The Slaughterhouse Informer A Compendiium of Various Official Lies, Business Scandals, Small Murders, Frauds, and Other Gross Defects of Our Current Political, Business and Religious Moral Lepers. Presenting a new magazine that contains material that is not found elsewhere and is very difficult to post on the Internet. The ‘Voice of the White House’ will appear in each issue containing material not found on TBR News for very obvious reasons.This publication will appear once a week, on Wednesday, every week, will be ten pages in length and is available by subscription only. The price is $5.00 a month and can be paid via PayPal or by check, sent to ‘Morris Productions, 1350 E. New Yort St. Ste A2-190, Aurora, Il 60504.’ If you don’t like it, and Bush supporters can read the Drudge Report for free, you can cancel at any time. The Voice of the White House “Washington, D.C., September 20, 2008: “Putin’s total humiliation of his enemy, Georgian President Saakashvili, George Bush and the Israel government and military, .in the brief but deadly war in Georgia that was instigated by Saakashvili ,has caused a wave of fear in Kiev. The Ukraine, an American satellite, knows that Putin has his eye on their country and has proven that he can seize it at any time, un-hindered by a useless NATO. Their diplomatic representatives have been engaging in frantic and panic-stricken phone calls, emails and personal visits to key Americans such as Bush, Cheney, McCain (whose chief foreign affairs specialist is a neo-con and a paid agent for Georgia) and members of the U.S. military. The Ukraine is terrified that if Putin institutes some kind of an Anschluss , NATO can, and will, do nothing to counter it , and that Washington will quickly abandon them as they did Georgia last month and today, there was news that the Crimean parliament has asked Kiev to recognize Georgia’s breakaway provinces . The Crimea, which is peopled with ethnic Russians, is home to the Sebastopol naval base, used by Russia. Our people view this area as the most likely flash point for future problems. The United States has very clearly abandoned one ally, Georgia, and is now attacking a second, Pakistan. Georgia was intended to serve as an American showcase for its brand of democracy, a democracy mirroring the wishes of Washington, as well as acting for a probable base to attack Iran, and Pakistan was to assist our military in attacking the Afgahnistani Taliban. Now that our man, General Musharrif, has fallen from power to be replaced with a weak and vacillating government that is terrified of the Taliban and also strongly anti-American, the Bush people, goaded by a frightened India, are consideringimmediate military strikes, with U.S. Special Forces, deep into the territory of their former ally in order to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry. And a comment about the “rescue of the collapsing credit market” by the Bush people: In essence, Secretary Paulson wants to set up a Federal agency which will scoop up billions of dollars of bad debt the greedy banks ‘suddenly’ found themselves stuck with. This financial fraud will be dumped onto the American taxpayer and is privately estimated to exceed 6 trillion dollars. The banks involved, who were criminally responsible for this situation, get off with a Pass Free card and can get their golden parachutes, or the golden shower if they want it.And when the banking community realized that this payoff might actually happen, they lined up in groups of fifty with outstretched hands for their friends to press money into. Also, Paulson and McCain are going to insure all investors in U.S. money-market funds which will cost our taxpayers many more hundreds of millions. And as to the ‘fiscal fix,’ recall the words of Patrick Henry. ‘Trust it not sir, it shall prove a snare and a delusion.’ Smile, children, and swallow.” A Brief History of the Subprime Swindle September 21, 2008 by Brian Harring On January 29, 2008, the following information was made public in the old Wall Street Journal:: Federal investigators at the FBI have opened a criminal investigation of 14 mortgage-related companies, focusing on alleged accounting fraud, insider trading and securitization practices, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday afternoon. Even bankrupt firms aren’t free from the scrutiny, with the Journal quoting FBI economic crimes chief Neil Power as saying that investigators were combing the books of failed mortgage lenders to identify if evidence of wrongdoing exists — given that there aren’t that many really, really large failed lenders, it’s probably not too hard to guess which firms are included in that group of 14. Even if the FBI isn’t naming names right now. FBI officials say the bureau has 1,200 mortgage fraud cases under investigation and that they believe many more cases are in the offing, based on the number of so-called suspicious activity reports filed by banks. The number of SARs documented by the FBI has rocketed from 35,000 in 2006, to 48,000 in 2007, and are projected to reach 60,000 in 2008. “We have observed that subprime loans are decreasing, but the suspicious activity reports we see…have noted that suspicions of mortgage fraud are increasing,” said Sharon Ormsby, the financial crimes section chief in the FBI’s criminal investigative division. The FBI’s investigation coincides with similar probes already underway at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Journal reported. At this point in time, it is not difficult to locate the causes of the