A PROFILE OF RICHARD J. BRENNEKE
A Profile of Richard J. Brenneke Richard J. Brenneke first surfaced in the Iran-contra affair when a Federal court in New York City released copies of memos he had written to the Pentagon and the...
...These incidents include a check-kiting complaint by a Seattle bank that was settled when Brenneke agreed to replace the funds, and a civil lawsuit, later settled out of court, in which a Portland bank charged Brenneke with falsifying an airplane title report...
...The counsel says that lack of time prevented a thorough follow-through on Brenneke's information, but that "an awful lot of what he said jibed with other things I had heard from other reliable sources or had seen in other records...
...The other witness was Ed Dick-stein, a consultant for Kendall International Arms, who also confirmed Brenneke's Demavand story...
...He refused at that time to say how he knew of these matters or to comment on his personal role, and The Progressive Aid not publish his remarks...
...He freely concedes that his potential legal vulnerability gives him a motive for claiming that his deals were sanctioned by the Government...
...He cannot recall Brenneke saying "anything that was untrue in a way that would reflect negatively on his credibility...
...Last July, in the final days of the Congressional Iran-contra investigation, a committee counsel spent several days interviewing Brenneke at his Lake Oswego, Oregon, office...
...If he goes over them, he remembers things in a way that is convincing...
...Brenneke now refuses to talk about his CIA connections, saying only that he does not dispute the Times account...
...Brenneke says he assumes that full details of his contra arms dealings will eventually surface publicly, as did the Demavand memos...
...Brenneke had obtained his information as a member of the Demavand group, a team of international arms dealers with ties to Western intelligence agencies who were trying to broker a $ 1 billion sale of missiles, tanks, and fighter planes to representatives of the Khomeini regime...
...A Profile of Richard J. Brenneke Richard J. Brenneke first surfaced in the Iran-contra affair when a Federal court in New York City released copies of memos he had written to the Pentagon and the Vice President's office concerning secret U.S arms deals with Iran...
...Asked about Brenneke's credibility, Dickstein responded, "I'd go to the wall for him, and there are not many people I'd say that about...
...Although Brenneke has apparently never been convicted of a crime, he has, according to the Portland Oregonian, at times been accused of doing business on the margins of the law...
...According to a reporter who helped prepare the article, Brenneke spoke on the condition that he not be found him to be thorough, competent, and very trustworthy,' a CIA letter states questioned on his non-Demavand activities...
...The Progressive had the first of a series of interviews with Brenneke in February 1987...
...In subsequent interviews, Brenneke confirmed some details of the transactions but was reluctant to discuss the matter further, citing legal worries and saying that he did not "want to wind up in what could be a circus back in Washington, D.C...
...Brenneke worked for us...
...John De-Larocque, whom Brenneke has identified as a business partner, is standing trial in Federal court in New York—in the same case in which the judge released the Brenneke memos—on charges of illegal arms sales to Iran...
...Brenneke said at the time that he was getting the information from European business associates...
...and saying 'we found him to be thorough, competent, and very trustworthy.' " The CIA responded with a statement that "we have no information that Mr...
...Brenneke says he is careful about observing the law but at the same time admits to involvement in a world of intelligence operations and clandestine arms shipments that by their very nature often seem to run afoul of the neutrality and export-control laws...
...A.N...
...He told of links between the contras and the Vice President's office, some of which were later corroborated by other sources...
...He also described East bloc weapons which were directed to the contras with, he then said, "the knowledge of top Bush aides...
...The article said Brenneke "showed The Times evidence that he was employed for thirteen years by the Central Intelligence Agency [and] provided a letter of reference under a CIA letterhead dated June 20, 1979, confirming that he had been employed by the Agency...
...Brenneke brought two witnesses to the Pentagon meeting on Demavand...
...After the memos were released, Brenneke was interviewed by The New York Times and said he had learned in early 1986 that money from Iranian arms sales "was accumulating in Switzerland for the purchase of weapons" for the contras and that he had passed this information on to the Vice President's office at the time...
...The memos, written in November 1985 and January 1986—ten months before Iran-contra broke publicly—discussed Iran's desire to trade arms for hostages and said that Admiral John Poindexter, then the President's National Security Adviser, had verbally authorized selling TOW missiles to Iran...
...The investigator says he did not ask Brenneke about Bush and the contras or his dealings with Donald Gregg...
...The Times story said that "while some of his assertions at first hearing appeared implausible, he provided hundreds of pages of handwritten notes and typed memos dating to 1985 and referring in detail to arms shipments that were then secret and have been substantially corroborated by recent official disclosures and by the investigation by The Times...
...While the Congressional Iran-contra committees were attempting to obtain Swiss banking records on the accounts of Richard Secord's enterprise, Brenneke provided The Progressive with information on the Secord funds that was later borne out by the committees' findings...
...But Brenneke says he is confident that—as with Demavand and the Iran arms deals—his own documentation, along with evidence from other participants, will ultimately bear out his claims...
...Brenneke was later the principal source for a front-page New York Times story on Demavand which identified him as an "intelligence consultant and CIA employee for more than thirteen years...
...Brenneke referred to others in the arms-trading world who "knew what he said they were going to know," the investigator says...
...The Times said its article was based on 150 interviews and some 4,000 pages of documents...
...Ann Kendall, secretary of Kendall International Arms in Paris, Kentucky, was one of these, she told The Progressive...
...Dickstein said that Brenneke had mentioned dealings with the Vice President's office in passing...
...He's exceedingly meticulous, to the point of almost an obsession...
...She confirmed Brenneke's account of the meeting...
...This January, however, Brenneke told The Progressive that he had been personally involved in the contra arms shipments and had obtained some of his information from telephone conversations with Gregg...
...Brenneke "had all kinds of hand-written notes," the counsel adds, that "really had the indicia of authenticity...
Vol. 52 • March 1988 • No. 3
