invasion of Cambodia.

Roger Morris is now a fellow at the Green Institute , a lecturer, and the author of several books, among them, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America – about Mena; Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician; and writing with his wife, Sally Denton, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and its Hold on America.

Among the many awards he’s received is the Bronze Medal “for the finest investigative journalism in all media nationwide”.

In Partners in Power Morris has established that Mena was not only a point of transfer of drugs for arms to the Nicaraguan Contras but that it was a drugs distribution “hub” linked to US airports in half a dozen or so other states. And that Bill and Hillary Clinton essentially knew about the operation from the start.

Our interview follows:

Roger Morris & his book on the Clintons

Suzan Mazur: Jackie Kennedy once made an ink drawing adorned with lace of Washington “fixer” Clark Clifford, who helped draft the National Security Act that created the CIA and who ended his career infamously as one of BCCI’s central figures. She sketched a tall fashion icon in formal attire with walking stick and spiffy pointed shoes. In one hand Clifford carries a wrapped gift, roses and a bottle of champagne, and in the other a theatrically monogrammed briefcase with several documents tucked inside entitled: “Places of Exile, Tortures and List of Jails.”The President’s Man

You suggest in your book, Partners in Power , based on what you describe as “a numbing accumulation” of evidence following numerous trips to Arkansas,100 interviews and the review of thousands of documents – that Bill and Hillary Clinton, as Governor and First Lady of Arkansas, knew about the ongoing CIA drugs & gun running by CIA asset Barry Seal, et al., out of Mena’s Intermountain Regional Airport in the Ouachitas in the 1980s. The operation armed the Nicaraguan Contras and delivered $3 billion to $5 billion worth of cocaine for distribution throughout the American homeland – as you note, “the single largest cocaine smuggling operation in US history”.

But wasn’t a CIA rogue operation already in place in and around Mena prior to the Clintons assuming office in 1983, so that the Clintons didn’t even have to choose between champagne, roses and promotion to higher office – and torture & exile? Bill and Hillary made their pact with the Devil by accepting a second term – Mena was part of the job.
[LINK]

Doesn’t that now make Hillary Clinton the “Manchurian Candidate” for US president?

Roger Morris: I don’t know about Manchurian Candidate, I just think that the Clintons are the quintessential compromised American politicians. That’s a tragedy as well as an outrage. These are two people who were young people of promise, and I think for all we know about them, of some initial idealism and some purpose and goals beyond their own ambition, although that ambition was outsized in both cases.

We don’t know, of course, how much of the detail they were aware of regarding Mena, but I’m convinced they were both aware of what was essentially going on there.

Suzan Mazur: How early did they know?

Roger Morris: My guess is they learned of it very soon after it started, if not at the very inception.

Suzan Mazur: It started in 1982, which is just before they assumed their second term in 1983 as Governor and First Lady of Arkansas.

Roger Morris: Right. Bill Clinton was out of office. But he was sill very connected, as the single most powerful figure in Arkansas.

Suzan Mazur: So they became sort of caretakers of Mena? Mena was part of the job?

Roger Morris: I don’t think they would have seen it that way. This is a seamless web of corruption and compromise in Arkansas. It was part of the job after all to tend to these large corporate interests – Walmart and Tyson’s Foods and all of the other big hitters in Arkansas. Hillary was working for a law firm that represented most of those interests in Arkansas and elsewhere throughout the South. I think they simply saw this as part of what one had to do in political life and political office.

Suzan Mazur: But this is something quite serious because it had to do with the poisoning of millions of Americans with drugs smuggled in through Arkansas from Latin America.

Roger Morris: Absolutely. It’s not a casual corruption.

Suzan Mazur: The other person who moved on up to higher office from the Mena episode is Asa Hutchinson. Hutchinson was US Attorney for Mena and western Arkansas and oversaw the quashing of the drugs & guns smuggling investigation by the grand jury. Hutchinson was subsequently promoted to DEA Director and now serves as the Department of Homeland Security’s Under Secretary for Border & Transportation Security.
[LINK]

What does Hutchinson’s promotion tell us?

Roger Morris: Well Hutchinson again is part of the same culture of accommodation and compromise. It’s clear that he was aware of something going on, whether it was rationalized to him as a national security operation or there were payoffs involved, I don’t know. But his career flourished as a result of having brushed up against this, as a result of having been right there on the scene. That’s not what happens to people who blow the whistle. So that (a) he undoubtedly knew something about was going on, (b) he certainly had to have known that it involved illegality and (c) he benefits and profits accordingly.

Suzan Mazur: You also note in the book that Mena was the US hub for the smuggling of drugs, weapons and other contraband from “meticulously maintained” rural airports in six other states: Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida and Arizona. We know of the Marana airport, south of Phoenix, Arizona, which during the Vietnam years was the US base for Air America, and that some of Seal’s planes were former CIA-owned Air America craft – a Lear, helicopters and US military transports.

Sally Denton, the distinguished historian and investigative journalist [LINK], who you acknowledge in your book as its “guardian angel” in intellect and spirit, has told me:
“The other airports I recall being involved were the airport in Baton Rouge where Barry Seal operated, Homestead Air Force Base, Greybull in Wyoming, and Evergreen (??) in Arizona.”

Sally may be referring to Pinal Air Park, just north of Marana that was used as an Evergreen/CIA base and/or Firebird Lake Airstrip at Gila Indian Reservation in Arizona where Evergreen and Southern Air flew from.
[LINK]

She said that there were as well “some private landing strips in Lexington, Kentucky and Angel Fire, New Mexico” and that she thinks “they used a landing strip in Nevada near the test site”.

Any more airstrips come to mind?

Marana Air Strip, AZ

Pinal Air Park, AZ

Firebird Lake Airstrip/Gila Indian Reservation, AZ

Angel Fire Airstrip, NM

Greybull, Wyoming

Homestead Air Force Base, FL area

Blue Grass Airport, Lexington, Kentucky

Roger Morris: Those are the airstrips that I remember as well. And her memory was better than mine. The Angel Fire airstrip is quite illustrative. We know from internal evidence in New Mexico where Sally and I lived that there was a flourishing drug traffic there.

Suzan Mazur: Angel Fire is near Santa Fe?

Roger Morris: Angel Fire is near Taos actually. It’s north and northeast of Santa Fe. And it’s a very posh ski resort and summer resort area as well. Scattered recreational homes. Some estates up there. But quite secluded in the mountains. It did have a sizeable landing strip that was used of course by private planes. Private planes come and go all the time in America at smaller private strips like that.

What was unusual about Angel Fire, as reporters from the Albuquerque Journal and elsewhere discovered, was that it was also getting these not so common black-painted night jets coming in at strange hours.

Suzan Mazur: The reports were that the Mena operation started up in 1982. But if the operation having to do with drugs from Vietnam, you know the CIA operation in Marana was going on back in the 1970s, is it possible that that sort of activity never stopped? It materialized at Mena in 1982, but it may have been going on seamlessly.

Roger Morris: You know that’s my sense really of this whole world, this empire of drug trafficking, which the CIA ignited in some cases, joined in others, but was a silent partner or not so silent partner in several parts of the world. My sense is that as these operations go on – even as the wars end, even as the CIA stops its most intensive involvement, if the subsidies stop, if the operatives shift from one payroll to another or whatever – the drug trafficking, the actual buying and selling of drugs goes on regardless of what’s happening in geopolitics. It’s quite possible it’s what you describe – that it’s a leftover of the Vietnam trafficking.

Suzan Mazur: It’s the same aircraft.

Roger Morris: The same aircraft.

Suzan Mazur: Seal was using the Air America aircraft.

Click for big version

Roger Morris: The Agency was not in the business of calling in its used assets like that, its people or its aircraft or its hardware. Air America had a huge inventory, which was never really accounted for, that simply disappeared. Those planes didn’t go off and crash in the sea. They were used.

Suzan Mazur: Is it conceivable the polygamist airstrip on the Utah-Arizona border just north of the Grand Canyon, which has existed since the 1960s, was another?
Scoop: The AZ Polygamy Town Airport Built With Fed $$$Mns

After Mena came under scrutiny following the October 1986 crash of the CIA’s Fat Lady plane over Nicaragua “with a load of arms for the Contras” and CIA asset Eugene Hasenfus’ capture [LINK]– the Colorado City Municipal Airport run by the FLDS polygamists began receiving the first payment of what would eventually become $3 million in federal, state and local funding. I believe Bruce Babbitt was governor of Arizona at the time – he then went on to become Secretary of the Interior. Would you comment?

Former CIA asset Eugene Hasenfus

Roger Morris: I once interviewed a DEA agent who was retired and was quite cynical about all of this and he compared it to – the whole thing should have been written about by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He said they had the gulags, the archipelago. We have the drug running archipelago. That the map of the United States is a map of leopard spots, of airstrips, of depots, of centers of distribution. And, of course, it tends to be heavier in the Southern states closer to the supply when the supply was mainly the South. But the West is heavily populated with it as well.

Suzan Mazur: So you’ve got the Clintons. The Clintons came under scrutiny because of Mena, but you’ve got a half dozen or so other governors who were also mixed up in this.

Roger Morris: Well the Clintons never really came under scrutiny. Sally and I did our piece for the Washington Post and it was quashed by the paper, by the Editor. [LINK]

We then took the piece to Penthouse. And it did get published and it created something of a sensation. My book certainly created a sensation.

Mena was one of these marginalized subjects that the American body politic, certainly the culture of media and certainly certainly respectable historians, biographers, etc., people who pretend to write about what’s real in American political life – never really wanted to touch.

Suzan Mazur: Sixty Minutes dropped it.

Roger Morris: Oh Sixty Minutes was fascinated initially and wanted to talk about it and when they got a diffident – I don’t know – from Congressman Jim Leach, who was in the process of investigating Mena at the time, Sixty Minutes dropped it as well.

Suzan Mazur: It may be time for Sixty Minutes to look at it again.

Roger Morris: You know, it’s like so much in foreign policy. We’re never going to come to terms with the crises we face in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world until we face the history of our involvement there. We’re not going to come to terms with the corruption in American politics as huge as the tyranny of money is until we understand how it works.

Suzan Mazur: Mena is a case study.

Roger Morris: Mena wasn’t, as you point out, just a plundering corporation – a health care, an insurance giant, or somebody giving money to protect a venal interest – this was a criminal empire that victimized millions of Americans. That used its money for the most nefarious purposes around the world.

Suzan Mazur: Aside from Mena serving as the air hub for the trafficking of drugs & guns – you report in the book that Nella, Arkansas, just outside Mena, was a training grounds for Contra pilots and guerrillas. And you note that Seal also flew in to Mena Medellin cartel kingpin Jorge Ochoa to show him the operation.

You also describe secretaries from a bank close to the airport telling investigators that couriers from the Mena drugs for arms operation brought bags of money there, and that in order to avoid scrutiny, they purchased cashier checks in amounts just under $10,000. Would you expand on this about the bags of cash?

Roger Morris: We don’t know very much about the sheer size of that traffic. We simply know that it happened from time to time – from locals from people who worked in the banks, people who were in local law enforcement and those who worked around the airport.

Suzan Mazur: When was that?

Roger Morris: Early to mid 1980s.

Suzan Mazur: Was it one bank or a couple of banks?

Roger Morris: The people I talked to worked at one bank.

Suzan Mazur: Can you say which bank?

Roger Morris: Something like “The Bank of Mena”. It was a sizeable local bank in Mena. Mena is a classic small American town. The first sign you see outside coming in on the highway is: Welcome to Mena, Home of the Bearcats.

Suzan Mazur: There was a town adjacent to the airport, so it wasn’t a secluded airport in a land that time forgot.

Roger Morris: The airport was always incongruous. State of the art. Long runway. Very sophisticated maintenance. For all intents and purposes, it could have been a very advanced Air Force base or government installation with a small town nearby, but of course it wasn’t. It was essentially a private airport. The traffic that went in and out of Mena – they weren’t resident in the town. These were not people who lived there. They were always on their way somewhere else. They got picked up in limousines or helicopters or whatever and taken off to Little Rock or to other places.