subprime mortgage disaster that threatens to effectively wreck the American banking and credit entities. It all began with very poor underwriting policies that just simply grew and were compounded. At every level of the methodology by which a known risky home loan to unqualified borrowers grew into an asset-based security which was elevated to a ‘collaaterized debt obligation’ and was then sold to unsuspecting investors. In theory, there is no problem with lending to borrowers from the lower income groups and to those with much lower credit scorings. But it is obvious that in making so-called “subprime loans,” the lenders must strictly evaluate the borrower and set up much higher standards for loan collateral. But the primary level lender did not follow any of these practical standards but abandoned the normal lending standards in both subprime and ‘Alt-A’ (located somewhere between prime and subprime) levels of lending. As an added problem, many, if not most, of these very risky loans were made to people with no job and no assets. The loans were made with very low initial interest rates (which, by the obscure terms of the loan were certain to be sharply raised after a set period of time) These were often called ‘interest only” loans but these loans always increased their payments and this was rarely understood by the borrower. It was reasoned that such inherently risky loans were easily justified by the fact that the housing market in the United States was booming and that if the borrower failed to repay the loan as agreed and on time, the increased value of the house would cover the loan, the accrued interest and penalties in the event of forclosure The really dangerous problems arose when masses of these highly speculative mortgages became transformed into securities (in which the income and principal payments are passed, through a trust, to investors) added problems. Whereas all pass-through, mortgage-backed-securities (MBSs) issued by the U.S. government–sponsored enterprises (GSEs)— Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—have common underwriting standards, the MBSs issued by the major Wall Street firms had varying loan standards. This made the costs of understanding disclosed information, and the premium on maintaining confidence, much higher. Due diligence from investors did not increase enough to compensate for this greater information burden. Instead, investors increased their reliance on the assessments of credit rating agencies. Although these agencies have a long and well-known track record rating bonds, subprime residential MBSs and CDOs were new and more complex. CDOs are structured credit securities backed by pools of securities, loans, or credit derivatives whose cash flows are divided into segments, called tranches, with different repayment and return characteristics. Because subprime mortgages were a relatively new entity, there was limited information on their past performance, a shortcoming that was especially important when trying to determine how these mortgages—individually and as a group—would perform during economic stress. Optimism about how subprime mortgages would perform led to more than 90 percent of securitized subprime loans being turned into securities with the top rating of AAA More problems occurred when the securities were distributed and traded. The vulnerability of leveraged, or thinly capitalized, investment positions and the illiquidity of many structured credit markets were exposed when trading was disrupted in a host of other markets. Mortgage originators, broker-dealers, hedge funds, and the structured investment vehicles, which the banks maintained off their balance sheets were highly leveraged. The principal risk management strategy was to plan to trade rapidly out of a loss-making position. But such a strategy, which relies on markets remaining liquid, failed when markets rapidly became illiquid. Many major American and European banks have suffered, and are still suffering, enormous losses which they are certain a very friendly Bush administration will compensate them for. Added to these losses, are absorbed assets from failed SIVs and hedge funds onto their balance sheets, and which the banks have been forced to honor loan commitments. As a result, they have had to ration capital more strictly. With capital impaired and difficult, or very expensive, to raise externally, banks have sought to reduce voluntary loans and tighten the terms of the credit they already extend—whether on home equity loans to consumers or on loans to hedge funds. Commercial banks are naturally leveraged—holding capital that is a small fraction of total assets—and so a relatively small decline in capital can result in a much larger decline in total lending. One estimate is that the $400 billion of U.S. banking system losses from the current crisis would result in a $2 trillion decline in total lending and a 1.2 percent reduction in U.S. GDP 'The World As We Know It Is Going Down' September 18,2008 by Marc Pitzke in New York Spiegel Panic is the word of the hour on Wall Street. Now even Morgan Stanley is fighting for survival. The commercial bank Wachovia and China's Bank Citic are being discussed as possible rescuers. The crisis has led President Bush to cancel a trip. The original plan actually called for humor. On Wednesday evening, actress Christy Carlson Romano was supposed to ring the closing bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to mark her debut in the Broadway musical "Avenue Q." She plays two roles on stage -- a romantic kindergarten