Christic Mystics and Their Drug-Running Theories
Brock, David
David Brock CHRISTIC MYSTICS AND THEIR DRUG-RUNNING THEORIES An obscure Washington institute is filling America's head with nonsense and making a killing. For the past thirty years, says the...
...He is also convinced...
...The institute has recently established relationships with an impressive array of mainline groups like the Americans for Democratic Action, the National Organization for Women, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and church organizations like the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations...
...John Singlaub, and Maj...
...Upon learning that the Christics listed him as a source, Jenkins says, "I expressed to Mr...
...The Christics' influence among liberal political organizations has thus been enhanced substantially, particularly on Central American policy...
...The solemn voice belongs to Daniel Sheehan, general counsel and prognosticator-in-chief of the Christic Institute, which calls itself an "interfaith center for law and public policy," meaning that through lawsuits the Washington-based group aims to effect a shift in American politics and culture...
...After the bombing, Avirgan and Honey undertook an investigation and published their findings in a 1985 book, La Penca...
...Both of these alleged assassination plots are said by the Christics to be part of a larger criminal conspiracy to finance the contra war from the sale of drugs smuggled from Colombia to Costa Rica and into the United States by the Secret Team...
...The star par-ticipant was former CBS news producer Leslie Cockburn, a leading Christic mouthpiece...
...And it is an effective one, as journalists and their audiences not only are more predisposed than ever to take a dim view of the CIA and the American military, but also are increasingly preoccupied with events that most resemble fiction...
...Similarly, the damages in the Greensboro case were awarded despite the failure of Christic attorneys to establish who was actually responsible for the killings...
...Some, like Terrell, got involved with the Christics for political reasons (he turned against the contras after leaving the Posey organization...
...In those early years, the Christics did not have much going for them...
...Carl E. Jenkins, a former CIA official, is also listed in the Christic affidavit as a key source of many of their charges...
...The banker says he had worked for "Air America," a "CIA front," during the Vietnam war with a special unit called "Shadow Company...
...Garcia said he had attended a Miami meeting, along with Posey, John Hull, and Bruce Jones, two Americans who owned ranches in Costa Rica, and three mercenaries, Steven Carr, Robert Thompson, and Peter Glibbery, where the Tambs plot was discussed...
...And Posey acknowledges that his organization has raised millions of dollars in non-lethal aid for the contras, but notes that the group was cleared of any illegal conduct in a Justice Department investigation...
...Special Forces in Vietnam were cast as the villains...
...John Kerry of Massachusetts, whose staff works closely with the institute...
...ne question remaining is whether some hidden hand is driving Sheehan and his compatriots to fabricate such a bogus story with such single-minded intensity...
...Legal action against the participants in the Iran-contra affair in the wake of recent indictments will also keep the Christic charges in the news...
...In any case, says Singlaub, "the Christics really can't lose...
...In May 1986, the Christics filed a massive civil rights suit against twenty-nine defendants in U.S...
...On the other hand, the suit may be thrown out for lack of evidence...
...Jonathan Kwitny, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has written Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA (W...
...Kwitny now says he is dogged by "glassy-eyed" Christic followers in public appearances because he criticized the group, an experience he compares to facing the LaRouchies...
...John Kerry of Massachusetts, whose staff works closely with the institute...
...covert operations [in Asia] is ridiculous...
...Despite this astonishing admission, the reporter concluded: "If Danny Sheehan has the Secret Team—or whoever the hell they are—running scared, he must be doing something right...
...aid was scuttled by Congress...
...The Christic Institute also has been a prominent endorser of such activities as last summer's "Hands Off the Americas Festival," advertised as a "rally to support non-intervention in Central America and self-determination everywhere...
...The Christics have identified an additional ninety-eight people said by them to "have knowledge" of the Secret Team operation, including Vice President George Bush and Pentagon official Richard Armitage...
...Activists were mobilized, new alliances were forged, and the Nuclear Reform Project, a national campaign to help towns and cities expand their power to prevent radiation hazards, was launched...
...But recall: although the company settled the ten-year-old lawsuit in 1986 for $1.38 million, Kerr-McGee in no way acknowledged the Silkwood charges, which remain unproved...