Suzan Mazur: You cite an Arkansas arms manufacturer – William Holmes – who described meeting Barry Seal and collecting payment in cash for his guns that were going to the Contras. The gunsmith said he’d also made 250 automatic pistols with silencers as a special order for the CIA. And you say that Seal was transporting guns to Bolivia, Argentina, Peru and Brazil as well as to Nicaragua.

Why should anyone again vote for the Clintons?

Roger Morris: Well, you know this is the way the Agency works. There may be a perception among even conspiracy enthusiasts that it all begins with a systematic meeting of some sort in a conference room in Washington and then they radiate out and everything is enormously efficient and great sums of money are expended and operations are massively impressive.

In most cases, from the end of WWII to the beginning of the CIA in 1947 down to the present – including, my God we know, in Iraq and Afghanistan – in most cases it’s much less impressive than that, much less organized. There’s a lot of local initiative. There’s a lot of local subcontracting.

Operators like Seal were given the opportunity to make extra money by transporting, by taking weapons down as well as running the drugs and bringing the money in and out. He was freelancing in a number of ways consistent with the Agency. He was being rewarded accordingly. So with sort of minimum security measures he could buy and sell commodities that they were trafficking in, including weapons, in the first instance, beyond the drugs.

Suzan Mazur: You seem to find former Arkansas trooper L.D. Brown’s “firsthand evidence” compelling about Bill Clinton pulling some strings to get him into the CIA, about Brown meeting and flying with Seal, and about his being “privy to some of the Clintons’ most personal liaisons” – including the “sustained affair”, dating from the mid-80s, between Hillary Clinton and Rose [Law Firm] partner Vince Foster. Would you comment on the credibility of LD Brown?

Roger Morris: I thought Brown was a credible witness. I thought most of the other troopers were credible as well. We’ve gone through a kind of ebb and flow of credibility with the troopers. They were first on the scene with exposes in the American Spectator. We often forget that they also talked to reporters from the Los Angeles Times who did a very similar series. For whatever one thinks of the American Spectator, the LA Times did much the same thing. They were roundly attacked, of course, personally as well as professionally by the Clinton camp. They sort of receded. And they’ve now reappeared – lately.

If one looks at these recent biographies of the Clintons – you can’t write a biography about either one of them without writing about both of them – the troopers are very much there, for example, in Carl Bernstein’s book, Woman in Charge, about Hillary. And there’s no question that the troopers were with him at every turn. That they witnessed these affairs, much to Hillary’s dismay and agony. And LD Brown was among them, of course.

Suzan Mazur: Did LD Brown say that Seal was his first person-to-person contact with the Agency?

Roger Morris: You know, I’m not sure. I think he’d gone through a recruitment process. He was not being hired as an analyst or covert operator on the conventional track in Washington. He was applying for that kind of thing, but the Agency has a whole other category of contract people. And poor LD had wandered into a no-man’s land that involved people like Seal.

Suzan Mazur: Is there documentation that LD Brown was CIA?

Roger Morris: What I saw were exchanges of letters and applications and so on showing that he had started that process. And at a certain point he was contacted orally. This is, of course, apart from the formal application process. He was contacted and put in touch with Seal and did those runs described in the book and had the encounters that he had with Bill Clinton.

Let me just say that everything he told me about everything else with the Clintons – details large and small – personal and political – everything checked out. And everything he told me about his experience with the drug running and all the rest checked out similarly as much as I could check it with other sources. You’re always up against credibility issues in this world and you make choices. But there was so much other evidence that this was going on.

Sixty Minutes was very interested because they wanted one single talking head, a simple story line to pin on Clinton and those simple story lines are the easiest to knock down as the Clintons have always understood. You destroy the credibility of a Gennifer Flowers or an LD Brown or Paula.

Suzan Mazur: Was there a draft of the letter LD Brown sent to the CIA that Clinton made notes on?

Roger Morris: I don’t know about the notes. There was a recommendation Clinton made. And as the book explains, Clinton’s connections with the Agency go back a long way. Since the book was published, I’ve had people come forward and tell me that they knew much more than even the informants I was talking to, and I was talking to people who were retired from the Agency, who were quite categorical about Bill Clinton having been a source for Operation Chaos [LINK] and for informing on American students abroad while he was at Oxford and all the rest.

Since then I’ve had people come to me and say, well don’t you know you missed the story, he was actually recruited at Georgetown. Georgetown was a veritable recruiting center in those days for the CIA – not just for Americans but for the large number of foreign students, the sons of foreign wealthy who were at Georgetown. So Bill’s contact with the Agency went back for years and years.

Suzan Mazur: You’ve said “Danny Ray Lasater would signify their most telling relationship of all – the man Bill Clinton mentioned on impulse when he assured his security guard, ‘That’s Lasater’s deal.’ Bush I, then Reagan’s Vice President, and Bill & Hillary were close to Lasater”, correct? And, who was Lasater?

Roger Morris: Lasater was a bond Daddy. Lasater was a wheeler-dealer in Little Rock in this very fast and furious period of the 1980s. So he was making a lot of money very quickly in finance.

Suzan Mazur: In drugs also?

Roger Morris: Well, we don’t know beyond what Clinton said to LD Brown. [“That’s Lasater’s deal.”] We don’t really have hard evidence of his connection to the Seal operation. There were all sorts of allegations. There was all sorts of circumstantial evidence, but we don’t know that. All we know is what Bill said to LD and Lasater’s proximity, certainly, to all of this world was pretty clear.

[According to Sam Smith's Progressive Review Clinton timeline, in 1986: Dan Lasater "pleads guilty to cocaine distribution charges" and serves a brief prison term.]

Suzan Mazur: Do you believe Foster’s death was a suicide, and was there anything to the story about his being an Israeli spy as former Forbes editor Jim Norman writes in “Fostergate”.[LINK]

Roger Morris: I just don’t know frankly enough about the Foster case to really have an informed opinion. Like the James Forrestal death. [LINK]

I wrote in a recent series on the CIA saying that Forrestal had jumped to his death after confinement at Bethesda and I got a very detailed disquisition from a scholar in Washington saying: No no no, he was pushed. Forrestal was anti-Israeli and was the last remaining powerful voice in the Truman administration. And he was killed as a result.

I don’t know the answer to that one and I don’t know really what happened to Vince Foster. I know that like so much else in the Clinton story, it absolutely cries out for further investigation. There are so many loose ends. There are so many unanswered questions about the circumstances of the suicide. About the run up to it. Almost anything, it seems to me, including this, the Norman theory, is possible.

Suzan Mazur: Do you believe Gary Webb’s death was a suicide?
[LINK]
Webb looked at the CIA being involved in drug trafficking in a series for the San Jose Mercury News, writing “that a CIA-related drug ring sent ‘millions’ of dollars to the Contras; that it launched an epidemic of cocaine use in South-Central Los Angeles and America’s other inner cities; and that the agency either approved the scheme or deliberately turned a blind eye.” The series grew into a book. [" Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion"by Gary Webb.].

Roger Morris: Well I knew Gary. I don’t know, again, any details about his death per se except, of course, the written reports. I can tell you that the way he was treated was absolutely savage and unconscionable. Whether he was a suicide or not, he was de facto killed by a combination of the American media – the giants, the Washington Post, the New York Times – the reporters there were compromised by their relations with the National Security Establishment – who had attacked him so wantonly, so viciously for a series that end up being vindicated on the facts even by the CIA’s own Inspector General’s report.

And I discovered in doing the Robert Gates’ piece
[LINK]
as they were attacking Webb, these people as they always do of course — this is how they make a living. They went back and relied on Agency moguls, one of whom was then in retirement and no longer with the Agency, but now of course is back in the Pentagon – Robert Gates – who roundly and firmly denied that any of this was going on.

The irony of this is that it was just literally a matter of months until the Inspector General’s report came out vindicating much of what Webb had written.

Suzan Mazur: So you’re saying you can never know if a person’s suicidal or not? You say you knew Gary Webb personally.

Roger Morris: I knew him personally in a professional context. I didn’t know anything about problems with his family or about his personal financial difficulties. I knew that he’d been let go by the Mercury News. I knew that he was despondent. I knew that he had been viciously attacked. And we talked a lot about that. I always tried to encourage him. It was unfounded, but this is a very nasty, dirty world in that respect. And suicides happen and certainly murders that are portrayed as suicides happen. We do that all the time abroad. I’m not really qualified as a forensic detective to follow it.

Suzan Mazur: You served on the senior staff of both President Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s National Security Council – and resigned from Nixon’s over the Cambodia invasion. Would you comment on what can be done to end these secret charters of the CIA?

During the time Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford served as Secretary of Defense, for example, organized crime figures who were weapons manufacturers were given security clearance. We’ve now got the CIA’s former Director of Operations as NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence.

Clifford, again, who helped draft the National Security Act that created the CIA – and he had some really serious personal demons – scored the following language in two books on espionage in his collection, which I saw following their purchase at auction a few years ago by a retired military officer:

–“Of the greatest and most far-reaching consequence was the provision in the 1947 law that permitted the CIA to ‘perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence . . . as the National Security Council may from time to time direct’.” – The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence

–“Although it was commonly assumed when the CIA was created that it was restricted to foreign operations, the Agency’s home-front activity had become so extensive by 1964 that a special section, the Domestic Operations Division, was secretly created to handle it.” – The Espionage Establishment

So the question is, what can be done to end these secret charters of the CIA? And does it makes a difference now with the intelligence apparatus having gotten even more convoluted?

Roger Morris: It makes an enormous difference. It’s part of an almost revolutionary kind of change in the way we do business with ourselves and with the world.

The beginning ingredients here it seems to be are quite clear: You have to get the corrupting power of money out of politics so that you even have a chance at electing a constitutionally co-equal balancing branch in the Congress that can maintain any kind of independence, any kind of integrity. The executive branch will always be beyond their reach to a certain extent, but at least they’ll have power. At least they will have a constitutional chance at balancing off some of this.

The media clearly has a role here. And their independence, their fearlessness, their sheer sophistication of knowledge of these matters, their courage in facing up to what the reality is rather than getting along, going along, playing along in a public game – becoming mere entertainers – which is what they are now. Of course, becoming journalists again is part of this process.

And you’ve got to have an active and informed public. These are all massive, massive changes.

Suzan Mazur: But it keeps getting more and more convoluted with the Department of Homeland Security now, for example.

Roger Morris: Well absolutely. The government is hardening up. And the CIA is arguably worse now than it’s ever been in its history. It’s more far-flung, it’s more powerful. You’ve got this whole shadow world of mercenaries. The Agency always had contract people out there, but it’s true now you’ve got literally a shadow armed forces in the mercenaries, in the Pentagon. You’ve got a shadow intelligence operation in the Pentagon.

Suzan Mazur: The hiring of foreign nationals to conduct our foreign policy – Tony Blair, for example.

Roger Mazur: It’s a huge shadow world. And the reason it’s come into existence is that it’s occupied a vacuum. There’s no one on the other side to even look at it. The average Congressman, even a newly empowered Democratic committee chairman in the House or the Senate, looks at all of this with a sense of being overwhelmed and not even knowing where to begin, so massive is the enormity they face.

I remember an old movie, not to be corny about this. When I was a kid there was a movie called Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne. Very famous movie. They’ve done remakes. And at one point the nervous young Marines are gathered around John Wayne on the ship. This is the night before they land the next day and they say: Gee Sarge, what have the Japanese got out on that island out there? And he says: Well I don’t know boys, but they’ve had 40 years to put it there. And the camera pans back to these worried faces.

It makes the point that we always have to remember about the National Security Establishment. This thing hasn’t happened overnight. It didn’t just happen in the George W. Bush administration. This is a product of a very long, convoluted, very well financed, in some respects well planned and in other respects entirely spontaneous and almost random development of a process which is now HUGE. It’s now vast.

Suzan Mazur: The recent biographies of Hillary Clinton seem to be looking the other way when it comes to Mena. Carl Bernstein does however, in his book Woman in Charge
[LINK]
touch on the fact that Hillary’s father was from Wyoming Valley’s Scranton, Pennsylvania. I grew up there in Northeastern Pennsylvania. It’s long been part of America’s soft underbelly.

