Bush I, left of the throne at Skull and Bones, the mega-evil secret society at Yale — a typical windowless structure like masonic temples and almost all Jehovah’s Witness kingdom halls
Seymour Hersh: George H.W. Bush Team Leaked To Media To Reveal CIA’s Iran-Contra Affair
A new piece by Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books gives some insight into secret U.S. operations during the Reagan administration. The Vice President’s Menincludes a quite sensational claim of who revealed the Iran-Contra affair.
According to the conventional wisdom, as reflected in Wikipedia, an Iranian operator revealed to a Lebanese paper that the U.S. was selling weapons to Iran in the hope to get hostages in Lebanon released:
After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on 3 November 1986. This was the first public report of the weapons-for-hostages deal.
People is the National Security Council used profits from these weapon sales to illegally arm and finance CIA run anti-government gangs in Nicaragua. Both the weapon sales to Iran and the weapon delivery to guerilla in Nicaragua, were illegal under U.S. law. The leak to Lebanese paper blew up both operations.
That Mehdi Hashemi, the Iranian operative, leaked the affair is only supported by second hand hearsay from a dubious source. Seymour Hersh reports of a very different culprit.
According to his sources, former CIA director George H.W. Bush, who was then Reagan’s vice president, ran his own secret operations through a special office in the Pentagon. It was led by Vice-Admiral Arthur Moreau. The office and its operations were kept outside of congressional oversight. Neither the CIA nor the Joint Chief’s of Staff were aware of its doing. During some 30 different operations the Bush team used small groups of U.S. Marines to affect Soviet operations in foreign countries and to get rid of unwanted foreign politicians.
Bush essentially ran the prequel of the ‘war on/of terror’ which today is run by the CIA and the Joint Special Forces Command.
Bush disliked William Casey, who Reagan had named as new CIA director. Casey was a business man who got the job after he managed Ronald Reagan’s election campaign. Bush thought that he was too incompetent to run the clandestine service.
One of the operations run under Bush also involved Nicaragua, but had nothing to do with the later Iran-Contra scandal. At the same time the CIA director William Casey was drumming up support for the Contras in Nicaragua. The two operations collided when Lieutenant Colonel Oliver (Ollie) North at the National Security Council used the proceeds from the weapon sales to Iran to illegally finance the CIA’s Contras in Nicaragua. While North was also a confidante of the Bush/Moreau’s operations, he allegedly freelanced and eventually deserted to the CIA side.
According to a former officer involved in Bush’s operations office, Bush and Moreau feared that the CIA’s widely expanding Iran-Contra operation run by Oliver North would become a threat to their own operations. They decided to blow it up:
‘Ollie brings in Dick Secord and Iranian dissidents and money people in Texas to the scheme, and it’s gotten totally out of control,’ the officer said. ‘We’re going nuts. If we don’t manage this carefully, our whole structure will unravel. And so we’ – former members of Moreau’s team who were still working for Bush – ‘leaked the story to the magazine in Lebanon.’ He was referring to an article, published on 3 November 1986 by Ash-Shiraa magazine in Beirut, that described the arms for hostages agreement. He would not say how word was passed to the magazine, …
According to Hersh’s source the effect of the leak to the Lebanese paper was foreseen and intended:
The officer explained that it was understood by all that the scandal would unravel in public very quickly, and Congress would get involved. ‘Our goals were to protect the Moreau operation, to limit the vice president’s possible exposure, and to convince the Reagan administration to limit Bill Casey’s management of covert operations. It only took a match to light the fire. It was: “Oh my god. We were paying ransom for the hostages – to Iran.”’
If Hersh’s anonymous source is correct, which I have no reason to doubt, the Iranian Mehdi Hashemi did not leak the issue. It was bureaucratic infighting between a former CIA director, who continued to run secret operations, and a sitting one, who was deemed incompetent by the former, that led to the disclosure of the Iran-Contra affair.
Seymour Hersh is known to have lots of contacts with former officials and officers. According to his on telling he is actively seeking them out as soon as they retire. Old men like to tell war stories, but dislike to damage their still living friends. George H.W. Bush died last November. Hersh likely knew the story long ago but is only now allowed to tell it.
The new Hersh/LRB piece is quite long and the details seems to have little relevance for current affairs. But his sources tell an interesting story about the backstage fights that went on between the various branches of the national security bureaucracy during the Reagan presidency. There is no doubt that similar fights, including intentional leaks to damage competing officials, continue today.
Posted by b on January 17, 2019 at 02:11 PM | Permalink
So Hersh is going back to stories from the ’80’s? My guess is he’s been warned off from doing any more investigation into the Deep State and Democrats’ efforts to get rid of Trump by faking the Russiagate and DNC hack stories. First he spends time on his biography, now he’s doing stories from forty years ago.