assistant, and a slutty nightclub singer. After that day on the floor, the stock traders could have used a bit of comic relief. But it was not to be. Instead of Christy Carlson Romano, a NYSE employee in a joyless gray suit stood on the balcony and silently pressed a button. The bell rang and he disappeared. No waving, no clapping, none of the usual jubilation. By the end of Wednesday, no one here was in the mood for laughter. The bad news on Wall Street was coming thick and fast. All the US indexes were crashing again after Tuesday's brief and deceptive breather. In its wild, rollercoaster ride, the Dow Jones lost about 450 points, which was almost as much as it lost on Monday, the most catastrophic day on US markets since 2001. Investors were turning their back to the market in droves and fleeing to safer pastures. The price of gold broke its record for the highest increase in a one-day period. Panic Is the Word of the Hour Traders abandoned the NYSE temple visually defeated and immune to the TV crews waiting. The disastrous closing prices were flickering on the ticker above the NYSE entrance: American Express -8.4 percent; Citigroup -10.9 percent; JPMorgan Chase -12.2 percent. American icons, abused like stray dogs. Even Apple took a hit. I don't know what else to say," stammered one broker, who was consoling himself with white wine and beer along with some colleagues at an outdoor bar called Beckett's. Ties and jackets were off, but despite the evening breeze, you could still make out the thin film of sweat on his forehead. His words captured the speechlessness of an industry. Things got worse after the markets closed. Washington Mutual, America's fourth-largest bank, announced that it had started the process of putting itself up for sale. The Wall Street Journal reported that both Wells Fargo and the banking giant Citigroup were interested in taking over the battered American savings bank. And then came the announcement that would dominate all of Thursday's market activities: Morgan Stanley -- the venerable Wall Street institution and one of the last two US investment banks left standing -- had lost massive amounts and was fighting for survival. Media reports were saying that it was even in talks about a possible bail-out or merger. Rumor had it that possible suitors might include Wachovia or China's Bank Citic. China? "Folks," economist Larry Kudlow, a host on the business channel CNBC begged his viewers that evening, "don't give up on this great country!" End of an Era In fact, it really does look as if the foundations of US capitalism have shattered. Since 1864, American banking has been split into commercial banks and investment banks. But now that's changing. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch -- overnight, some of the biggest names on Wall Street have disappeared into thin air. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the only giants left standing. Despite tolerable quarterly results, even they have been hurt by mysterious slumps in prices and -- at least in Morgan Stanley's case -- have prepared themselves for the end. "Nothing will be like it was before," said James Allroy, a broker who was brooding over his chai latte at a Starbucks on Wall Street. "The world as we know it is going down." Many are drawing comparisons with the Great Depression, the national trauma that has been the benchmark for everything since. "I think it has the chance to be the worst period of time since 1929," financing legend Donald Trump told CNN. And the Wall Street Journal seconds that opinion, giving one story the title: "Worst Crisis Since '30s, With No End Yet in Sight." But what's really happening? Experts have so far been unable to agree on any conclusions. Is this the beginning of the end? Or is it just a painful, but normal cycle correcting the excesses of recent years? Does responsibility lie with the ratings agencies, which have been overvaluing financial institutions for a long time? Or did dubious short sellers manipulate stock prices -- after all, they were suspected of having caused the last stock market crisis in July. The only thing that is certain is that the era of the unbridled free-market economy in the US has passed -- at least for now. The near nationalization of AIG, America's largest insurance company, with an $85 billion cash infusion -- a bill footed by taxpayers -- was a staggering move. The sum is three times as high as the guarantee provided by the Federal Reserve when Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan Chase in March. The most breathtaking aspect about this week's crisis, though, is that the life raft -- which Washington had only previously used to bail out the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- is being handed out by a government whose party usually fights against any form of government intervention. The policy is anchored in its party platform. "I fear the government has passed the point of no return," financial historian Ron Chernow told the New York Times. "We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams." Bush Cancels Trip The situation appears to be so serious that George W. Bush cancelled two domestic trips he had planned for Thursday on short notice. Instead, the president will remain in Washington to discuss the "serious challenges confronting US financial markets." He said the president remained focused on "taking action to stabilize and strengthen the markets." Bush had originally planned to travel to events in Florida and Alabama. So far, the US presidential candidates have made few helpful remarks about the crisis other than the usual slogans. Both are vaguely calling for "regulation" and "reform" -- bland catchphrases almost universally welcomed with applause. Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain had the most to say. On Monday, he said "the foundation of our economy" was "strong," adding that he opposed a government-led bailout of US insurer AIG. But now he's promising further government steps "to prevent the kind of wild speculation that can put our markets at risk." McCain's explanation for the current crisis: "unbridled corruption and greed." But Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama didn't move past superficialities, either. "We're Americans. We've met tough challenges before and we can again." What else are they supposed to say? After all, US presidents have very little influence on stockmarkets. And Wall Street is expecting the status quo for the next president. On Wednesday an almost palpable mix of tension and melancholy filled the air above New York's Financial District. The beloved trader bar Bull Run was half empty, and many tables were free at fine-dining establishments like Cipriani, Mangia and Bobby Van's, which are normally booked days in advance. At the side entrance to Goldman Sachs on Pearl Street, limo chauffeurs sat waiting for their customers, still above in their office towers cowering over the accounts. "If they go under," said Rashid Amal, who works as a chauffeur for a firm called Excelsior, "then I will soon be out of a job, too." Your Money at Work, Fixing Others’ Mistakes September 21, 2008 by Gretchen Morgenson New York Times It looks as if we may get through this weekend without another scramble to save a troubled financial firm with a trillion-dollar balance sheet. But that doesn’t mean taxpayers are out of danger. No, sir. No, ma’am. Because lawmakers are at work on a bailout fund that would buy the kind of distressed assets (defaulted mortgages, for example) that have ignited this firestorm. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has called the fund the “troubled asset relief program.” I’ll just call it TARP for short (you know, the kind of thing they spread over muddy fields so you don’t soil your Guccis). And depending on how TARP is operated, and how the assets are valued before taxpayers are forced to buy them, it could bloat our final bill for this mess while benefiting the very institutions that got us into it. Yes, we need a smart plan and a concerted effort to get the frozen credit markets up and running. But we also have to be certain that the types of conflicts of interest that riddle Wall Street aren’t visited upon TARP. Consider: A bank wants to sell the TARPistas (also known as TAXPAYERS) a pile of stinky mortgage securities that it currently values at 60 cents on the dollar. Let’s assume that the most recent actual trade between market participants for similar assets was struck at 30 cents on the dollar. So what’s a fair price that we TARPistas should pay for the assets? If we bought at 60 cents, a price that the bank would argue is appropriate, we would most likely face a loss. The bank, however, would be much better off than if it had to dump at 30 cents. Conversely, if the assets were sold at 30 cents, taxpayers could wind up making a profit on the purchase if the assets performed better than expected over time. But the bank would have to write down the value of the assets as a result of the sale, possibly threatening its financial standing yet again. Do you think, perchance, that financial services lobbyists might be working their Hill contacts right this very minute to ensure that the TARP valuations are rigged in their favor? You know the answer to that. And you also know that we should steel ourselves for heavy losses as the TARP gets pulled over our eyes. Never mind that it was the banks, with their reckless lending and monumental leverage, that drove us into this ditch. Such is our lot today: They break it. We own it. Taxpayers deserve better than this, of course. But we have no lobbyists, so we get skinned. If federal regulators and political leaders want to earn back some trust, they could do two things. First, they could provide us with some transparency about whom precisely we are backing in the recent bailouts. Take, for example, the rescue on Tuesday of the American International Group, once the world’s largest insurance company. It was pretty breathtaking. Since when do insurance companies, whose business models seem to consist of taking in premiums and stonewalling claims, deserve rescues from beleaguered taxpayers? Answer: Ever since the world became so intertwined that the failure of one company can topple a host of others. And ever since credit default swaps, those unregulated derivative contracts that allow investors to bet on a debt issuer’s financial prospects, loomed so big on balance sheets that they now drive every bailout decision. The deal to save A.I.G. involves a two-year, $85 billion loan from taxpayers. In exchange, the new owners — us — get 80 percent of the company. If enough of A.I.G.’s assets are sold for good prices, we may get our money back. Credit default swaps, which operate like insurance policies against the possibility that an issuer of debt will not pay on its obligations, were the single biggest motivator behind the A.I.G. deal. A.I.G. had written $441 billion in credit insurance on mortgage-related securities whose values have declined; if A.I.G. were to fail, all the institutions that bought the