The late Chicago court investigator, Sherman Skolnick, wrote that Hillary’s father was tied into the Gambino family in Scranton.
[LINK]

Russell Bufalino, who was a trustee of the Genovese family, and believed to be at the center of the disappearance of Teamsters’ boss Jimmy Hoffa, also lived and operated in Wyoming Valley, PA. [LINK]

Many of the landmark buildings of Scranton, incidentally, were built by Frank Carlucci I, grandfather of Carlyle Group Chairman Emeritus Frank Carlucci III.
[http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur07022005.html
Scoop: Suzan Mazur: Frank Carlucci I, "Sublime Prince" ]

However, Frank Carlucci III grew up in the nearby Poconos Mountains away from the tough crowd in Scranton – though some of the tough crowd’s families sent their kids to the same elite prep school in Wyoming Valley that Frank attended.
[Scoop: Suzan Mazur: Unspooking Frank Carlucci
http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur01152005.html ]

According to Bernstein, Hillary spent a couple of weeks visiting Scranton every summer with her father, mother and siblings. He describes her father as not being a big spender, but notes that following one visit to Pennsylvania, he took the family to Saks Fifth Avenue for a shopping spree. I thought this may have been Bernstein speaking in code.

Can you add anything to this. I believe you have some insight into her father’s business dealings in Chicago.

Roger Morris: Well I don’t know what code Carl Bernstein is speaking in. I was disappointed in the book. I think it turns out to be a recitation of some very old, I would call essentially, gossip about Hillary and Bill. We’re subjected to this endless soap opera of their relationship. He could have done a lot more digging into her origins. I was just beginning to do that when my book came along and the evidence was just beginning to become available in the mid 1990s. My book was published in 1996.

There’s no question that her father operated in a milieu – I think that’s the best way to put it – because we don’t have any other hard evidence here. But in a milieu which was heavily influenced by organized crime in Chicago. He got contracts at the Chicago airport for airlines, and other business dealings that normally just didn’t just go to people that were not connected. And we don’t know whether this is traced to his origins in Pennsylvania or this was something he came across in Chicago. But there’s no question that he operated in that world with proximity.

The other simple fact is – and this is part of this enormity that I was talking about earlier of the system. No American politician – nobody who holds public office, certainly not at the level of prominence of a Bill or Hillary Clinton, can operate for very long without being aware of and coming in contact with this enormous shadow world that exists.

Suzan Mazur: You also suggest in your book that Clinton’s Uncle Raymond Clinton had his mob connections. And I believe you’ve said that Raymond may have been Bill’s ticket into Georgetown’s school of Foreign Service.

Roger Morris: Uncle Raymond was pure and simple mob proconsul for Hot Springs, Arkansas.

[Sam Smith notes in his Clinton timeline: "He [Uncle Raymond] was a minion of the organized crime overlord who controlled the American Middle South for decades, New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello or “Mafia Kingfish” as his biographer John David called him.”]

Suzan Mazur: You think he may have been Bill’s ticket in to Georgetown’s school of Foreign Service?

Roger Morris: Absolutely. He was a very instrumental patron for Bill. I didn’t know that when the book came out. But I’ve since learned that Uncle Raymond was instrumental in getting Bill into Georgetown. It was always something of a mystery. Why would this Southern Baptist boy from Hot Springs end up in this Jesuit college on the Potomac.

Suzan Mazur: So that Bill became aware early on of the – as you put it – “netherworld where government and crime were joined”?

Roger Morris: Yes. Georgetown was one of those places where the syndicate, the mob rubbed shoulders with the establishment. That went on a lot at various points of contact in places in the United States. Georgetown was one of those places. Uncle Raymond was instrumental in getting Bill in.

But coming back to what I was saying earlier, about Hillary and Bill – you can’t do business in American politics without coming upon this absolutely shady world that operates in a kind of no-man’s land between crime and legality. And of course much of organized crime – billions and billions, now trillions of dollars in profits from gambling and everything else – has been washed clean, as it would, and legalized in all sorts of things – electronics, land, agribusiness, and all the rest. Hillary has an extraordinary number of donors and contributors, supporters, etc., who have dubious records of legality, both here in the US and in the world at large. It’s commonly thought that Giuliani has a set of seedy contacts but Hillary can match’em seedy-for-seedy.

Suzan Mazur: Can you tell us a bit about your new book Shadows of the Eagle – when it will be out and what it’s about?

Roger Morris: Well, I’m hoping it’ll be out early next year. It started out to be a book about American policy in Afghanistan. It began right after 9/11 with a commission from Harper’s Magazine. Lewis Lapham knew that I had worked on the NSC staff and had known the king and other officials in the old Afghan government and been there a lot and asked me to do a piece. And it just grew, grew, grew. Not only with the subject but with advance.

I always say you should never write a book about a subject which appears on the front page of the New York Times. It’s endless. It’s turned out to be a rather comprehensive history of American covert intervention and involvement from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas all the way across this arc of crisis that we’re still dealing with. It tells that story from the 1940s. The key event in all of this is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. And that really establishes. By the end of 1980, the world that we inherited in 2001 with 9/11 and the world we’re still in was essentially made.

Suzan Mazur: Is there anything else you’d like to say about the Clintons?

Roger Morris: It may sound corny but I think it’s genuinely an American tragedy. I think this is a woman who is acting out a personal tragedy in the most dramatic and historic political terms. She’s going to be obviously the first serious woman contender for the presidency of the United States and it’s going to be such a freighted choice, such a fraught campaign, simply because of the character of her background and her own compromise over the years. It may have been inevitable. Being wooed and won by this winning young Southerner, this Sisyphus who kept pushing the rock of his seedy background up the hill only to find it falling back down again. This wanton libido that overtook him.

I really do feel a sense of sorrow and compassion about her tragedy, because I think she loved him. I think this was a devastating blow to her life as well as a great humiliation because she always thought she was smarter, better, more disciplined, etc., more able to lead than he. And it didn’t work that way of course. It hasn’t worked out. She’s trying to salvage it even as we speak.

Suzan Mazur: Any of the candidates look good to you?

Roger Morris: I think this is going to be the most terrible choice and I’ve said that before. I think it’s “Roger’s Rule of American Politics” that things always get worse. Certainly my rule of non-redemption in writing history is that if you think that the worst contemporary interpretation is bad – just wait for the archives. Just wait for the emails and the documents and the transcripts, because it’s so much worse.

The Bush administration that we think of here as being some kind of awful nightmare is going to look so much worse when the real records come out.

Suzan Mazur: One thing I didn’t ask in relation to Mena is that you mention a Southern family very much involved in organized crime, but you don’t name them. Who were you referring to ?

Roger Morris: Well there must have been a perfectly good reason for that. Other than the Holt lawyers. I don’t remember. But there were so many people who were compromised. This was part of a larger thing called the Dixie Mafia, which operated part of a distribution system. You bring drugs into the United States, flying it past the laissez-passer the CIA had arranged with the federal government. But getting the drugs into the country for Barry Seal was just the beginning of a very differentiated and sophisticated operation of distribution in the United States. That distribution was not handled by the CIA, it was not handled by politicians, by the people who waved all of this by for whatever reason. That was handled by organized crime. By both local and regional organized crime.

Suzan Mazur: How powerful do you think organized crime is at this point?

Roger Morris: I think we’re in a wholly new era with Iraq and with post 9/11 and the Bush administration. The privatization of armed forces and of national security and of intelligence is absolutely unprecedented. And so too is this open looting of a war. We’ve always had plunderers and profiteers in war time, but what’s gone on in Iraq with cash and suitcases full of it and with the overcharging and the looting by the Halliburtons and others is absolutely unprecedented.

Suzan Mazur: It’s dizzying.

Roger Morris: It’s absolutely dizzying. And we’ll never catch up with it. That looses into the body politics untold amounts of cash and influence so that this stands to be by far the most corrupt political campaign in the history of the republic. And we’ve had some very corrupt ones. But all of this money you see headlined, $30 million raised here, $27 million raised there. ALL OF THIS IS A FRACTION OF WHAT’S REALLY CHANGING HANDS.

Suzan Mazur: Are you optimistic about the effect of the flow of information that now challenges the existing corrupt system?

Roger Morris: It’s a paradox. Right along with this unprecedented exploitation and abuse of power, we have the Internet. The very outrage of the Bush policies I think inspired, provoked, stirred a public consciousness and awareness. We have a more broadly educated and aware public than we’ve ever had before, thanks in part to the Internet.

The Internet would only have been used and utilized because of the sheer outrage of the Bush administration, who’ve been over the top in so many ways. So that George W. has escalated, has accelerated the process of public awareness and public consciousness. The political system will have to catch up to that institutionally, of course. And the commercial media will be the last to get on the train.

Suzan Mazur: But there’s clearly a meltdown of institutions underway, wouldn’t you say?

Roger Morris: Including the media. Yes. The media’s trust is at an all time low. But the very establishment forces, for example, who savaged and ended up killing in one way or another Gary Webb seems to me are at the very lowest point of credibility. They’re going to retire and collect pensions and go off and live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland or whatever. It will never be the same again. And their credibility, their power will never be the same. There’s a much greater pluralism and diversity out there on the Internet than ever before. A lot of schlock, but a lot of real authority, as well. And just more voices. More informed than we’ve ever had before.

I’m mildly optimistic. I think this could be a very traumatic political year. But we could come out the better for it. I have absolutely no hope that the Democratic party in its present form is going to rescue anybody. The Republicans are hopeless. They’re doomed to where they’ve always belonged – in a regional cave. Being the permanent party of the Old Confederacy. And the deepest and worst part of it at that. The fringes will go somewhere else.

WE’RE LOOKING AT A POTENTIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS. The population, the country is much more conscious and aware than it was eight years ago. And I think it’s much more aware of how its basic interests in economic and social terms have been exploited and really devastated.

Suzan Mazur: The political process has been more or less nullified?

Roger Morris: They wouldn’t call it by this name yet, but they’re coming to understand they’re governed by an oligarchy and it’s an oligarchy of not two parties but one. Look at Michael Moore’s film which is getting such incredible response, Sicko. There’s not a thing in that film that wasn’t true essentially of the medical system back in 1992 when Bill Clinton was running for president or in 1993 when Hillary Rodham Clinton was in charge of drafting a new health initiative for the Clinton administration.

Nothing in Sicko is new in American politics. There are two lobbyists for every member of Congress. That’s been true for a very long while. And the insurance and health giants are nothing compared to the military industrial complex.

Suzan Mazur: So you’re saying that Michael Moore waxes over the fact that the Clintons were also part of the problem?

Roger Morris: Michael Moore has simply begun to popularize here facts that were on the ground and should have been plain to us 10, 15 or even 20 years ago.

I mean I think that’s the service that George W. Bush has performed. He has made it possible because of the very outrage of his rule and the very excess that’s just so undeniable now. He’s made it possible for us to recognize this in a way that we may have taken much longer to see. And I think that’s very positive.

Suzan Mazur: So that’s Bush’s lasting contribution?

Roger Morris: Yes. And it’s a very real contribution. We just have to survive Bush and Cheney without attacking Iran. If we can get to January 21, 2009 without a catastrophe, I’ll be happy.

Suzan Mazur covered developments in Colombia in the late 1980s for The Economist, The Kwitny Report, Newday’s editorial pages, TV Asahi and Archaeology Magazine (cover). Other reports have appeared in the Financial Times, Forbes, Philadelphia Inquirer, CounterPunch and Scoop, among others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

When Mormon feminist Judith Dushku learned that Mitt Romney, her former bishop and friend, counseled a woman to come to full term with her sixth pregnancy –despite overwhelming medical advice that the life of mother and child were seriously endangered …

Click for big version
Sealing for Eternity — “Such is the Endowment, as reported by many who have passed through it.” — J.H. Beadle, Polygamy or, the Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (1882)]

When Mormon feminist Judith Dushku learned that Mitt Romney, her former bishop and friend, counseled a woman to come to full term with her sixth pregnancy –despite overwhelming medical advice that the life of mother and child were seriously endangered — she confronted Romney about the matter, privately and publicly. He reacted bitterly, breaking off their relationship.