...Whatever the Christics ultimately are up to, the Secret Team lawsuit will remain their prime vehicle...
...With its exposure of the private contra re-supply operation run by current and former U.S...
...The attorney pointed out that while Garcia had said the plot was discussed in January and February of 1985, Tambs was not the ambassador to Costa Rica until July (he was posted to Colombia at the time...
...Sheehan, one of the institute's founders, was formerly on the staff of the Quixote Center, the group which spearheaded the "Quest for Peacea fundraising project that sent tens of millions in private aid to the Sandinista government...
...Press notices have been uniformly favorable as to the institute's ends—spelled out in its literature as "dismantlement of Contragate's secret team," an "end to the contra war," and 'The other defendants are: Robert Owen, Thomas Clines, Thomas Posey, Albert Hakim, Rene Corbo, John Hull, Bruce Jones, Felipe Vidal Santiago, Moises Dagoberto Nunez, Francisco Chanes, Ramon Cecilio Palacio, Ricardo Gris, William Gris, Roger Lee Pallais, Amac Galil, Hector Cornillot, Jorge Gonzalez, Alvaro Cruz, Frederico Saenz, Ronald Joseph Martin, James McCoy, Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero, Mario Delamico, Pablo Escobar, and Jorge Ochoa...
...Sheehan had been involved in the case against the Kerr-McGee Corporation brought by the family of Karen Silk-wood, and in 1985 he won damages David Brock is a writer for Insight magazine...
...Max Pacheco, the physician who initially treated Avirgan, have said in affidavits that Avirgan only sustained an injury to his middle finger...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988...
...For the past thirty years, says the earnest, curly-haired man in the short film "The Heart of the Matter," a gang of gung-ho military and intelligence veterans, a "shadow government," a "secret team" has been conducting its own version of U.S...
...government not only sold arms to Iran...
...Sheehan my displeasure at being used as a sourcefor his affidavit and I again explained and emphasized to Mr...
...This was also the belief of Tomas Castillo, the CIA station chief in San Jose, according to Iran-contra committee documents There have been reports that Avirgan and...
...As the trial date in the case nears, Sheehan finds himself in a quandary as each of his, sources refuses: to back up the Christic story...
...For one thing, there are a lot more of them: the staff now numbers at least sixty, including attorneys, private investigators, and public relations specialists...
...Kwitny also criticized CBS News for repeating the charges "uncritically...
...The assassination plan was hatched in order to collect a $1 million bounty placed on Tambs's head by South American drug lord Pablo Escobar, the bounty to be used to fund a Cuban-American brigade to invade Nicaragua from the south, according to Garcia's story...
...But he apparently believes, with the apodictic fervor of his followers, that he will stumble upon information to prove the case yet...
...he has been receiving about $20,000 ayear from the Christics in small bills since he became one of their sources...
...Last July, James Lawrence King, chief U.S...
...He enters a church and lights a votive candle as the organ music rises...
...Singlaub contends the Christics' main purpose is to divert' attention from drug smuggling by the Sandinistas and Fidel Castro, a charge long made by the Reagan Administration and detailed in the recent statements of Sandinista defector Maj...
...Last July, the Christics brought their charges to a hearing of the House Select Committee on Narcotics...
...He places Shackley in Southeast Asia in 1965, when in fact Shackley's service did not begin there until mid-1966...
...Some of the Christic sources, in trouble with the law, made statements that they were led to believe would help them plea bargain their cases or get legal aid or financial remuneration...
...Honey have met regularly with the Soviet ambassador in San Jose...
...an "education and organizing packet" ($7...
...foreign policy "based on law and morality' while expressing some measure of skepticism about the veracity of Christic claims...
...Typical was a long and sympathetic take-out in the New York Times, under the banner headline "A Liberal Group Makes Waves With Its Contra Lawsuit," which waited until the very end of the article to tell the reader: "Federal agents, United States prosecutors and spokesmen for the CIA have characterized the suit as a political fantasy...
...and foreign law enforcement officials, military personnel, private pilots and crew, and examined reams of documents...