insurance would have been subject to enormous losses. The ripple effect could have turned into a tsunami. So, the $85 billion loan to A.I.G. was really a bailout of the company’s counterparties or trading partners. Now, inquiring minds want to know, whom did we rescue? Which large, wealthy financial institutions — counterparties to A.I.G.’s derivatives contracts — benefited from the taxpayers’ $85 billion loan? Were their representatives involved in the talks that resulted in the last-minute loan? And did Lehman Brothers not get bailed out because those favored institutions were not on the hook if it failed? We’ll probably never know the answers to these troubling questions. But by keeping taxpayers in the dark, regulators continue to earn our mistrust. As long as we are not told whom we have bailed out, we will be justified in suspecting that a favored few are making gains on our dimes. A.I.G.’s financial statements provided a clue to the identities of some of its credit default swap counterparties. The company said that almost three-quarters of the $441 billion it had written on soured mortgage securities was bought by European banks. The banks bought the insurance to reduce the amounts of capital they were required by regulators to set aside to cover future losses. Enjoy the absurdity: Billions in unregulated derivatives that were about to take down the insurance company that sold them were bought by banks to get around their regulatory capital requirements intended to rein in risk. Got that? Which brings us to Item 2 for policy makers. Stop pretending that the $62 trillion market for credit default swaps does not need regulatory oversight. Warren E. Buffett was not engaging in hyperbole when he called these things financial weapons of mass destruction. “The last eight years have been about permitting derivatives to explode, knowing they were unregulated,” said Eric R. Dinallo, New York’s superintendent of insurance. “It’s about what the government chose not to regulate, measured in dollars. And that is what shook the world.” And it will continue. SECRECY NEWS September 22, 2008 IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT PUTS AL QAEDA ON THE DEFENSIVE Al Qaeda is "imploding," a State Department counterterrorism official told the Associated Press last week, as a result of growing opposition in the Muslim world. The implication that al Qaeda's demise may be imminent is almost certainly incorrect. But what is true is that "a severe intellectual conflict has emerged" within the jihadist movement, said Kamal Habib, a former official of the Egyptian Jihad Organization (Al Arab, September 14). So when Sayyid Imam declared in a November 2007 book that killing non-combatant civilians, including Christians and Jews, is prohibited and that Al Qaeda's conduct of jihad against the west was illegitimate, itproduced an ideological earthquake within Islamist ranks. "Fadl's arguments undermined the entire intellectual framework of jihadist warfare," wrote Lawrence Wright in an illuminating article in The New Yorker (June 2, 2008). "Al Qaeda senior leaders in 2008 have devoted nearly half their airtime to defending the group's legitimacy," observed National Intelligence Officer Ted Gistaro in an August 12 speech. "This defensive tone ... reflects concern over allegations by militant leaders and religious scholars that al Qaeda and its affiliates have violated the Islamic laws of war, particularly in Iraq and North Africa." One of the major al Qaeda responses came in a book by bin Laden deputy Ayman al Zawahiri called "The Exoneration." The book is an attempt to defend the legitimacy of al Qaeda's tactics, including the killing of civilians, against the critiques of Sayyid Imam and other Islamic figures. "Those who claim that killing innocent persons is absolutely forbidden are in a position of accusing the prophet, may God's peace and prayers be upon him, his companions, and the generation following them that they were killers of innocent persons, as they see it," wrote Zawahiri. He noted that the prophet authorized the use of catapults, which do not discriminate between innocent and guilty, and he also killed all the males of a Jewish tribe "and made no distinction between one person and another." "The Exoneration," which was published in January 2008, was translated a few months later by the DNI Open Source Center. The translation has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News. http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/osc/exoneration.pdf "Zawahiri's strategic thinking and understanding of asymmetrical warfare and revolutionary violence is heavily indebted to vanguardism, a Leninist theory of revolution which posits that a small, revolutionary elite uses violence to rouse the people to fight against the government," according "The potential problem with Zawahiri's application of the theory of vanguardism... is that terrorism usually diminishes the support of both the government as well as the terrorist organization," as appears to be the case today. "Is Al Qaeda going to dissipate as a result of the criticism from its former mentors and allies? Despite the recent internal criticism, probably not in the short term," said analyst Peter Bergen at a July 30 "However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like Al Qaeda are the seeds of their own long-term destruction: Their victims are often Muslim civilians; they don't offer a positive vision of the future; they keep expanding their list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't