Dushku says Romney still speaks to others in her family, however, which includes daughter/actress Eliza, known for her television role as “Faith” in the series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Judy Dushku has been a professor of government for 40 years. She now teaches at Suffolk University in Massachusetts and is Fulbright Senior Specialist there. For a while she also served as Dean of Suffolk’s Senegal campus.

Dushku has traveled widely in Africa and elsewhere as part of her involvement with international study-abroad programs. And she’s a vigorous anti-war and human rights activist as well. In 2005, she was part of a Global Exchange delegation that visited victims of tsunami-ravaged Indonesia’s Band Ache.

Dushku considers herself a Social Democrat and has a problem with right-wing Utah Mormon politics. She agrees with me that the polygamy cults out West still exist due to a political coverup [See also… Scoop: Suzan Mazur: Most Wanted In Polygamy Coverup] .

Our interview follows:

Click for big version

Suzan Mazur: Mitt Romney was bishop of your church in Massachusetts.
[See also… Scoop: Suzan Mazur: Big Love, Romney, Bush & Mormons]

Judy Dushku: Yes. I first met him in the very early 1970s when we were both in the same congregation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was my bishop for five years and after that he was stake president for five years, meaning that he presided over a larger area in Massachusetts, which included my ward.

In the Mormon Church, there’s no trained leadership. The Lord inspires those in authority in Salt Lake City to call down through a hierarchy of people certain members to serve as bishops, teachers, etc. The idea is to get everybody involved. It increases the sense of commitment.

Suzan Mazur: Does a person’s financial contribution to the church have anything to do with whether or not they’re chosen to be a bishop or stake president?

Judy Dushku: No, except that in order to be called to the high leadership position you have to be temple worthy. There are a series of questions that are asked in the temple interview and one of them is:
“Do you pay 10% of your income to the church?”
And so Mitt Romney would have to have answered that question “Yes” in order to be eligible to be bishop.

Suzan Mazur: Now you also considered Mitt Romney a friend.

Judy Dushku: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: But you broke off your friendship with him when you publicly criticized his approach to the abortion issue while he was bishop, specifically his sadistic “counseling” of a 40ish-year-old woman in her sixth pregnancy to give birth, even though her doctor advised her that she’d developed blood clots and that her life was in danger.

Judy Dushku: I sort of naively didn’t think I was breaking off the friendship. I was upset about the position he took. And I wanted it to be clear both privately and publicly how upset I was about that. But I did go up to Mitt after his 1994 Senatorial race to congratulate him for making a respectable showing against Ted Kennedy, whom I had actively supported.

Suzan Mazur: And what did he say?

Judy Dushku: He said I’m so angry at you. I don’t ever want to talk about this again. And I don’t want to talk to you.

And I said, I’m sorry about that Mitt because I thought we could have our political differences and remain at least cordial.

He said – No. That’s not possible.

Suzan Mazur: Bits of this story have appeared elsewhere, but would you recount the story of Bishop Mitt Romney’s counseling of this pregnant woman?

Judy Dushku: It was in the late 1970s. She was a woman about 40 years old, 3 ½ to 4 months into her sixth pregnancy. We’ll call her woman “X”. She was an active member of the ward where Romney was bishop in Massachusetts, at that time in a neighboring community where I was not a member. The stake president was a doctor named Gordon and was an old friend of X.

X and her husband went to the hospital because she had an aching in her leg. Her doctor was alarmed after examining her, telling her she had developed blood clots and could not carry the pregnancy to full term. He said they’d have to give her blood thinners in order to get rid of the clots and that they would endanger the baby.

X had lost her first baby; the child was born with many physical problems and died at two or three weeks old. X was already the mother of four teenage children. This would have been her sixth.

Suzan Mazur: And X and her husband decided they would abort the child because her life was in danger.

Judy Dushku: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: And she advised her bishop – Mitt Romney – that she was going to terminate the pregnancy for medical reasons. And what did he say?

Judy Dushku: First of all the stake president – Gordon – came by to see X with a friend and said well it looks like you have to do this – terminate the pregnancy. He was perfectly comfortable with X’s decision, since both she and the child were in peril. And Gordon was technically higher in the LDS church hierarchy than Mitt was as bishop.

So then Mitt came in to the hospital. X thought Mitt had come to be comforting because that’s what bishops do. They have a pastoral role. But she said that instead he was critical.

He said – What do you think you’re doing?

She said – Well, we have to abort the baby because I have these blood clots.

And he said something to the effect of – Well, why do you get off easy when other women have their babies?

And she said – What are you talking about? This is a life threatening situation.

And he said – Well what about the life of the baby?

And she said – I have four other children and I think it would be really irresponsible to continue the pregnancy.

X said she found herself arguing with Romney about her medical crisis, said he was very unsympathetic, very critical, and said that under the circumstances in no way did he condone her aborting the child. And he left.

She was extremely distraught. Talked it over with her husband. They decided to go ahead with the abortion. After that she left the church.

Suzan Mazur: She’s okay now?

Judy Dushku: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: And you then confronted Romney over the matter.

Judy Dushku: In the early 90s, our feminist newspaper Exponent II, did a theme issue about Mormonism and abortion. X said she’d like to write a piece describing her experience. We agreed to publish her story anonymously because we knew her and knew about the ordeal.

Then in 1994, when Romney was running for the Senate, he came out in favor of choice for women — which was surprising to me. I was pleased and called, asking to see him. I told him I suspected that we had our differences, but that maybe I could work with him if he’d come to a really good position on women and childbirth.

And he said – Yes, come to my office.

I went to his office and I congratulated him on taking a pro-choice position. And his response was – Well they told me in Salt Lake City I could take this position, and in fact I probably had to in order to win in a liberal state like Massachusetts.

Suzan Mazur: Who’s “THEY”?

Judy Dushku: I asked him the same question. And he said “the Brethren” in Salt Lake City.

And I said, Mitt, it doesn’t make me happy to hear that. What you’re suggesting is that you’re not genuinely pro-choice. It’s a position of convenience.

He said – Oh no, I actually had an aunt who died of a botched abortion. So I have some positive feelings about choice, but basically I know that I have to take that position.

So I said – How do you feel about choice for poor women and state funding of abortion for poor women?

He said, I’m against that. The state has no right or responsibility to fund abortions for poor women.

And I said – Well Mitt, I thought there was possibly some kind of room for mutual agreement on this issue but it appears there’s really not. I think we’re quite far apart on the issue of choice. It’s nice meeting with you here and talking with you. Good luck with your campaign, however, I can’t support you.

Suzan Mazur: We know how tight Mitt Romney is with the LDS church. There’s an institute in his father’s name at church-funded Brigham Young University. Mitt Romney has been credited as point man in bringing the 2002 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City — the security for which served as a model for the Department of Homeland Security. The irony, of course, is that only a few bus stops away live the Allred polygamist cult of 5,000-8,000 members, the Kingston polygamists and to the south the FLDS polygamists numbering 10,000-12,000.

Why do you suppose Romney has failed to do anything to help those in the Mormon culture trapped in polygamy?

Judy Dushku: Well he’s of my generation. We grew up in the church at a time when polygamy was never discussed. In fact, I did a search this morning for several articles on polygamy and they all say virtually the same thing. In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the official church position was polygamy was only practiced by a very few people. In fact, at that time the church even denied that founder Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. It was never mentioned in a church publication.

I was told as a child by my very observant parents that it’s a question we didn’t talk about. It affected such a small minority of people. The church was so much against it now that it needn’t concern me.

Most people my age just grew up in a state of denial about the reality of polygamy, particularly if they lived away from Utah. It’s only in the last 10 or 15 years that people have become aware of how prevalent polygamy is as a result of various media exposes.

I’d say – in Romney’s defense – that he didn’t think polygamy would become an issue.

Suzan Mazur: But it has. And Mitt Romney knows very well what’s going on – his father George, who somehow was allowed to run for president of the United States in 1968, was born in a Mexican polygamy colony — Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua.. So why does Romney continue to look the other way on this issue?

Judy Dushku: Well, I really think that he thought he could do like the Kennedys have done and say my religion will not be an issue. It’s a private matter.

Suzan Mazur: That still doesn’t get him off the hook. And ditto for John McCain.
[See also… Scoop: Senator John McCain Passes The Buck On Polygamy ]

Romney is supposedly point man in bringing the Olympics to Utah, the major American officials traipse through to get to the Games, and then when the Olympic caravan packs up — nothing is done about the polygamy cults dug in. There’s obviously a big political coverup here.

Judy Dushku: I agree with you, but I think that during Romney’s Senate race in 1994 he was able to get away from confronting Mormonism because he was not running for national office.

Suzan Mazur: What’s your feeling about LDS church scripture still advocating polygamy, specifically the Book of Mormon Doctrine & Covenants, section 132?
["if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified, he cannot commit adultery . . . And if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery. . . therefore is he justified." -- Joseph Smith]

Judy Dushku: It’s been an issue for me since I became aware of it. Removing it from scripture would take a revelation from the church’s current prophet and church president – Gordon B. Hinckley.

I’m also bothered by the fact that the church has said it excommunicates people who practice polygamy, but the fact is that only a small percentage have been excommunicated. Some practice it right under the nose of the church and no one investigates that.

And you understand that LDS people put great emphasis on the importance of “eternal marriage” – marriage that continues after life on Earth. But with that doctrine there is a difference in the rules regarding the marriages of women and men. A woman cannot be married to anyone else for time and all eternity if she divorces and remarries but a man can marry as many as he wants if the wives are temple worthy. They’ll all be his wives in heaven. The implication is that polygamy is still part of our scriptures and our theology when it comes to the afterlife.

Suzan Mazur: Is a member of the LDS church answerable first to the church and then to family and professional calling next?

Judy Dushku: Yes, but with an understanding that loyalty to family is very important. My husband is not a Mormon and no one in the church would criticize me for my loyalty to him.

Suzan Mazur: But while you have a certain skepticism about the religion, you don’t have any inclination to leave the religion?

Judy Dushku: That’s right. And don’t ask me why, as it is hard to explain briefly.

Suzan Mazur: Because it’s come under a lot of attack. Christopher Hitchens’ book god Is Not Great [Link] is the latest.

[Hitchens says the following about Mormon founder Joseph Smith:
"In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of being "a disorderly person and an imposter." That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or "necromantic" powers. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the "Book of Mormon"."]

Many see the LDS church as a money making scheme rather than a religion. And a political tool. And that the church feeds the FBI, CIA, Treasury, etc. with personnel. Sends missionaries on dubious missions abroad and when they come back they’re recruited by the intel agencies. Also, I’ve noted in a recent article that beginning in 1985, which is when the Latin American countries came into their own as narco-economies – that the LDS church doubled its membership in Mexico, particularly. [See also.. Scoop: LDS Church -- Mexico Drug Money Connection?]

Judy Dushku: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: It is not publicly known how much is in the LDS treasury or what the source of the money is. A bishop from a Roman Catholic church in Mexico has been quoted, for instance, by the AP saying yes some of his church funds do come from drug money and it’s not the church’s responsibility to investigate the origin of those funds.

Then you’ve got this funny little airport on the Utah-Arizona border funded by local, state and federal monies to the tune of $3 million and run by the FLDS polygamists for decades.
[See also… Scoop: The AZ Polygamy Town Airport Built With Fed $$$Mns]
It grew out of a dirt airstrip in the 1960s. Very isolated. Just north of the Grand Canyon, a plane hop from Vegas and the Mexican border.

What’s going on? There are reports that it’s served as a kind of Mena, Arkansas airstrip for drugs, money laundering and trafficking of women. In fact, just south of Phoenix there’s another airport – Marana – that we know served as a CIA base for clandestine activity — where Evergreen Air and Air America flew in and out of in the 70s. [Link ]

One of the reasons the polygamists on the Utah-Arizona strip were not disturbed for decades?

Judy Dushku: That surprises me a lot what you just said. Because my impression of those communities is that they are so isolated from the world. I have no knowledge of these reported activities of the church in Latin America or on the border. The polygamist communities seem so separate from the world.

Suzan Mazur: Not so separate. The Colorado City Airport was named Arizona’s “Airport of the Year” in 1992.