...Three people were killed...
...T he money goes to cover the costs of investigating, litigating, and promoting what has come to be known as the Secret Team theory...
...Cockburn's book includes no table of contents, no index, and unnumbered "chapter notes," making it impossible to trace the sources of her various allegations...
...The Chris-tics have so far identified seventy-four sources and kept five secret...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 25 trafficking...
...Two Catholic priests now in Managua as advisers to the government, Cesar Jerez and Wally Kasuboski, have been intimately involved in Christic activities...
...government service...
...foreign policy...
...The sign-in book at the Chris-tics' Washington office one recent day was filled with the names of journalists, representing organizations from the Nation to UPI...
...Other investigators, including reporters from major news organizations, have tried without success to find proof of aspects of the case, particularly the allegations that military supplies for the contras may have been paid for with profits from drug trafficking...
...foreign policy...
...According to a passage from the minority report of the Iran-contra committee, ". . . North appears to have suggested, in conversation, an FBI investigation [be conducted] of certain individuals based on a suspicion that a foreign government was secretly financing or supporting a lawsuit against various U.S...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 23 intelligence officials trafficking in drugs and committing other nefarious deeds has been popularized in the past year or so in books and films, most notably in the hit movie Lethal Weapon, in which veterans of the CIA and U.S...
...They've been "killing and maiming innocent people," selling "weapons of death," shipping "cocaine by the tons" into the U.S., "skimming millions," all as part of a "global anti-Communist war" conducted in "the back alleys of the world...
...It is a classic KGB technique to accuse us of precisely what they are doing," says Singlaub...
...Down the aisles went the index cards, and back they came, dozens of them, with offers of help for Danny Sheehan...
...All of these intelligence programs were official, funded by the U.S...
...The story is much the same even in the radical press...
...And then Sheehan closed—as he almost always does—to a standing ovation...
...She was killed while on her way to a meeting with a reporter to discuss these contentions...
...auditors and inspectors general from 1965 to 1975 examining the American position in Southeast Asia, detecting no links between American officials and drug traffickers...
...the Christic affidavit attributed to them that they had never made...
...covert actions or "dirty wars...
...And several Christies, as those who compare them to LaRouchies dub them, were seen on a recent Bill Moyers PBS special, "The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis...
...His allegation was made after a federal grand jury convicted Garcia in late 1985 of illegally possessing a machine gun and silencer...
...Attorney Jeffrey Feldman wrote in a memo: "The evidence we have gathered does not support Garcia's claim that Tom Posey and others planned to murder Ambassador Tambs...
...That defendants Shackley, Secord, Singlaub, and Thomas Clines, a former CIA director of clandestine operations training, were stationed in government posts in Southeast Asia at the time is self-evident...
...I heard no credible evidence that would make me believe that any of this is true...
...T he notion that there is a sinister 1 network of current or former U.S...
...The case attracted little attention until the Iran-contra affair...
...The Christic case is beginning to unravel...
...they both write for the Nation...
...the Contragate VHS video "The Heart of the Matter," "ideal for public events and meetings" ($35...
...Other Christic demonologies are enjoying a certain vogue as well, as a re-energized left rises up to repeal the political and cultural legacies of Reaganism...
...North, a non-lawyer, was flatly told that the FBI did not have the legal authority to investigate such a matter...
...A memorandum by Robert A. Bermingham, an investigator for the House committee, said investigators had questioned "hundreds of persons, including U.S...
...Jesus Garcia, a Florida Cuban, is the source of the Christic charge that the Secret Team conspired to assassinate Lewis Tambs, the U.S...
...that "foreign intelligence services" clued the Christics into their communications intercepts, gleaned from the Soviet spy facility at Lourdes, Cuba, enabling them to learn about the contra operation before the Iran-contra scandal broke...
...the establishment of a U.S...
...against the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi party on behalf of the families of five blacks killed at a 1979 civil rights demonstration...
...Mattes also said that it was initially Honey, and not his client, who suggested that Garcia had been set up because of his knowledge of thescheme...
...Sheehan that I had no personal knowledge concerning the misconduct he was alleging in the affidavit...
