Mike Ruppert - CIA Drug Smuggling (1997)

Mike Ruppert: It was a year ago, believe it or not, that the San Jose Mercury News ran a series of stories called The Dark Alliance by Gary Webb. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with them. What was revealed in those articles was the fact that there was a direct link between several narcotics organizations run by Norman Manessis, Oscar Danilo Blandon, and Freeway Ricky Ross here in South Central Los Angeles, and there was also a link between those drug organizations, DIRECT, and the Central Intelligence Agency, and support for the Civil War effort. It created a big stink, but it was not at all the first time these stories had ever been made public. It was not the first time that we had ever heard anything about CIA dealing drugs, not by a long shot. What was unique about the Gary Webb stories was that for the first time, there was a face put on the suffering connected to CIA drug dealing. Abraham Lincoln said that the one lady who started the Civil War was Harriet Beecher Stowe because she wrote a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin. Everybody could read that book and know what it felt like to be a slave. From where I sit, the Gary Webb stories perform much the same functions. For the first time in the history of revelations about CIA drug dealing, there was a direct connection between seeing involvement in drug trafficking and crack babies in South Central and drive-by shootings and gangs and the sufferings caused to families and the users and the addicts and all the people who were enslaved by crack cocaine. Now, it was eight months ago that there was a town hall meeting down at Locke High School in Watts, chaired by Juanita Millinder-McDonald, not Maxine Waters. She's a representative from Compton. And I had been at one prior meeting before that at Compton College, and I stood up there. But in Locke High School, where Director John Deutsch was meeting with the people in an unprecedented move, I stood up and confronted him directly and said, I am a former LAPE narcotics detective. I work South Central. And I can tell you, Director Deutsch, emphatically and without equivocation, that the agency has been dealing drugs in this country for a long time. And I think many of you probably remember that. We got news all over the place with that one. I have to tell you, that will remain probably one of the most fun experiences of my whole life. I met Dick Gregory for the first time. In February of this year, when Crack the CIA coalition held its rally in downtown Los Angeles and we had 4,000 people show up, and Dick pulled me aside and said that he had gotten word out of the White House, out of the Justice Department, out of various government agencies, that my confrontation of Deutsch had cost him his appointment as Secretary of Defense. He had been issued it. Because I named in that confrontation, for those of you who saw it, three specific agency operations known as Amadeus, Pegasus, and Watchtower. We will talk about those a little bit later. Now what's happened as time has gone on is we had this fervor for a while. And as probably you're all aware, it's like, where did the story go? While the San Jose apparently corrected, didn't retract, but they corrected some stories. Gary Webb is now driving 150 miles one way to work in Cupertino. He's covering dog shows and weddings and family events. And what happened to Gary Webb, one of my favorite heroes in all of this stuff about what CIA does and conspiracies is a man by the name of Fletcher Prouty. Everybody here see JFK by Oliver Stone, the movie? Remember the man, Mr. X, sitting on the bench who was talking to Jim Garrison? That was Fletcher Prouty, who's written several books. He was a full colonel inside the Pentagon Special Operations Division. And Gary Webb was what Fletcher calls an object lesson. The archetypal object lesson, according to Fletcher Prouty, is Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was riding three cars behind John F. Kennedy. The bullets that killed him went directly over Lyndon Johnson's head. Lyndon Johnson spent the rest of his life and certainly his tenure as president knowing that those bullets could have been just as easily directed at him. Gary Webb has become an object lesson. Any reporter who now may want to take on this story can look to Gary Webb, who should have gotten the Pulitzer Prize, and say he's now driving 150 miles one way to work in Cupertino covering dog stories. Get the point? There are many witnesses in this waiting to testify, and there may well be hearings, and I'm going to give you some of the current newsy stuff before I go into my material.

Speaker 2: Michael, forgive me, we all thought Kennedy was shot from the front, not from behind.