precisely share their world view; and they seem incapable of becoming politically successful movements because their ideology prevents them from making the real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in In 1997, acting on intelligence that a Hizballah cell was preparing to blow up the American embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay, a U.S. special forces team reportedly flew to the scene in several giant transport planes where it arrested the conspirators and prevented the attack. If that episode happened as described (and it cannot readily be confirmed), it left no traces on the public record. It "is only one of many hidden battles" between Iran and the West, writes Israeli journalist Conversations with the Crow: Part 33 Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation in this series, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint allof the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain, in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations. It is even more pleasurable to note that a number of people inside the Beltway and in McLean, Virginia, have been screaming with rage! On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley's CIA files. A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world. The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career. Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations. One of Crowley’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA, who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany. Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay. Crowley’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author. Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications. In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery, he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. These documents, totaled an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War. After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them. All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy. Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley. In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later. While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this. These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!TBR News September 22, 2008
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 92
Over the past year, al Qaeda has been publicly criticized by several of its own former supporters and ideological leaders, most notably Sayyid Imam Al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, who once saved the life of Usama
bin Laden.
"Sayyid Imam is viewed as the greatest and most important authority for all of the jihadist salafist groups," said Kamal Habib.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright
to a contractor analysis performed for the Department of Defense and obtained by Secrecy News.
See "Zawahiri Tries to Clear Name, Explain Strategy," Transnational Security Issues Report, prepared for the Department of Defense by the International Research Center, April 21, 2008:
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/zawahiri.pdf
congressional hearing.
genuine politics," Mr. Bergen said.
BOOK: THE SECRET WAR WITH IRAN
Ronen Bergman in his new book "The Secret War with Iran" (Free Press, 2008) http://www.thesecretwarwithiran.com/
The book, translated from the Hebrew and based on extensive interviews with Israeli intelligence officials and others, provides a wealth of insights, unfamiliar anecdotes, and telling observations regarding the three-decade-old confrontation with Iran. A few random examples:
Hizballah, acting as a proxy for Iran, temporarily refrained from taking American hostages between June 1985 and September 1986 in support of the arms sales deal between the U.S. and Iran that later became known as the Iran-contra affair.
Israel itself helped arm revolutionary Iran in an operation codenamed "Seashell" and described in the book. Earlier, Israel had also supplied advanced weaponry to the Shah, and "if Khomeini had not taken power as early as he did, he might have taken over a country [equipped] with long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads... as well as a jet fighter that was supposed to be the best in the world."
Out of a list of some 500 opposition figures targeted by Khomeini, nearly 200 of them were killed by Iranian assassins in Europe between 1980 and 1997.
Writing from an Israeli perspective, Mr. Bergman does not delve deeply into Iranian grievances or aspirations. But neither does he flatter the competence, judgment or morality of Israeli intelligence and military officials.
Categorized as "political science," the book is more of a work of intelligence history, with numerous strange tales of intelligence deeds and misdeeds, like the Israeli intelligence officer who was arrested for murdering his agent, and the Lebanese source who provided perfect warning of an impending attack only to be ignored in a turf battle between Israeli security agencies. The CIA is credited with "brilliantly" dismantling the Abu Nidal Organization, "sewing discord among its members by getting them
to believe that they were being robbed by other operatives."
Mr. Bergman, an investigative journalist who writes for Israel's Yediot Aharonot, earned his doctorate under historian Christopher Andrew at Cambridge University. His dissertation explored Israeli intelligence operations in Africa.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
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