...officials and financed in part from arms sales to Iran, the affair moved the Christic conspiracy theory into the realm of the possible...
...District Court in Miami, charging them under the Racketeering and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) with participating in a twenty-five year "pattern of racketeering activity" including "acts or threats of murder, kidnapping, bribery and the felonious manufacture, importation, selling and otherwise dealing in cocaine and proscribed drugs...
...The Christics may even seek to include Oliver North and John Poindexter as defendants in the case, now that both have left U.S...
...One scene—in which a bank president breaks down and admits his participation in a drug smuggling scheme—evokes the spirit, if not the letter, of the Christic yarn...
...Wheaton met Sheehan in the course of a personal investigation of drug smuggling, sparked by his daughter's drug problem, apparently became smitten with Sheehan, and collaborated with him in developing the theory...
...This elaborate web of private covert activities is alleged to include the attempted assassinations of Eden Pastora Gomez, a former leader of the Nicaraguan contras, and Lewis Tambs, the U.S...
...General Secord believes that the initial Christic aim was to cut off the contra re-supply effort that he had helped organize...
...In a chance meeting in a bar, the story goes, David tells a carpenter named Carlos Rojas Chinchilla that the bomb at La Penca was planted by a Libyan exile, Amac Galil, posing as a Danish journalist...
...The Christics have not produced a scintilla of hard evidence to back up their charges...
...But the Christics charge that the group funded their covert efforts with kickbacks from opium warlord Vang Pao, and continued, while both in and out of government service, to operate their own private intelligence network throughout the world in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were chosen by the Reagan Administration to keep the contras going after U.S...
...Bo Gritz, who repeated the story last spring to the House Task Force on International Narcotics Control, chaired by Democrat Lawrence J. Smith of Florida...
...district judge of the Southern District of Florida, confined discovery by the plaintiffs to charges made concerning the period 1982 to 1986, requiring them to prove the existence of a criminal conspiracy in relation to three specific charges—the alleged Pastora and Tambs assassination plots and drug smuggling by the Secret Team in collusion with the contras—before permitting discovery to move back to the 1970s and 1960s...
...This raises some troubling ethical questions as to how the Christic affidavit was assembled in the first place...
...Packets distributed at such gatherings contain a suggested letter to Congress requesting investigation of Chris-tic charges and material hawking a host of Christic wares: the Contragate affidavit, "a must...
...Wheaton admitted that...
...The Silkwood campaign was helped tremendously, to be sure, by riding the crest of nationwide antinuclear hysteria following the Three Mile Island accident of March 1979...
...And then there's the cash: the Christics are bringing in almost $60,000 a week, 70 percent of it from direct-mail and other solicitations from private citizens, making the institute one of the hottest properties on the left today...
...Iran-contra was a boon to the Christic strategy of attempting to criminalize foreign-policy differences...
...The question of drug trafficking and CIA operations was also investigated by the Church committee of the 94th Congress, which reported: "On the basis of its examination, the Committee has concluded that CIA air proprietaries did not participate in illicit drug trafficking...
...Before this meeting, Garcia had said nothing to Mattes about the plot...
...ambassador to Costa Rica, as well as the selling of narcotics to buy military equipment for the contra forces...
...government, and funded well...
...In the case of Silkwood, the Chris-tics contend that their campaign "inspired a Congressional investigation, two books, a play, several television dramas and a major motion picture...
...Jenkins continued: "I am astounded that on the basis of his conversation with me, Sheehan would swear under oath that I supplied him with this information...
...Before hearing their presentation, Capitol Hill sources say, Rep...
...In addition, thousands of man-hours were spent by U.S...
...That year, the obscure institute had a dozen people on staff and was raising about $500,000 a year from groups like the National Methodist Programs in New York, the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, and the C.S...
...Although Sheehan exaggerates his own role in the case, Silkwood family attorneys put forth a fascinating conspiracy theory, alleging not only that Kerr-McGee, Silkwood's employer, was responsible for her contamination, but also that company agents killed Silkwood to cover up the theft of nuclear fuel from the plant...
...The defendants, some of whom have been involved in raising funds and buying supplies for the contras, categorically deny the drug charges...