Mike Ruppert: Well, bullets went from all directions, but yes, he was shot from the front, of course. But Johnson was in that motorcade, and he was accessible to the same rifles. That's the point I was trying to make. I wasn't disparaging anything else, and I wasn't certainly saying that Oswald did it. There are many other witnesses to CIA drug dealing who want to testify, who are able to testify, and there is a mountain of evidence admissible under legal standards in a court of law to prove that CIA has been dealing drugs for a long time. In a court of law, I know we have one attorney in the room. In a court of law, one of the strongest forms of direct testimony is eyewitness testimony. I was a cop, and I worked assignments both in detectives and in patrol. One of the first things a cop says when he gets to a crime scene is, did anybody see him? Are there any witnesses? Eyewitness testimony is direct evidence, admissible. I am an eyewitness to CIA drug dealers. So is my very good friend Celerino Castillo, a former DEA agent who was president of Ilo Pongo, an air base in El Salvador, run by the National Security Council and CIA, who witnessed planes being loaded with cocaine, who was confronted by U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr and told, stop writing reports, stop pressing for a prosecution, it's a White House operation, leave it alone. That's admissible evidence. Oliver North's diary, July 12, 1985, quote, Without the Honduran military, there would have been no Congress. $14 million to buy arms, and there were a bunch of other words in there, but to paraphrase the arms, but continuing the quote, came from drugs, end quote. That's evidence. There's a mountain of evidence, and you're going to see some of that tonight. We're waiting to testify. The heat's being turned up, whether you see it in the newspapers or not. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Justice Inspector Generals, Frederick Hitz for CIA and Mike Bromwich for Department of Justice, are compelled and have committed to come back with their investigative reports, their findings on whether CIA was involved in drug dealing sometime this fall. We're talking September or October. That is not far away. At that time, there will be hearings. I've spoken within the last month of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. And I asked them, well, what's going to determine whether these are real hearings or just like some of the sham political theater that we've seen before? Al Cummings, a senior investigator, said the scope of the hearings will be determined by A, what Maxine Waters does. B, the credibility of the reports from the Inspector General's office, and C, public reaction. And I said, what's going to determine the credibility of the reports? He said, C, item C, public reaction. If there is no outcry, there will be no hearings when they come back and tell us there's no evidence. That's what they're preparing for. Now, the pressure is really being turned up on the witnesses. I was burglarized two weeks ago. They got my address book, all my phone numbers, all my sources. I have most of it copied. But they also got a complete day-to-day calendar record of every place I've been and everybody I've met with for the last eight months. I had a TV pilot for which I was supposed to get paid $5,000 in the first initial payment, the end of June. I've been blacklisted. The pilot's been scrapped. Any lawyer will be glad to help me if I can come up with a $10,000 retainer. Those of you who know me know that I have trouble eating on a daily basis because my car has been repossessed and I've been through a lot of financial difficulties. Celerino Castillo has been in a traffic accident which may have been staged. Another witness, D. Caron Ferdinand in New Mexico, raises horses. All of her horses were turned loose two weeks ago in New Mexico and almost killed by trucks on the interstate. Chip Tatum, many of you have read the Tatum Chronicles, has had his phone shut off several times. The pressure is on the witnesses. So that's a sign that something is going on anyway. Now, we don't know what's going to happen. We absolutely do not know whether there's going to be hearings or not. Something is compelled to happen. As Mike was talking to you before earlier, President Clinton came back with this wonderful suggestion of reducing the disparity in cocaine sentencing for crack cocaine from 100 to 1 to 10 to 1. Maxine Waters was absolutely eloquent when she took the House floor and said a tenth of slavery is not any better than 100% of slavery. She really rebuffed the President heavily and said, no, I want parity. The chips are being played behind the scenes. My read and sources inside the government and CIA tell me that he's trying to trade all of these hearings for parity. If she gets that, that's going to be great. But I'm not so sure that she will. And also, those of us who have put our whole lives into this would like to get something, at least a chance to testify about our suffering as well. But shortly after she rebuffed him, I caught this little piece on MSNBC. And it was kind of a sidebar to the fundraising scandal. And the sidebar was how President Clinton was ready to appoint six new ambassadors to very wealthy Democratic contributors, including, named six countries, one of which was the Bahamas. Maxine Waters' husband is the ambassador to the Bahamas. If Clinton is going to appoint a new ambassador to the Bahamas, he's going to have to fire Maxine's husband, isn't he? So, they're playing the heavy stakes poker right now. That's my read on it. And many people agree with me. Now, what we're going to do is I'm going to tell you in about an hour's worth of time the basics of my story and what my evidence is. And then we're going to throw it open to questions. And during the course of this, I will cover some of the other bits of evidence that are out there. But don't be deluded for a minute to think there isn't evidence to prove it. It's just like with the major other cases out here that people talk about. Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King. There's a ton of evidence. We all know it's there. It's just never been admitted. So don't delude yourselves for a second. Where we go with this is going to have to be determined by a collective will, by people working together and by some kind of group conscience forming a path. But we can't stay silent. Alright, before I start with the overlays. Yes? Is there any hope at all that with this trade-off with Maxine and Clinton, the drug trafficking by the CIA will stop? No, I don't see that at all. One of the first things you have to understand is that in the United States, we spend $49 billion a year on illegal drugs. That is more money per year that is spent on clothing, on housing, and on food in this country. That's directly from General Goofy McCaffrey. The world spends $1.5 trillion a year on illegal narcotics. That's cash that flows through banks. It's an unmeasured part of the gross national product. And we all, whether we know it or not or like it or not, benefit from it. How does that happen? If $200 million a month extra flows through the Federal Reserve Bank in Los Angeles, which is now regarded as the money laundering capital of the country, that $200 extra million lowers interest rates on loans that are charged to businesses. Businesses get loans cheaper, which generates more tax revenue, which pays municipal bonds. Do you get the picture? You can't play with $49 billion a year and not be talking about a significant part of the nation's economy. And come to think of it another way. Does the auto industry have a lobby in Washington? Yes. Does the food industry, the housing industry, does any industry you can think of have a lobby in Washington? Yes. Isn't it stupid to think that the drug industry doesn't? Well, more or less, yes. I lived in Washington for a year and a half from 1994 to 1995, and I met with a number of congressional staffers and some congressmen, and I was told about it. I couldn't see it. A classified report from the House Banking Committee, chaired by Henry Gonzalez, which says that the six largest banks in the country would fail if the drug money was withdrawn. That's the kind of money we're talking about. That's the kind of power we're talking about. But the corruption is out of hand. The corruption is like a drunk on a bender. A guy can't be satisfied having six drinks. If he's a genuine, blown alcoholic, he ain't going to be satisfied until he's passed out cold in the gutter. That's the way the disease works. How much is a little corruption? How much is enough? Since when does anybody ever stop after just making $10 million when he thinks, well, I'll quit when I get 15 or 100, et cetera, et cetera. That's the kind of process that we're dealing with. That's why it's so intractable. That's why it's so difficult. CIA has been dealing drugs since before it was CIA. What? Let's go back to the Second World War. And I'll do this briefly. The Second World War, we sprang Vito Genovese from prison in New York with the help of Lucky Luciano, who was Capo di Dicaprio, the Don of Dollars. We wanted help protecting the New York docks from Nazi saboteurs. We sent Vito Genovese to Sicily. When we invaded Sicily, he helped George Patton make his way to Messina. We sent Vito Genovese up in Italy as we began to occupy Italy. And General Vesey, with the U.S. government's help and the help of the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, began to revitalize a narcotics trade which was almost dead. The heroin addict population in this country during the first years of World War II was down to nothing. Zero. I mean, it was, you know, marginal. By 46, 47, it was back up to pre-war levels. Immediately after the war, with the Mafia's help and the OSS's help, the OSS was extremely concerned about communist movements in France and Italy. We turned the Mafia loose, the Corsican Mafia and the Sicilian Mafia loose in southern France and in Italy. They began to fund their operations using heroin, which was refined in the infamous heroin labs of Marseille. That money in turn funded the anti-communist propaganda efforts, the strike breakers, the union breakers. So that's 45, 46, 47. And we move into Southeast Asia after Chiang Kai-shek was kicked out of China. His troops fled into Burma. We send in very infamous people like Paul Hellowell. John Singlaub, whose name turns up still in Iran culture, a great many other CIA, OSS, Office of Policy Coordination hands, went to Southeast Asia and Paul Hellowell, a banker who bought all the land for Disney World, by the way, on behalf of the Disney Corporation, was paying the Kuomintang troops with sticky bars of heroin. That was the forerunner of all the heroin coming out of the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War. I won't