I’d say he’s getting ready to retire. After all, with the story about Seth Rich being the Wikileaks source of the DNC emails being buried and his denying it left and right, what can he do now? That story would have been the top of his career. He would have taken down the entire FBI management and the subsequent investigation would have taken down Brennan and the CIA. Obviously he knew that would probably get him killed since threatening the entire FBI and CIA establishment would have been something neither organization would tolerate. So he begged off and now is only useful for exposing stories from forty years ago.
Meanwhile Assange will be forced out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, deported to the US, tried for espionage and sent to prison for the next fifty years. Something Hersh might have prevented, had he some more guts.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Jan 17, 2019 3:04:29 PM | 2
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….My intel background
In the Marine Corps I was stationed as a Basic Intelligence Marine at the historic old Washington Navy Yard in Wash DC, and learned interrogation — and, with a secret clearance, many other things……………
One of these other things was that in 1978 US/NATO stockpiles of anti-tank weapons to stop the Soviets, should they invade with their vast tank superiority located in East Germany, were at just 40% of normal!
Why?
President Nixon (foolishly currying favor with the Jews who, ungrateful psychopaths that they were, brought him down anyway) had airlifted US antitank weapons from Germany to Israel for their 1973 Yom Kippur War!
And our stocks to defend Germany and Europe five years later were still not replenished!
The dire problem with that was that the then-gigantic Soviet block was FAR ahead of us in tanks. Had the Soviets attacked, they would have been on the Rhine River in three days.
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Then the US would have had to resort to tactical nuclear weapons to stop them, destroying the people of Germany in the process! But, hah, did the Jews care about THAT?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon
The US tactical nuclear-weapon w48, fireable from a 155-mm gun equal to 72 tons of TNT
Bye, bye to what was left after WWII of Deutschland.
But, hey, brave little Israel would stay safe. And that’s obviously all that matters.
I also learned the US had tactical nukes that you could carry in a backpack (“Alice pack”), take somewhere, set it to go off, leave, and let it detonate.
My own commanding officer, Harvey Philip Gold, was a jew, and also a somewhat effeminate bisexual who was a bit too friendly to me. and once came on openly to a Marine sergeant named Jacky.
A later photo when he was an author (https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Draft-Military-Selective-Service-ebook/dp/B000JMKR1Q/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8 and https://www.amazon.com/Wilhelm-Reich-Misconstrued-Misesteemed-critique/dp/B018OGHKGI/ref=sr_1_3?s=books
In some ways Gold was a very nice guy — other than all that 😉 — but, telling me that 30 of his relatives diied in the Holocaust, he transferred me, when my NS views became known, over to an all-black supply unit.
There, another Jew, a supply sergeant, doubtless at Gold’s suggestion, kept egging me on to call blacks “jungle bunnies,” and in Yiddish — again, to try to get me going — he also called them “Schwartzers.” (He knew I understood German, which uses many of the same words as Yiddish. Clearly, Gold had told him all about me. Jews don’t toss out their nice yiddish words to just any goy. 😉 )
35th ITT (thrid item) was my intel unit. The 4th Supply Battalion (fourth entry) was with the blacks, who in all the services, being often low-IQ, AND cowards, AND unruly, get put in supply.
Typical — this black three-star Marine general, Ronald Coleman, was a supply guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_S._Coleman
To this day, even in a darkening America, 80% of frontline troops — the actual warfighters — in both the Army and Marines are WHITE.
In Nam
Look at these Navy SEALS — 99% white.
Better not drop your 10-pound, WWII-era M1 rifle on the Marine Corps silent-drill team. Dem white boys, though, gots ice cubes in they blood. 😉 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps_Silent_Drill_Platoon
Well, by now pretty fed up with bisexual Jew Marines and the blacks, who did nothing and (as God is my witness), in a class on Nuclear , Bioloiogicla and Chemical Weapons started cat-calling a black captain giving the class, and throwing wadded-up balls of paper at him, which in the Marine Corps, at least among Whites, was literally, and I do mean literally, un-think-able), I then got an interservice transfer to the Virginia Army National Guard.
Hell, white Marines, already afraid of our sergeants, were terrified of our captains!
I had one for a dad, in fact. 😉 Look at those eyes. Try getting away with anything with Captain Nugent in the house. 😉
In the Virginia Army National Guard, under Captain John Holt, I was Guardsperson of the Year in my infantry battalion, partly for coming in third in a 600-man 11-mile march after pulling an all-night guard duty.
I was proud of my service, it also gets me respect here in the vet-rich Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and my ability to kill in multiple ways, to lead men and plan and direct operations, might come in useful again. (Wearing a new Iraq-service Marine uniform a friend got me.)
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very interesting. there have been various reports over the years that both casey and bush were involved in delaying the release of hostage in iran in order to tip the election to reagan in 1980. wonder if they were also working against each other, then.
Posted by: pretzelattack | Jan 17, 2019 2:40:01 PM | 1