And you’ve got Senator Orrin Hatch speaking in southern Utah condoning polygamy.
[See also… Scoop: Reports Reconfirm Hatch Said He Condones Polygamy ]
Plus the politics of Senator Bob Bennett, that go back to the days of Richard Nixon and Howard Hughes, when Bennett operated from a PR agency in Washington– Robert Mullen Associates — that fronted for the CIA. [Link] In fact, Nixon though Bennett was Deep Throat.

Judy Dushku: While I can’t imagine the actual leadership of the official church being involved in these kinds of activities, when it comes to right-wing Mormons involved in politics, I wouldn’t put anything past either one of them. Membership in the LDS church has never been a guarantee against involvement in criminal activity. But I do not believe this is orchestrated by “the Brethren” – the actual spiritual leadership.

Suzan Mazur: Connect the dots.

Judy Dushku: I don’t want to be your source on these matters, but as a Leftist, nothing would surprise me about these right wing connections.

Suzan Mazur: Are you disturbed by the creation myth in the Book of Mormon about the ancient Israelites “becoming” Native Americans?

Judy Dushku: There was a time when I found it quite distressing. But it doesn’t bother me anymore. I went through a period when there were so many things that bothered me that I started going to other organizations to find a spiritual home. And really discovered that I’m so touched and motivated by the basic Christian teachings that I learned all of my life in the Mormon church that that’s the language that reaches me the most deeply. I deeply value my membership and participation in the church. It is central to my life.

Suzan Mazur: And so you sort of take from it what you need.

Judy Dushku: Yes. I’m somewhat of a smorgasbord person.

Suzan Mazur: Why do you think Gladys Knight is a Mormon?

Judy Dushku: I’ve heard her speak and I’ve heard her say that it sounded like a pure and simple testimony of Christ that inspired her and made her want to be better and that was what she was looking for. I was a little surprised myself, but, those who know her are convinced that she is absolutely converted.

Suzan Mazur: It doesn’t have anything to do with the Mormons bankrolling Las Vegas, etc., right?

Judy Dushku: I don’t think so.

Suzan Mazur: How do you think Mitt Romney will do ultimately in the presidential race?

Judy Dushku: He’s got so much money. He’s publicly appealing and charming – more charming than McCain. And I think the Republicans will not tolerate a Guliani, so he has a very good chance. It depends on whether the Democrats can get their act together and present someone better.

Suzan Mazur: And he’s a good business man. But don’t you think the business model has gone as far as it can go in presidential politics? Isn’t it time for a switch to leadership that cares about more than business moguls and generals?

Judy Dushku: You’re talking to a Social Democrat who reads Paul Krugman and CounterPunch and thinks that it has all been downhill since the New Deal restraints on business and legal protections of unions and peoples’ rights. As a professor of government for over 40 years, I believe that we’ve never been in such terrible shape since the robber barons. The control of corporate money on America is a disaster and has led to the decline and fall of democracy.

Suzan Mazur: So it’s gone as far as it can go?

Judy Dushku: Unfortunately, it’s gone way beyond that.

Suzan Mazur has traveled through the western US and Canada covering the polygamy story, contributing a series on the subject to the Financial Times, writing for the editorial pages of Newsday and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as Maclean’s, CounterPunch and Scoop. She has been a guest on Fox Television News with Paula Zahn and Bill O’Reilly discussing the issue and on numerous radio shows. Email: sznmzr @ aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

New York collector Stuart Pivar says the odyssey of his “nearly life-size” Roman bronze boy includes a chapter on an attempted “assassination” of the statue. He identifies the place of treachery as the Hunt-Sotheby’s auction, June 19,1990. And he fingers …

” I was in Sotheby’s [December 1996] on my way to an old master sale, when I noticed a bronze statue of a boy perched on top of an eight foot tall French armoire. They got me a ladder and I was able to see only the toes. Under the loupe I saw immediately that the statue was ancient. It had a magnificent underwater incrustation patina, and traces of the holes which held silver toenails. I nervously descended and got the sales room frisson you get at times like this. The catalogue said 19th century bronze statue, $6 thousand to $9 thousand. Property of Sotheby’s. Exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and eight others, ex collection William Herbert Hunt. I saw this thing sell six years before [at Sotheby's for half a million dollars]. What’s going on?

“Next day psyched up to go to seven figures I bought the bronze statue by phone for $75 thousand. The great sculpture expert Michael Hall was underbidder and was luckily tapped out at that moment. A group supposedly bid to $40 thousand planning to cut it up and sell the parts separately. The head would make $500 thousand, the torso $100 thousand, the hands and feet $10 thousand each. Everything you buy has an interesting tale, but that of the Roman boy is an odyssey. “

–Stuart Pivar

New York collector Stuart Pivar says the odyssey of his “nearly life-size” Roman bronze boy includes a chapter on an attempted “assassination” of the statue. He identifies the place of treachery as the Hunt-Sotheby’s auction, June 19,1990. And he fingers the lead assassin: Bob Hecht.

Hecht is now on trial in Rome for another conspiracy, one to traffic in ancient art, including pieces from the Hunt-Sotheby’s sale.

I covered the Sotheby’s antiquities auction of the collection of Bunker and Herbert Hunt for The Economist magazine. Pivar’s bronze boy statue, then owned by Herbert Hunt, was the most expensive piece on the block. Sotheby’s billed it as 2nd C. AD, derived from a prototype of the 5th C. BC and estimated its value at $800,000 to $1.2 million. The catalogue noted the piece may once have been a Roman lampbearer.

The statue had been introduced to the international ancient art market in the 1970s by the late Swiss numismatist and antiquities dealer, Herbert Cahn of Munzen und Medaillen in Basle. It then went on consignment to New York dealer Andre Emmerich before being exhibited widely in the US and Hecht’s partner at Summa Gallery, Bruce McNall, acquiring it.

McNall got it in Basle, almost certainly from Herbert Cahn — although Cahn’s son David says he doesn’t know the details pertaining to his father’s sale of the statue or where his father’s files are. Quite odd, because Dr. Herbert Cahn was a scholar and his papers would likely be preserved.

In any event, McNall then sold the bronze boy to Herbert Hunt.

Pivar claims that it was Bob Hecht, the once unquestionable grand man of the antiquities trade, who spread the word in the market that the bronze was a forgery. And I do remember Hecht telling me and Turkish journalist Ozgen Acar prior to the Sotheby’s sale that the statue was a fake, made in a foundry in Italy.

The other dealers took note, says Pivar, and the strength of the pack prevailed.

In a drama that must have delighted Hecht, when the piece came up for bid there was silence among the dealers. I recall a lone paddle going up and the hammer coming down rather quickly, with Sotheby’s selling the bronze nude for $539,000 to an apparent outsider, a Japanese buyer. And then a snicker in the room.

That Japanese dealer is now believed to have been Noriyoshi Horiuchi – the man who supplied the Miho Museum with its hoard of unprovenanced ancient Western art.

However, even now, because of “confidentiality”, Sotheby’s — a public company — will not say who bought the bronze boy at the Hunt auction. Nor will it say whether the piece was returned with the dealer getting his money back. Nor if the statue was lab tested before the sale or who evaluated the piece prior to sale.

All we know is that somehow between 1990 and 1996 the statue became Sotheby’s property. It was listed as such in Sotheby’s 19th century garden sale [est. $6,000-$9,000] where Pivar bought it.

So, however you track it, the riches to rags and rags to possible riches story of the ex-Hunt Roman bronze boy clearly has been a mystery tour.

I thought I had exhausted stories related to the Hunt-Sotheby’s sale, when Pivar emailed me following a recent conversation with Max Bernheim at Christie’s who told him about my interview on these pages with Medici Conspiracy author Peter Watson, in which we discussed the whereabouts of the Roman boy. Krumpets With Medici Conspiracy’s Peter Watson Pivar wrote:

“Dear Suzan Mazur,
I own the Roman Bronze Boy, ex Hunt coll. The story of how I got it is remarkable.
It is no fake. You are welcome to see it.
Stuart Pivar”

Cornelius Vermeule, who exhibited the statue at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in the late 1970s when he was curator of classical art there, believed the piece was genuine too. In fact, he thought the Sotheby’s estimates were low and told me so before the sale:

“ Cornelius Vermeule: Very large [the Roman Bronze boy]. It’s not a very beautiful work of art in terms of slick green patina kind of sinuous male or female anatomy sort of bronze that a lot of people like – of which there are others in the collection. But it’s a rather powerful young man of the end of the Roman Republic/beginning of the Roman Empire slightly traditional style that goes back to the 5th Century BC.

It’s a splendid eclectic piece of the early Empire and it’s just plain. What you call life-size or nearly life-size – 2/3rds life-size. It’s kind of under life-size for a human, but it’s still no sort of piccolo Bronze – no table top thing. It’s, in that respect, very impressive.

Suzan Mazur: It’s very much intact, is it?

Cornelius Vermeule: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: It’s the most expensive piece that’s going to be auctioned, I believe.

Cornelius Vermeule: Is it? I haven’t looked.

Suzan Mazur: The estimate is $800,000-$1.2 million.

Cornelius Vermeule: It seems quite reasonable by today’s market, considering the $1million to $2million tickets on almost every masterpiece right now and the price Mr. Herbert Hunt paid for it. The piece was on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. . .

I think to quote Andre Emmerich’s famous quote about the market, which goes back to Winston Chruchill – “Certain pieces are or are not the tide which raises all boats.” Well this is going to be right up there surging on the beach with the best. Appropos to the Cycladic piece that Asher Edelman bought.

It [the Bronze nude] will fetch more than the estimates and the estimates are low. So in the forefront of the charge up Lookout Mountain at Gettysburg – I’m really mixing the metaphors – except I wouldn’t want to lead Pickett’s charge wearing what he’s wearing.”

Since Pivar acquired the statue in 1996, a number of experts have visited his home to view it, including a team from Sotheby’s led by antiquities specialist, Dick Keresey — who was also in charge at the time of the Hunt sale. Pivar said Keresey told him the statue was not ancient, that it resembled those bronzes manufactured from ancient molds at Chiurrazzi, a famous foundry in Naples established in 1840. That he was familiar with Chiurrazzi’s catalogues.

Ironically, it was not authenticity of the Hunt items that was the burning issue surrounding the Sotheby’s June 1990 auction. The concern was that the pieces were looted — lacking provenience and provenance. This was the sale that included two signed Euphronios vases — the first time Sotheby’s had handled a piece signed by an ancient artist.

The Hunt hoard was purchased from Bruce McNall through Bob Hecht who got the pieces from Giacomo Medici. Medici has already been convicted of trafficking in antiquities by a Rome court and sentenced to 10 years; he awaits his final appeal in January.

The Euphronios Sarpedon cup Medici purchased at the Hunt-Sotheby’s sale will become Italy’s if he loses his appeal. And Italy is currently in discussion with Shelby White over her collection, presumably this includes the Kyknos Euphronios vase from the Hunt sale, now on loan to the Met.

Italy earlier this year reclaimed its Sarpendon Euphronios vase that Hecht sold to the Met in 1972. The masterpiece is on loan to the museum until 2008.

However, tracing the source of an unsigned bronze statue — which may have come from a shipwreck — is tougher than determining that a signed Euphronios vase was looted from an Etruscan tomb in Italy. Deciding a classical bronze statue’s age is also more of a challenge since so few have survived to compare with.

Thermoluminescence tests can be done on a terracotta pot quite easily. Testing a bronze statue’s clay remains inside from casting is not always possible. Even if there is a hole big enough to get inside without damage to rest of the piece, the core material may not be there if the statue had been “joined” rather than cast in one piece. And TL tests on core material could indicate a piece is ancient when it’s not if the statue has been x-rayed a certain way prior to the TL test.

In any event, Stuart Pivar, was passionate about finding out just who his Roman Bronze boy was. He decided to have the statue evaluated and then tested in various labs.

Pivar has long been fascinated by such puzzles. He began his education at Brooklyn Technical High School. He’s an inventor (plastics molding), an entrepreneur (plastics factories) and science author. He’s written a book on evolution called Lifecode and was a friend of the late evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould.