...Since the scandal broke, Sheehan, a magnetic figure who rouses audiences with calls for a "return to the fervor of the 1960s," and his staff have tirelessly propounded their views in media appearances and in speeches to college and community groups across the country...
...Kerr-McGee attorneys said the cost of settling was less than the projected costs of continued litigation...
...Avirgan was one of the wounded...
...It is, of course, precisely in this fuzzy stratus of bizarre charge followed by predictable denial and lingering doubt that the Christics' phenomenal juggernaut thrives...
...Singlaub says that he has raised money from contributors outside the U.S...
...The institute took its name from the writings of the Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote in the early twentieth century of a "Christic force" that unifies all beings and overpowers destructive manmade forces...
...ambassador to Costa Rica, during a planned armedassault on the embassy in Costa Rica in 1983...
...Pastora eventually split with the Sandinistas and joined the contras, but called the La Penca press conference to announce his split with the resistance...
...Kwitny, who also has looked into the contra drug connection, wrote in a Nation article last August that the Christics' evidence remains "well-hidden...
...it sold thousands of tons of drugs—distributed from American airports—into the United States itself...
...Former NSC aide Oliver North apparently had similar suspicions...
...Garcia claimed that Tom Posey, the head of an Alabama-based group called Civilian Materiel Assistance, which has aided the contras, had framed him to prohibit him from revealing the Tambs plot...
...Several staff members work and live (complete with subsidized rent) in three chaotic Capitol Hill townhouses owned by the institute, which claims to pay each staffer $15,000 a year...
...intelligence officials trafficking in drugs and committing other nefarious deeds has been popularized in the past year or so in books and films...
...Roger Bengoechea...
...He would later claim that he suffered shrapnel wounds, burns, and a mangled hand, though Curtin Winsor, the U.S...
...This is, after all, Central America...
...There are other holes in Gritz's story...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 CIA headquarters in Langley...
...Proceeds to let Nicaragua live...
...The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Sheehan, helped by entertainment industry people like Jackson Browne and Don Henley, had raised $200,000 in the Los Angeles area in six months: "Seated on white folding chairs in the hot sun, sipping Perrier and Evian waters out of wine glasses, the crowd listened to Sheehan describe the secret team, a shadow government he calls it, and its 25 years of covert activities...
...Secord's role has been welldocumented in the Iran-contra investigation...
...Army, the end source for much of the Secret Team theory, has said in a deposition that he has no firsthand knowledge of the alleged conspiracy...
...The company later reunited as private citizens after the war and began bringing heroin into the U.S., using their Southeast Asian connections...
...The conference was rocked by an explosion...
...Many of the Christic claims about Southeast Asia emanate from retired Army Col...
...Avirgan and Honey certainly have a long history of radical political activity...
...Sheehan said to me that he was not concerned with the actual state of my knowledge and that he was using the affidavit simply to keep the case in court so that he could take discovery to prove the story...
...But the pounds of documents, bank and telephone records, and credit card receipts of the twenty-nine defendants already in the Chris-tics' hands should be enough to keep the rumor mills of the left churning for quite some time...
...Honey attended Garcia's trial in December 1985...
...But the reporter, after polling an array of left-leaning sources, concluded: "Ask these journalists, experts, Capitol Hill investigators, and former CIA agents, many of whom are sympathetic to Danny Sheehan's general critique of covert operations, and they will tell you that his gorgeous tapestry is woven of rumor and half-truth and wish fulfillment...
...In the most egregious cases, Sheehan got appointments with some of his alleged sources, read them statements that he wanted to attribute to them, and included these statements in the affidavit over their objections...
...But this 1960s-style communalism belies the 1980s-style high-intensity marketing success the Christics are having these days...
...In October, the judge ordered the Christics to reveal the identities of the seventy-nine anonymous sources listed in their affidavit so that the defendants could depose their accusers...
...to purchase weapons on the international arms market for the contras...
...In all, eighty such groups have joined the Christics in a "Communications Alliance," agreeing to publicize Christic charges and fundraising appeals in their publications and public events...