He was also a close friend of the late artist Andy Warhol and co-founder with Warhol of the New York Academy of Art. In the 1980s, Pivar and Warhol frequented New York’s flea markets, antique shops and auctions.

Stuart Pivar With Andy Warhol -
Image Source

Stuart Pivar now lives on New York’s Central Park West in an apartment stuffed with art, which is where I first met him twenty years ago.

Pivar had thrown open his place for a fashionable 1980s party. I remember meeting him with his blonde Finnish girlfriend. He was wearing a tight velvet jacket — his hair in ringlets framing his intense eyes.

He is still a very trim, fit 76-year old, and was wearing a muscle shirt the last time I saw him – even though he told me he now takes his gin every evening around 6pm.

I stopped by three nights in a row to view and discuss the statue. The doorman was amused asking on the third night: “Will we be seeing you tomorrow evening?”

Pivar has invested thousands of dollars since acquiring the bronze statue to discover what he’s got. Some of the most important tests on the bronze have been carried out at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts — on the materials and manufacturing process of the statue. But even so, MFA has said:

“An examination of the type carried out here rarely will absolutely prove that a sculpture is authentic or not. In the ‘best case’ scenario, the evidence may point strongly to the object’s authenticity or lack thereof.”

Therefore, the point of this story is also not to attempt to prove or disprove authenticity, but to document Pivar’s investigation of the statue. Steps that should have been taken by previous owners, long before the bronze was exhibited by major museums and put on the block for a million dollars at Sotheby’s.

A brief exhibition history of the piece is first, followed by Pivar’s quest for the facts.

Amsterdam, CINOA Exhibition, 1972
New York, CINOA Exhibition, 1973
New York, Andre Emmerich Gallery, 1975
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1978-79
Fort Worth, Texas, Kimbell Art Museum, 1983
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1983
Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1984
Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, 1984

Pivar first contacted a leading art historian at George Mason University in Washington, D.C. — Carol C. Mattusch — to have the statue evaluated. Mattusch is the author of The Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North American Collections. She stopped by Pivar’s apartment in July 2002, and shortly after that put her observations in writing. Pivar paid her $2,500 for this.

Here are excerpts of Professor Mattusch’s comments.

“This bronze is not ancient, and was almost certainly made as a forgery. Greek and Roman statues come in standard sizes and standard types. This one is neither ephebe-size, though larger than a statuette, nor adult-size.

The apparent joins, horizontal lines across the arms and thighs of this bronze, are not placed where joins are made on ancient bronzes. . . . Ancient joins of naked body-parts are not at these locations, the joins are flow-welded, and there are usually patches as well in the area. . . . The nipples appear to be inset, but they do not appear to be of a different material from the surrounding metal. On an ancient statue, if nipples are inset, they are made of copper. . . . Ancient inset fingernails and toenails are silver in color. The nails on this statue do not look to me as if they are inset; the toenails look simply as if the base metal has been revealed. . . . Other problems: the dough-like wavy hair looks like what one might see on a miniature, but not on a statue of this size. . .”

However, Richard Newman, Head of Scientific Research at MFA told me that historians do not agree that classical bronzes are of a standard type. Not enough of them have survived to say so.

Following is a note about this and citing of Pivar’s Roman bronze boy in Wealth of the Ancient World, the Kimbell Art Museum’s catalogue on the Hunt hoard. The article was written by the late Getty Museum curator, Jiri Frel:

“Our vision today of classical sculpture is hampered by several difficulties. The literary sources are scarce and cannot always be related to the available monuments. Very few Greek bronze originals survive – the preserved marbles are considerably more numerous – which is opposite to the situation in antiquity when the majority of works were in bronze. Only three extant life-size bronzes can be directly associated with famous names: the two Riace statues with Phidias, and the Getty bronze with Lysippos.

[The Lysippos bronze statue of a "Victorious Athlete" is contested by Italy, and currently in the news. The Getty Museum claims it was found in international waters in 1964 off the coast of Italy. The Italians say that even if it was found in international waters, it was brought into Italy and smuggled out. -- LINK -- ]

The works of many other masters who sculpted exclusively in bronze are lost. Many famous bronze artists are only names. The works of others, like the masterpieces of Myron or Polykleitos from the fifth century, exist only in Roman marble copies which dilute their art even more than do marble reproductions of marble originals.

Under such circumstances every large bronze is a treasure, for example, one can divine in the gauche Roman youth with inlaid silver eyes some of the inspiration from the classical ephebic beauty, even if its true starting point was the widespread image of Antinous, the emperor Hadrian’s favorite.“

And Jane Cody, former chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Southern California, now a USC associate dean, said this of Pivar’s statue in the same catalogue:

“This figure may have originally served as a lychnouchos, or lampbearer, of the type found at Pompeii and have held a branched candle holder in each hand. Or, according to Boucher (in correspondence) [Stephanie Boucher of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France], he may have held the attributes of an athlete, the palm, as a reward for victory, in his right hand and, perhaps, a discus in his left.”

So, upset but not discouraged by Mattusch’s opinion, Pivar next had the bronze boy x-rayed by Tom Chase of Chase Art Services, Chevy Chase, Maryland. Chase advised him that the piece indeed had “Roman joints”.

“Dear Mr. Pivar:

On August 1 and 2, 2002, I examined a statue of a standing boy in your collection. After examining the statue visually, I took it out to Cranford, NJ for radiography and surface analysis using x-ray fluorescence. . . . The radiographs showed many repairs in the torso area, attachments of the head and limbs by “Roman joints,” and radioopaque fills in the feet. On examiniation with x-ray fluorescence, the fills turned out to be lead. . .”

Chase told me last week that he and Pivar peered through a hole in the statue’s “butt” after removing one of the patches and found there was no core material to do a thermoluminescence test on.

According to one museum source, because the statue was in pieces and then assembled, it’s possible the clay could have first been removed before being joined.

Carol Mattusch, learning of the Chase test, then sent the following letter to Pivar on March 12, 2003 apparently changing her opinion about the statue:

“Dear Dr. Pivar

[Pivar says he only has a BA degree]:

Tom Chase forwarded your letter to me of March 11, which you sent to him. I know Richard Stone, and I am glad that he looked at your ex-Hunt bronze statue of a boy.

[Pivar said Stone never gave him a written evaluation but casually looked at the piece at his home.]

If he and Tom Chase believe it to be ancient, I see no reason that you should not accept their word. Nor do I think that you need to ask me to look at the statue again: simply accept their conclusions.

I remind you that you never paid me the full amount that you offered for my consulting work on July 5, 2002.”

I have since had email exchanges with Carol Mattusch, confirming that she did evaluate the bronze for Pivar, although she would not say exactly what she wrote. She also did not respond to my email request for a conversation about the matter, however, I have copies of both her evaluation and her March 12, 2003 letter.

Next, the Boston MFA asked Pivar to exhibit the piece in their 2004 show to celebrate the Olympics in Greece that summer: “The Greek Athlete and the Games”. MFA officials saw Pivar’s bronze boy as an “athletic victor”. They asked to test the statue in their lab to try to verify its ancientness before exhibiting.

Click for big version

MFA will only run such tests for a collector or dealer if the museum plans to exhibit their art. Pivar paid for the MFA tests and all other testing of his bronze.

MFA also required an appraisal, which Pivar secured from the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental & Primitive Art. This was the organization that Fred Schultz was president of before he was convicted for conspiring to smuggle Egyptian antiquities. — LINK — NADAOPA filed a friend-of-the-court brief in 2001 opposing Schultz’s indictment, but the dealer was sentenced and went to jail.

On March 20, 2004, NADAOPA cited the insurance value for Pivar’s Roman bronze boy at $1million. The document was signed by Astrid Sanai, Director of Appraisal Services.

NADAOPA does not seem to have a website. There are a couple of references online about reaching the organization through the Merrin Gallery. But the receptionist at Merrin said the gallery stopped appraising for NADAOPA about 15 years ago. That would be roughly around the time of the Hunt-Sotheby’s sale. I was given a telephone number for Astrid Sanai, however, there was only a voice message at that number.

No one from NADAOPA returned my call regarding my question as to who on the NADAOPA committee appraised Pivar’s statue in March 2004. I was particularly interested in finding out because none of the New York dealers bid on the statue at the 1990 Sotheby’s auction.

After Pivar succeeded in getting the $1million appraisal, MFA told Pivar the statue had “bronze disease” and needed cleaning before it could be exhibited. This was done at one of MFA’s outside labs in Massachusetts.

MFA scientists then studied Tom Chase’s x-ray radiographs of the piece and made their own observations. They confirmed Chase’s findings that the joins were mechanical — with three pins in each join — and noted that mechanical joins were used by the Romans.

MFA found “little evidence” of intergranular corrosion in the samples they took in the more accessible, less corroded areas of the Bronze. They did not want to slice into areas that had more corrosion (the head) because they did not want to further disturb the piece. Richard Newman said, however, that he did not need evidence of more significant intergranular corrosion to say that MFA had a “good feeling” the Roman bronze boy was ancient.

Here are some of MFA’s findings:

– The standing youth was made in six pieces, which appear to have been joined by mechanical means [sleeve and pin]. Large classical bronzes were usually made in multiple pieces, similar to the manner in which the “standing youth” was made. The usual means of joining pieces were fusion welding and mechanical joins (the latter aided sometimes with lead solder).

- The standing youth was made from an alloy that contained intentional amounts of tin, zinc and lead. . . . Bronze alloys that contain as much zinc as the standing youth . . . were utilized by the Romans, particularly for everyday metalwork such as lamps, hinges, etc.

- Silver inlays were used in the eyes and copper (or copper alloy) inlays in the nipples. Such inlays were fairly common in Roman statuary. . . . No silver was detected [in samples from a fingernail and toenail, copper corrosion products were].

- Metallographic sections, taken from areas in which little corrosion was evident, showed little evidence of intergranular corrosion. There were, however, pockets of thick corrosion in recessed areas in the sections, even though most of the exposed surfaces contained no corrosion.

- The presence of chlorides on presumed cleaned areas and in areas of thicker corrosion suggest that the statue may have been buried in seawater.

- Samples of the thicker black [corrosion] were chipped with a scalpel from one toenail on each of the feet and from one location in the hair. These chips were prepared as polished cross sections and examined by Scanning Electron Microscope. The analyses showed that all three samples contain compact corrosion which has a complex structure involving numerous superimposed layers whose relative copper and tin contents are variable.

Pockets of lead corrosion products (probably carbonate) are scattered throughout the cross sections. Chlorides are present (but not evenly distributed) throughout all three of the cross sections.

Click for big version

So does anyone really know what they’re buying at an auction of ancient art or from an antiquities dealer unless certain lab tests have been carried out? And even if a piece has been tested, how conclusive can the data be?

Says Met Ancient Near East expert Oscar White Muscarella, who has also seen the Roman bronze boy at Stuart Pivar’s place:

“Conclusions presented by conservators citing their “scientific” investigations can be as subjective, wrong, or in conflict with fellow scientists’ conclusions, as empirical , non-scientific determination by archaeologists and art historians. The assumption that alleged “subjective” stylistic analyses is distinct from alleged “objective” scientific analysis is a false dichotomy. Both forms of analyses are subject to fallibility, ignorance, mistakes, and more.

To quote an honest conservator: “we have no magic machines.”

And pertaining to common academic perceptions of scientists or conservators employed by private collectors and museums to make determinations about authenticity, two issues are to be emphasized. One is that they can honestly err in their conclusions. And more important, because it is little known or discussed, a number are not disinterested agents as they and their employers proclaim, for they obey the commands (overt or insinuated), or seek to please the anticipated needs, of their paymasters. Put bluntly and succinctly: some conservators when recognizing they are indeed examining a forgery will refrain from making a complete, thorough analysis, and present general, non-significant observations, or consciously omit conducting a complete, thorough analysis, crucial tests that would demonstrate that the object is a modern creation. They then lie about the results of their alleged analyses by making general statements, and/or ambiguous, dissimulating conclusions-attesting to the ancient manufacture of the object.”