...Shackley says that he was not involved in providing aid of any kind to the contras...
...But none of the press accounts has sought to disprove or contradict the Christic allegations or include more than rudimentary denials from the defendants in the Secret Team case...
...Pastora, the Press and the CIA, in which they alleged that the bombing, an attempt to assassinate Pastora, had been planned by the CIA, contra leader Adolfo Calero, a group of U.S...
...Avirgan, a TV cameraman.who has worked for CBS, ABC, and the BBC, was arrested several times for protesting against the Vietnam war and wrote an article for Win magazine in 1970 titled"From Hanoi with Love...
...He said that he learned of the plot, the meeting, and Calero's approval of the plot from . . . a journalist named Martha Honey...
...The Christics have clearly modeled the Secret Team theory on the Karen Silkwood case, perhaps the most celebrated public-interest lawsuit in history and an engine of the antinuclear power movement...
...At the Christics' Washington office, things don't appear to have changed much from those lean times...
...The institute traces the genesis of the Secret Team partnership to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the Phoenix program of the Vietnam war through Iran in the late 1970s and, latterly, to Central America, in an attempt to show a close association between the team and official U.S...
...The Christics have other indirect ties to the Sandinistas...
...The left has an obvious stake in keeping the Iran-contra affair alive, and so the view that the ten-month, $10 million-plus bipartisan investigation by Congress was somehow circumscribed is taking root, not only in the People's Daily World and the Nation, but also in respected publications like Harper's, which recently sponsored a roundtable discussion on the matter...
...Mervyn M. Dymally, a California Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had agreed to "help us...
...At his subsequent deposition, Terrell took the Fifth Amendment, much to Sheehan's dismay...
...They're now trying to delay the start of the trial to postpone an inevitable defeat in the courts...
...Richard Secord...
...Nonetheless, Granta, the trendy British literary magazine published by Penguin, has just run an excerpt from the book, telling its readers: "To finance the secret war in Nicaragua, the U.S...
...There was no information developed indicating any U.S...
...But perhaps, if the charges come to be known as a sham, the liberal groups that have hitched their wagons to this particular evanescent star will come to regret it yet...
...111 Christic drug-smuggling charges against the Nicaraguan contras have been raised before every congressional aid vote, usually by Democratic Sen...
...Eugene Wheaton, a former warrant officer for the U.S...
...According to the Christics' affidavit, the Secret Team's point man is former CIA official Theodore Shackley, who worked for the agency in Laos in the 1960s organizing opposition to the Pathet Lao guerrilla force and was later CIA station chief in Saigon...
...I did not offer Mr...
...The group was founded in 1980, but even a year ago it was considered just another wacky, moribund left-wing hive, with no more of a following than, say, the Rainbow Lobby or Partners for Global Justice...
...In a sworn affidavit Jenkins has filed with the court in Miami, he says the Christic allegations with which he is identified are "either known by me to be false " or "I have no personal knowledge of them...
...Sources of news stories indicating to the contrary were of doubtful veracity...
...Orlando Castro, head of the Costa Rican Democratic Association, has charged that Avirgan and Honey are spies for the Sandinistas working against Costa Rica's national security and has tried to get the pair expelled from the country...
...On March 14, 1986, Assistant Federal Public Defender John Mattes, Garcia's attorney, told us that Honey confronted Garcia about the assassination plot during the trial...
...The Christics have never explained, moreover, why the contras and their supporters would want to kill a Reagan ambassador who had been on their side...
...Some contra rebels with ties to Eden Pastora have been linked to drug trafficking, which is one of the reasons the CIA says it broke with Pastora in 1984...
...and did not pursue the request...
...And it seems clear that even though the Secret Team story has been deemed largely blue smoke and mirrors by all who have examined it, a portion of the public is prepared nevertheless to accept it willfully as truth, filling as it does a psychic or emotional need to make sense of Iran-contra...
...Tony Avirgan, at the time a stringer for ABC News in Costa Rica, and his wife, freelance journalist Martha Honey, attended a news conference held by Eden Pastora, better known as "Comandante Zero," the leader of the rebel assault on the National Palace in Managua during Anastasio Somoza'sreign...
...Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat and leading contra critic, had scheduled a follow-up news conference to publicize the Christic charges...
...All of those listed by the Christics as sources for their allegations who have been deposed in the case have recanted or denied ever making statements attributed to them...
...And that is probably only the beginning...
...Sheehan any information whatsoever...
...But when deposed in November by attorneys for both sides in the case after he surfaced in Canada, Rojas, advertised by the Christics as their star witness, broke down several times and admitted he had no knowledge implicating the defendants in the bombing...
...But Sheehan's case was so amorphous that Rangel was forced to tell 200 reporters: "None of the witnesses gave any evidence that would show that the Contra leadership was involved in the trafficking of drugs...
...Consequently, the Miami division of the FBI and the U.S...
...Others say they met with Sheehan to discuss his theories and later found allegations in...
...It's all run by ex-CIA, soldiers, mercs," the banker says...
...W. Norton), chock full of unproven allegations linking the CIA and an international bank to an "extra-constitutional" pursuit of U.S...
...But there is more...
...The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter (South End Press) is mostly a rehash of news clippings, though the Christic Institute is cited several times...
...10...
...He has Shackley and Clines running the Phoenix program after it had been dismantled and the two had returned to Even though the Secret Team story has been deemed largely blue smoke and mirrors by all who have examined it, a portion of the public is prepared nevertheless to accept it willfully as truth...
...and a two-hour audio cassette featuring Sheehan ($12...
...On May 14, 1986, Assistant U.S...
...Among the defendants are former United States intelligence agents and military officers, including former CIA deputy director Theodore Shackley, Maj...
...Avirgan and Honey then hooked up with the Christics, giving them a lawsuit on which to hang their theory...
...The point for the Christics is not to prove the case in court, but rather to advance a political cause in the media and in left-wing circles while raising funds to stay in business...
...Pastora has at different times attributed the crime to the Sandinistas, enemies within his organization, other contra factions, and the CIA...
...Christic drug smuggling charges against the Nicaraguan contras have been raised before every congressional aid vote, usually by Democratic Sen...
...citizens, a matter about which it would have been legitimate for North to inquire for national security reasons and which, if true, might have constituted a fraud on the courts of the United States...
...He concluded: "Despite numerous newspaper accounts to the contrary, no evidence was developed indicating that contra leadership or contra organizations were actually involved in drug The notion that there is a sinister network of current or former U.S...
...The campus crusade for Christic was swelling...
...Fund in Los Angeles...
...David claims to be a member of the group that hired Galil, which he says includes contras and CIA agents...
...there's also Nicaraguan rebel leader Adolfo 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 Calero, with several Miami Cuban-Americans and a few Latin American drug smugglers thrown in for good measure.' In all, the defendants are said to constitute a "powerful criminal network, fanatically right-wing, financed by drug profits and closely connected to the Reagan administration...
...In celebration of Nicaragua's new constitution, and the eighth anniversary of the revolution...
...A rivulet of books, ranging widely in coherence and tone though not in intent, has been flowing from the prestige presses, all of them positing that in the wake of the Iran-contra scandal, the CIA must be reined in once again and covert actions must be further curtailed.' (This, despite the fact that the Iran-contra affair, if it shows anything, shows that bureaucratic intransigence at the CIA led William Casey and North to consider an "offthe-shelf" operation...
...But as to the Christic charges that the current leadership of the contras and their private re-supply network are involved in the smuggling of drugs, investigators for the Democratic-controlled House Iran-contra panel have found no evidence...
...The Christies, from Minnesota, were interviewed at the end of the show, identified merely as people who had "organized citizens around their state to monitor the Iran-contra hearings, as a way of increasing public awareness...
...That appears to be the extent of the role religion plays in the institute's doings...
...The defendants speculate that the Christics might in fact drop the case just before the trial date on the grounds that some of their sources must remain anonymous for their safety, declare vice tory, and continue raising funds off the Secret Team theory...
...Silkwood, an Oklahoma plutonium plant worker, had contended that the plant where she worked was unsafe and that she had been contaminated with highly radioactive plutonium...