But Pivar, who has lived with the Roman bronze boy for 10 years, now having exhausted most of the methods of testing the piece, has no doubts about it being genuine. What’s more, he says Sotheby’s by presumably returning the half million dollars to the Japanese dealer may have shown negligence in regard to its stockholders.

Suzan Mazur’s stories on art and antiquities have been published in The Economist, Financial Times, Connoisseur, Archaeology (cover) and Newsday. Some of her other reports have appeared on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

With a searing ancient Near East focus, Hicham Aboutaam, the 30ish Lebanese antiquities dealer sweeps into the back of his Phoenix gallery showroom in Manhattan to greet me. He is dressed in French elegance, his handshake somewhat reserved. I later notice …

Hicham Aboutaam

With a searing ancient Near East focus, Hicham Aboutaam, the 30ish Lebanese antiquities dealer sweeps into the back of his Phoenix gallery showroom in Manhattan to greet me. He is dressed in French elegance, his handshake somewhat reserved. I later notice the smooth, manicured, almost translucent quality of his fingers — certainly absent any trace of anything freshly dug up.

I’ve come unannounced to view Phoenix Ancient Art’s controversial Greek & Roman exhibition of vases from the 6th century BC-4th century BC. The promo said most of them were acquired by a Swiss collector — a Dr. C.J.D. — “during the course of his archaeological studies in the 1960s and early 1970s”.

Aboutaam tells me right off that C.J.D. are not the real initials of the previous owner. But the individual, still alive, insisted on anonymity in exhibtion and sale of the collection as a precondition to the sale to Hicham and his brother, Ali.

Beginning to sound like the Dorak Affair? (See… Scoop: Suzan Mazur: The Dorak Affair’s Final Chapter)

Brother Ali runs the Geneva branch of Phoenix Ancient Art, where raids were carried out in March 2001 by Swiss and Italian authorities, and antiquities seized.

Hicham & Ali Aboutaam

The Italian government has issues with the brothers because of their business dealings with Giacomo Medici, who’s appealing a 10-year sentence in Rome for antiquities trafficking.

The Aboutaams have also been under the scope because of Hicham’s 2004 guilty plea to a misdemeanor federal charge of falsifying import documentation related to a silver drinking vessel from Iran that Phoenix sold for $950,000 (some experts say it’s a fake). Ali Aboutaam was convicted that same year in Egypt and sentenced in absentia to 15 years for smuggling.

So there was a sense among critical observers that the plug might be pulled on the Aboutaam “Painter’s Eye” vase show.

PRESS RELEASE: Phoenix Ancient Art to Premiere Important Collection of Greek Vases at Its New York City Gallery

Masterpieces From Major Painters Among the Most Important Vases Remaining in Private Hands

NEW YORK, Oct. 5 /PRNewswire/ — Phoenix Ancient Art, one of the world’s leading dealers in rare, high quality antiquities from Western civilizations, today announced that its exhibition, “The Painter’s Eye: The Art of Greek Ceramics. Greek Vases from a Swiss Private Collection and
Other European Private Collections,” will be unveiled at its New York City gallery on October 20, 2006, opening to the public on October 21, and remaining on view until November 11, 2006.

A journalist in Rome emailed me to that effect following my story about the Cleveland Museum [Scoop: Italy Will Contest Medea Vase At Cleveland Museum ], which included some mention of the Aboutaams:

“I’m glad you noticed the Aboutaam exhibit coming up — expect a firestorm. If they pull it off without problems it will be worth asking what exactly the Feds did for those two in exchange for their help in finding and returning that piece to Iraq a couple months ago…”

And it was rumored the brothers were not speaking to confrontational media, referring inquiries to handlers and attorneys instead. I was surprised that Hicham Aboutaam actually materialized to talk.

The other reason for my visit was curiosity about the DANGEROUS label that has been put on the brothers, the buzz that they were the new antiquities kingpins. That they’d replaced the old man of the trade, Medici’s former partner, Bob Hecht.

Hecht is on trial in Rome charged with antiquities trafficking along with former Getty curator Marion True.

For adversarial media, there has been a sense that walking into Phoenix asking the wrong questions might be tantamount to stepping foot in 1994 Algiers.

“Is Bob Hecht still alive?”, Hicham Aboutaam looking exactly into my eyes responds to my inquiry about whether Hecht attended the opening of Phoenix’s Greek & Roman vase exhibit.

It is certainly true Hecht’s also been out of action because of the frailties of old age — though he’s not been out of sight at Hoad’s tennis club near Marbella, so why should he miss an important exhibition of vases from the period he has the greatest “affection” for?

Author Peter Watson reports in The Medici Conspiracy that Geneva dealer Frida Tchacos told Italy’s Medici prosecutor, Paolo Ferri, who was part of the raid on Phoenix-Geneva, that the Aboutaams were indeed “replacing the older dealers [Hecht, et al]“.

Watson quotes Tchocos:

“And in the last . . . in the last years I learnt that he [Giacomo Medici] was in partnership or worked with the Aboutaams, the Arabs of Freeport, Geneva . . . at a certain point at Sotheby’s the Aboutaams were seen buying [very important] vases next to Medici.”

Watson also cites Tchacos telling Ferri that in recent years Shelby White was buying a lot from the Aboutaams (and previously from Robin Symes via Hecht via Medici).

Diamond and political influence peddler, Maurice Tempelsman, has also been spotted shopping at Phoenix-NY in recent months. [See… Mazur: Deeper Into The Dillon-Euphronios Nexus]

Fourteen catalogs were among the items seized by Swiss and Italian authorities at Phoenix-Geneva in 2001. The catalogs included pieces bought and sold by the Aboutaams between June 1995 and October 2000 at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams. Says Watson:

“In at least two of these cases, the objects had started out with Medici, as proved by the Polaroids. They had then been “sold” at auction, both by the Aboutaams, and ended up back with Medici. That confirms laundering in seven sales, and possibly as many as twenty-one, stretching from 1987 until 2000.”

But, however amazing it may seem, the recent Greek & Roman Aboutaam vase exhibition, opened and closed uneventfully in New York. With virtually no press coverage, 20 of the 25 vases and one fish plate had been sold prior to my visit — according to Aboutaam.

Considering Bob Hecht’s professional “retirement”, could then some of the ratting on the Aboutaams also reflect a turf war among the dealers for pre-eminence?

Michel van Rijn’s web site may hold clues. The art dealer turned master of “the page everyone reads though may not admit it”, has posted a volume of material about the Aboutaams [http://www.michelvanrijn.nl/artnews/artnws.htm] and is now in court defending himself. Van Rijn’s even got a phone conversation up about a contract being taken out on his life by the Aboutaams.

These kind of threats to journalists are, indeed, a reality in the dirty business of antiquities dealing. As I’ve noted before, Hecht attempted to assault me. And Hecht’s pal, Turkish dealer Fuat Uzulmez, advised me on the way out of Hecht’s 1990 Hesperia Arts auction that the Turkish dealers were looking to get even with my friend, journalist Ozgen Acar, for Acar’s expose in Connoisseur magazine (10/90) on the Munich-based Turkish antiquities mafia.

Uzulmez, putting his arm around me, whispered in my ear, “We are going to kill him.” Acar has his own stories to tell about intimidation from the antiquities crowd.

However, van Rijn has reported that New York dealer/appraiser Dr. Jerry Eisenberg with a Ph.D., 1983, Art History, Pacific Western U, a distance learning school in California — is also in litigation with the Aboutaams.

“Have you noticed that Eisenberg, who is van Rijn’s friend, and certain other dealers never get targeted on van Rijn’s site?” Aboutaam asked.

Met Ancient Near East expert Oscar Muscarella, one of the heroes of Peter Watson’s Medici Conspiracy, says this about Eisenberg:

“In the magazine Connoisseur, May 1987, pages 99-109, Thomas Hoving and Geraldine Norman wrote an article about the scandal at the Getty involving its curator Jiri Frel. He was exposed by the Getty authorities as having falsified both the monetary value and scholarly claims about the alleged ancient age of a large number of classical antiquities that he had either purchased or accepted as donations for the museum. In fact, and reluctantly acknowledged by the Getty authorities, not only were many of these purchased and donated objects overvalued far above market value, but a good number of them were, in fact, modern forgeries. On page 105, Hoving and Norman report that Eisenberg was one of the dealers who appraised many of the antiquities involved; and on page 107, they reveal the Eisenberg-Frel partnership in these fraudulent transactions.”

Back to Aboutaam, who says none of what van Rijn claims actually happened and that he and his brother are demanding van Rijn take down all damaging references to them, make a public apology and pay 100,000 pounds.

Peter Watson, however, has not been asked to remove his references to the Aboutaams in Medici Conspiracy, which has become the definitive book on the trade in looted art, particularly Italian looted art.

Aboutaam insisted he and his brother Ali are playing by the new rules. “It is good to be scrutinized,” he said.

Moreover, Aboutaam made the point that virtually all the ancient art in circulation is looted from somewhere. He said Phoenix will continue to pursue the many important objects in collections since the 40s and 50s. He was passionate in saying “There is a lot of money to be made.”

But it does appear some of the old rules are still in play, especially the ones established for viewing the recent Phoenix Greek & Roman vase exhibition. The media was prevented from attending the opening because collectors and other clients would be there doing their thing. Which is exactly the reason the media wanted to be there.

Here’s an email on the subject:

“Dear Ms. Mazur,

Thank you very much for your interest in our upcoming exhibition on Greek vases. I apologize for the delay in getting back to you, but we were in the midst of setting up a special Press Preview [emphasis added] on Thursday, October 19th and I wanted to ensure I had all the details for you before I responded.

I would ask you to please contact our press representatives . . . to arrange a time to visit the gallery on the 19th. . . . Alternatively, I can have one of them call you directly if you’d like to provide your phone number.

Thank you again for your interest, and we look forward to meeting you.

Best regards,
Bibiane Choi
Electrum, Exclusive Agent for Phoenix Ancient Art “

A separate by-appointment pre-exhibition tour for media was arranged by Aboutaam’s public relations people per the above email. I skipped it, but was reminded by pr that even if I visited the public viewing, I should identify myself, so as not to interfere with sales to clients.

“Dear Susan:

Sorry that you can’t make it on Thursday.

Please be in touch with us before you’d like to visit the Gallery so that Phoenix can make sure that there is someone there to host you. Additionally, Phoenix needs to respect the privacy of its clients and prospective clients, so they need to be sure, in advance, that no one else has made an appointment to come by when you (or other media) might be there.

Best,
Richard Dukas “

“Have you had some media reviews of the Greek & Roman vases exhibit?” I asked Aboutaam.

“Not yet,” he said, “but we expect one in Forbes and Art & Antiques.”

“And the New York Times?”

“The New York Times is only covering ‘illegal’ antiquities,” Aboutaam said he was told by the paper. [See… Scoop: Add NYT To Bob Hecht Antiquities Ring Organigram?] However, the Times did run a $20,601 quarter-page ad for the Aboutaam October 21 – November 11 show, in the Friday, October 20, 2006 issue.

New York Times advert for Pheonix’s Painter’s Eye show

The vases in the Painter’s Eye show, set on pedestals, appeared to be floating when viewed from East 66th Street through the gallery’s eye-level windows. They were exhibited without showcases, facilitating optimum study of the paint, the cracks, missing phalluses, inscriptions, etc.

Before I’d arrived, the most important vase had already been sold for $1.5 million, according to Aboutaam, although it was still on display. It was a red-figure wine cup, 490BC-480 BC, attributed to the painter Makron and signed by the potter, Hieron. The vase depicts the departure into battle of the Achaean warrior Antilochos, who stands before his father, Nestor, king of Pylos.

The two do not make eye contact. Nestor has had a premonition of his son’s death in battle and knows “their separation will be for eternity”.

Kind of the feeling you get after viewing the entire vase collection at Phoenix.

The show’s promo indicates some objects also came from other European collections, including that of Lucien Bonaparte, the amateur archaeologist brother of Emperor Napoleon I.

One piece, a red-figure kylix, 500 B.C., attributed to the painter Epidromos and inscribed “Epidromos is beautiful”, was clearly not one excavated in Italy by L. Bonaparte or tucked away for almost 50 years in Dr. C.J.D.’s Swiss collection, either. In fact, the wine cup was the auction catalogue cover art for the Hunt-Sotheby’s sale in 1990. It went for $150,000 plus tax at the time.

The only provenance given in the Aboutaams’ catalogue for the piece is “Formerly in the collection of Nelson Bunker Hunt”.

Click for big versions
Hunt-Sotheby’s catalog cover of wine cup & Aboutaam catalog wine cup image

The cup depicts a young hunter, holding a spear, naked except for a wide-brimmed hat tied under his chin and short mantle draped across his shoulders; the exterior scenes of the cup are of naked revelry. It had been sold to Bunker Hunt by Bruce McNall via Bob Hecht via Giacomo Medici.

So why has the NYT, which reported the Hunt-Sotheby’s auction (Rita Reif 6/20/90) not followed up if the Times is indeed also playing by the new rules and covering looted antiquities these days? It couldn’t have anything to do with the $20,601 ad, could it?

In any event, as of Monday, November 6, the Aboutaam vase advertised in the Times, and described in the promo as formerly belonging to Dr. C.J.D., had not been sold. It is a red-figure hydria, 500 B.C, attributed to the painter Dikaios with the same battle theme of Herakles and Kyknos, as the signed fragmentary Euphronios vase from the Hunt-Sothbey’s auction.

The fragmentary Euphronios is now owned by New York collector Shelby White and is on loan to the Met. It was purchased for White’s late husband, Leon Levy, by dealer Robin Symes who paid $1.76 million for it at the time. It rests on a pedestal just down the hall from the Sarpendon Euphronios krater, whose title of ownership was transferred from the Met to Italy earlier this year.

And the Italians are as interested in the Herakles-Kyknos Euphronios as they were in the Sarpendon Euphronios.

But surely Dr. C.J.D.’s Swiss provenance is proof enough that the Aboutaams’ Herakles-Kyknos carries no risk for the buyer? Perhaps it’ll turn up in Shelby White’s hoard as insurance against loss of her Kyknos Euphronios.

Suzan Mazur’s stories on art and antiquities have been published in The Economist, Financial Times, Connoisseur, Archaeology (cover) and Newsday. Some of her other reports have appeared on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

John Deuss, multi-millionaire Dutch oil man and, until recently, chairman of Bermuda Commercial Bank, is being questioned in his native Netherlands about “carousel” financial irregularities involving his Curacao bank. So what, you would be pardoned for asking, …

Click for big version
The merchant? – Image From
]thecanterburypilgrim.com

“John Deuss, multi-millionaire Dutch oil man and, until recently, chairman of Bermuda Commercial Bank, is being questioned in his native Netherlands about “carousel” financial irregularities involving his Curacao bank. So what, you would be pardoned for asking, has that to do with Chaucer’s famous stories?

Image From thecanterburypilgrim.com

Deuss is surely a latter-day merchant telling tales as did his medieval forerunner. Someone who might, if the world’s banking authorities succeed, have good reason to walk his own pilgrim’s way and pray forgiveness.

But hold fast before you condemn him to sack-cloth and ashes! What crime has he committed? None, if his vehement denials are true. And there are many who believe he has been unfairly singled out in the search for a scapegoat.

Yet he is now thrust into the limelight as some kind of international fraudster instead of basking in the glowing reputation of literary benefactor; for that was surely his destiny had he not himself been cruelly robbed. John Deuss had a vision that, thanks to his hard-earned wealth, almost materialized on the long road to reality.” Les Travers, www.thecanteburypilgrim.com

Suzan Mazur: What prompted John Deuss to commission the Canterbury Tales project?

Les Travers: I’ve never had a chance to ask him, never met him. But I’ve been told that Deuss admired Geoffrey Chaucer’s work and the late Charles Mozley’s artistic skills. Mozley was indeed one of England’s finest illustrators, known also for his magnificent horses in Black Beauty. The Mozley Canterbury drawings are a joy to see, undoubtedly the best version of the Tales ever produced.

Had the project been completed, there is no doubt it would have been the literary work of the century.

The Tales were translated by Nevill Coghill and illustrated by Mozley in the 1980s — one thousand copies, a massive elephant folio sized, set to grace a thousand universities and libraries around the world thanks only to Deuss’ amazing generosity. Until, that is, Mozley’s death prevented completion, bringing ten years of devoted labor and over three hundred illustrations to an end.

Because of circumstances outwith Deuss’ control, the four folios and eight tales that had been printed were eventually stored in a barn. An old barn; a falling-down kind of barn. And they suffered a decade of attack by harsh English winters and hungry, marauding mice . . . until someone remembered where they were!

But without Deuss, Tales would simply not have happened. It is a literary heritage to be admired not only by generation after generation of Chaucer devotees, but also medieval scholars who see the Canterbury Tales as the social comment they truly were.

I doubt John Deuss will ever receive the accolades he deserves for this project, and perhaps in his present circumstances it is not the most important aspect of his life, but that does not diminish what he intended to give the world. Perhaps, like Chaucer, he will survive the many accusations thrown at him. There are many people here in England who truly hope so and wish him well.

Suzan Mazur: How did it all start?

Les Travers: It all started after I returned from Africa where I’d spent a few years taking clients on safari — a relaxed pastime after many years in personal security, my field of expertise. I learned that my son, Kes, then 16-years old, had been approached by a friend who knew of this almost unbelievable store of Canterbury Tales folios.

Kes was simply intrigued at first, but he also knew of my English college studies — of Chaucer in particular. My choice of studies was influenced by my schooling in Canterbury, yet it was not the entire reason.

Geoffrey Chaucer, after all, was the father of English literature and certainly as influential as the later William Shakespeare. Who knows, had Chaucer not started the practice of writing in English, perhaps Romeo and Juliet would have been an Italian tragedy written in French! Chaucer’s death is commemorated on October 25th, by the way.

Suzan Mazur: Where was the barn where the drawings were found?

Les Travers: In Kent. When I saw the art, I was overwhelmed. I decided Kes had to be helped to rescue the Tales.

We managed to buy what was essentially a mountain of wet and rodent ravaged paper. Then Kes took on the responsibility of salvaging as much of the complete work as possible before turning his attention to saving individual lithographs where the text had been destroyed. After two years of hard labor, we now have two hundred complete sets and enough lithographs to set up a permanent exhibition in Canterbury, which will preview during a US tour in 2007.The exhibition and its collection of pilgrim artifacts, including a rare Becket ampulla (one of only seven in the world) will surely be one of Canterbury’s foremost attractions.

There is an enormous interest in both Chaucer and his tales in the US. In San Francisco there is a Chaucer theater company and also a Canterbury Tales-themed hotel. We are liaising with the theater to put on an exhibition, which I hope will include staged plays of the Tales. We’d like to repeat the theater production in Canterbury.

Suzan Mazur: Why do you suppose John Deuss was fascinated by Chaucer?

Les Travers: Maybe Chaucer’s similarly VERY complex character. No one knows very much about Chaucer’s early life either. Chaucer comes to the fore when he enters the outer circle of royal court life, becoming a page for the wife of the Duke of Clarence.

He later takes up arms against the French, but is captured at the battle of Rettel, causing a ransom to be paid by King Edward III. Then he goes on to marry Philippa, the sister of Katherine de Roet — who became the wife of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III and the most powerful man in England.

Chaucer chose wisely to enter John of Gaunt’s service!

When John of Gaunt’s wife died of plague, she was commemorated by one of Chaucer’s most beautiful poems, The Book of the Duchess. Chaucer then carried out military and diplomatic missions to France, Flanders, Spain and Italy — and accrued more power. After returning to England, he was appointed Justice of the Peace and elected to the House of Parliament as MP for Kent.

Still influential at the royal court, he became a favorite of the Earl of Derby, son of John of Gaunt, who later became King Henry IV.

It was during this time that the Canterbury Tales was started — the stories of pilgrims 800 years ago en route to Canterbury to the tomb of Thomas Becket.

Towards the end of Chaucer’s life, turmoil spread all over England, resulting in the murder of John of Gaunt’s brother on the orders of Richard II, who himself was later murdered. And Henry took the throne.

Even more chaos followed. Chaucer tried to retire from public life. But sometime during 1400, he either disappeared or died. His tomb is in Westminster Abbey, however, many are unconvinced Chaucer actually resides within!

So Chaucer, like Deuss, was extremely complex. Chaucer made many enemies even with his writing of the Tales. He used the Tales as barbed comments on the state of the country — especially targeting the church.

Of course, his fictional characters could not be prosecuted. But no one was fooled! And had Chaucer not surrounded himself with powerful people there is little doubt that he would not have survived so long.

Suzan Mazur: Parallels to the current Deuss saga?

Les Travers: Chaucer even survived unscathed from a FALSE charge of rape.

But again Deuss, as visionary and benefactor of the Mozley-Coghill Chaucer tales — even uncompleted — has given us one of the really important literary works. The eight tales are an absolute collector’s item. Despite the lost folios, many can enjoy owning the individual lithographs that have been saved.

This is the idea behind our planned exhibition and where better to site it than Canterbury? Still attracting more than two million pilgrims every year.

Suzan Mazur’s reports have appeared in the Financial Times, Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Bermuda’s Mid Ocean News, CounterPunch and Scoop, among others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url

The current sex scandal involving former Congressman Mark Foley (Rep.-FL)begs the question: Just where do Washington politicians and US military seeking private trysting spots — free of pesky media and routine security questions — continue to find them?

The current sex scandal involving former Congressman Mark Foley (Rep.-FL)begs the question: Just where do Washington politicians and US military seeking private trysting spots — free of pesky media and routine security questions — continue to find them? Why, the “O” Clubs, of course — the Officers’ Clubs of the US military. There are several in and around Washington, DC and at least 150 worldwide. Headquarters for Morale, Welfare & Recreation

They’re cheap as well as cozy, with features like screened windows with rotating ceiling fans, so perfect on a sultry night on the Potomac, and even a special jewelry drawer for your Rolex and Tiffany cufflinks.

Some suites are as little as $25 a night. Rates (partial list) Navy Lodge
The only stipulation is that you be an active or retired military officer .

Retired military officer? – that includes a good slice of Congress. (Reservations are sometimes, somehow also made for friends of officers.)

Let’s begin with the Washington, DC area and the Army & Navy Club (military affiliated). Then there’s Fort Belvoir 12 miles outside DC.

Here’s another DC area “O” Club, not far from the Eastern Shore homes of Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. Naval Station Annapolis Md

The Annapolis Bachelor Officers Quarters, in fact, boasts the cheapest rates in the DC area, and advertises the following:

“The BOQ has had many distinguished visitors as guests including the President, Vice-President, Secretary of the Navy, and numerous Congressmen and Ambassadors. In 2000, the Bachelor Quarters and Bachelor Officer Quarters won the Admiral Zumwalt Award for excellence in Bachelor Quarters management and earned a five-star accreditation.”

Don’t bring candles, however. Lighting them could set off the club’s smoke alarm!

How about Canyon Lake in President Bush’s home state of Texas?

Perhaps you prefer beach cottages and sand dunes?

Or cabins and camping?

Looking for a romantic tryst offshore? How about Hawaii? At Kaneohe Bay or Kilauea – www.kmc-volcano.com or Bellows?

Cuba anyone? There’s so much more to Guantanamo than wired fences and Al-Qaeda. Navy Lodge Guantanamo Bay

Hiking with your honey in Alaska? There’s Seward Military Resort

Perhaps the thrill you & yours seek is golfing on Freedom’s Frontier in Korea?

How about beautiful Okinawa?

A mountain view of Italy? AF Inns – Aviano AB, Mountain View Lodge

The sizzle of Sicily? Navy Lodge Sigonella

Ooouuu . . . romantic Naples. . . Why else would the US still have a base there? Navy Lodge Naples

Suzan Mazur’s reports have appeared in the Financial Times, Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, CounterPunch and Progressive Review (she broke the classic How Bush Got Bounced From Carlyle Board), among others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs. Her antiquities series about the Hecht trial in Rome and Italy’s recovery of ancient art from US museums, featured here on Scoop, has received extensive media attention. Email: sznmzr@aol.com

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
Original url