...He further told me that he would drop sources such as me once he had developed hard sources...
...Both Glibbery and Carr, who had made allegations of drug smuggling and bomb plots, have sworn that those allegations are untrue and, moreover, that they were made in exchange for promises by Avirgan and Honey of legal assistance from Sen...
...This provoked an angry exchange on the letters page with Leslie Cockburn, a former "West 57th Street" producer and Sheehan defender who had relied extensively on Christic information for two broadcasts on the contra-drug connection...
...Honey has free-lanced for the New York Times...
...government employees, leaders of the resistance, representatives of foreign governments, U.S...
...One recent morning at the institute, a Christic staffer returned from Capitol Hill announcing breathlessly that Rep...
...With the same fortuity, the Iran-contra revelations have propelled the Christics and their crackpot mysticism from the fringes to the center of a gathering storm...
...John Kerry and financial aid from Robert White, Jimmy Carter's ambassador to El Salvador...
...Contributions are tax-deductible...
...Evil things are done by the human family," he says, "and done in the dark...
...contra supporters, and anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Miami...
...Iran-contra was also a boon to the Christic strategy of attempting to criminalize foreign-policy differences...
...And the Christics are gettingnoticed in the political sphere as well: the latest Christic literature includes endorsements from Democratic presidential aspirants Richard Gephardt and Jesse Jackson...
...The Iran-contra affair, the man is here to tell us, did not begin with Oliver North...
...Cockburn has now produced a book, relying heavily on the Christic Secret Team charges, Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipeline and the Contra Drug Connection (Atlantic Monthly Press...
...Smith told UPI afterwards that Gritz was a "crazy character who has made these outrageous statements before...
...T he complex Christic tale upon 1 which all of this rests begins at a small farm called La Penca just inside Nicaragua on May 30, 1984...
...ambassador to 2A scholarly treatment of the matter is found in Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World, by Gregory F. Treverton (Basic Books), in which the author argues that the "problem" of a democracy engaging in covert operations "remains unresolved...
...Miranda...
...And as if that were not enough, Oliver Stone, who has endorsed the Christics in a public letter, is now making a movie called simply Contras...
...T he only source said to have had 1 firsthand knowledge of the La Penca plot is a man identified solely as David, who, the Christics claim, as befits good conspiracy theory, is now dead...
...And we are here to expose it...
...Feldman concluded that "Garcia obtained this story from Martha Honey...
...Attorney's Office there conducted an exhaustive investigation of the alleged Tambs plot in early 1986, including a polygraph test of Garcia...
...The case is expected to go to trial June 29...
...The Christics say that in Minneapolis alone more than 1,500 private parties have featured the video cassette and they claim to have put 100,000 Christic brochures into the hands of voters in the Iowa caucuses...
...All of the other people that Garcia claims attended the planning meeting fervently deny it, and one of them, Peter Glibbery, could not have possibly been in Miami at the time, Feldman determined...
...The Secret Team theory," according to Mother Jones, is "fast becoming the official explanation of the Iran-Contra events in progressive circles around the country...
...Costa Rica at the time, and Dr...
...The suit was filed by the Christics on behalf of Avirgan and Honey in May 1986, seeking $1.28 million in compensatory damages for Avirgan's alleged injuries, $2.56 million under a special feature of the RICO statute, and $20 million in punitive damages...
...government agency or organization condoned drug trafficking by the contras or anyone else...
...Sheehan has said that by early 1986, the Secret Team theory was already percolating, as stories about the private contra re-supply effort began circulating in Washington...
...In relation to another Chris-tic source, former Civilian Materiel employee Jack Terrell, whom the Chris-tics claim has firsthand knowledge of Adolfo Calero's involvement in the Tambs plot, Feldman reported: "Terrell has no personal knowledge of the events described...
...A Mother Jones reporter recently followed Sheehan to Harvard Law School to hear his table-thumping Christic pitch: "He unrolled the harrowing story of the Secret Team, and accused his law school listeners of trooping off to Wall Street at a time when the Constitution is in mortal peril...
...At that time, Mr...
...Says General Singlaub: "The idea that we needed to deal in drugs to fund U.S...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