have time to give you the whole history, but it runs sequentially through every major area of covert operations that CIA has been involved in since its inception in 1947. Southeast Asian Indochina with the French, there was actually a little war at one time between CIA and the French Dizien Bureau in Indochina over who would control a lot of the opiate trade. The French were running it directly also. When the French got kicked out at the NBN, the CIA was already moving in to control the heroin trade in Southeast Asia. By the time, of course, we had the Vietnam War, it's legendary what we were doing in Laos. Ted Shackley, the station chief in Laos, who was a prominent figure in all of my work, was funding the whole war in Laos with heroin out of the Golden Triangle. It got so bad, or so blatant, that Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky in his battle with President Diem in 1970 was shut off from access to the outside world, so the CIA on his behalf invaded Cambodia for a number of reasons, but one was to give Air Vice Marshal Ky access to small airstrips inside Cambodia where he could fly in, land his planes, and get all the heroin being brought out of the Golden Triangle. He couldn't get it out of the country of Vietnam, so he flew it back into South Vietnam, and to whom did he sell it? American G.I.s. The great heroin epidemic of 1970 amongst American GIs in South Vietnam. Direct participation of CIA. Every covert operation, every area of involvement, you find the same people with CIA. All the way through Southeast Asia, from Cuba, which is where Ted Shackley and Tom Clines and Ed Wilson and all the famous guys from Iran-Contra got their starts. Southeast Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Remember the Russian invasion of Afghanistan? In 1979, 0% of U.S. heroin came from Pakistan. In 1979, the Russians invaded Afghanistan. We set up a major support effort in Pakistan. Now the heroin poppy grows in the mountains between 5,000 and 6,000 feet, or it's happy. Lots of mountains in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By 1982, 45% of the heroin in this country was coming from Pakistan, directly correlated to CIA operations. So we get to Iran-Contra, and it's no big deal, except for this time all the brakes were off. And we find the same players we found throughout history. Richard Secord, Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, George Bush, Felix Rodriguez. I'll give you a punchline about Felix toward the end of the talk tonight. The same players are always turning up in the same places and the ammo is always the same. How did I get involved in this? Bad karma. Really bad karma. I don't know what else to say. I come from a family very steeped in intelligence. My mother had been a cryptographer at Fort Myer, Virginia during the Second World War for Army Intelligence. My father was an Air Force officer. pilot, flier, flew during the Korean War, got out of the Air Force, went to work for Martin Marietta, which built the Titan 3C rockets, which put up all of the keyhole satellites for the agencies. Relatives of my father had been OSS during the Second World War. My father's cousins. And Sam and Barbara both retired from the agency in the mid-80s after like 25, 30 years. So I come from a spoke family. I was born in Washington, D.C. I was an only child. I was an honor student. Raised a devout conservative Republican. I'm a recovering Republican, so don't hold it against me. Went to UCLA and was an honor student at UCLA. And I started interning for LAPD in 1969 when I was a freshman at UCLA. Now, my closest friend through four years at UCLA was a guy by the name of Craig Fuller. Craig and I were the only two living Republicans on the UCLA campus from 1969 to 1973. Craig became George Bush's chief of staff during the Iraq conflict. I was chosen to intern for Chief Ed Davis at LAPD in 1970 at exactly the same time Craig Fuller was chosen to intern for Governor Ronald Reagan. We were being groomed in very early ages for positions of power within the establishment. I was all for it. I worked at four or five divisions, but I spent about a year and a half in the chief's office at LAPD. I left as a student worker. That was what the position was called after I turned 21. I hadn't graduated yet, but I finished college. Joined the LAPD in 1973. Was valedictorian of my candidate class. And went to work in Wilshire Division, a place called The Jungle, down near Crenshaw and Martin Luther King. That's when Wilshire Division had The Jungle. It's part of Southwest now. And worked the streets there. And then went into narcotics very quickly. And I was being groomed. A little sidebar here. My first captain at LAPD when I was an intern was Captain Archie Bob Sellings, who had been the lieutenant watch commander at Rampart Division the night Bobby Kennedy was shot, moving people around. Two lieutenants at the Venice Division, Tudor and Tackerberry, or Sergeant Tudor and Lieutenant Tackerberry, had been Metro, who had been at Central Receiving Hospital when Bobby Kennedy arrived. When I was drawn to the chief's office, my first commendation was written by Sergeant Dave Brath, who had been the chief scribe for Special Unit Senator, which wrote the RFK investigation for LAPD. Commander Carroll Kirby assigned me in the chief's office. He had been captain of the communications division at LAPD the night Bobby Kennedy was shot, and he showed up at the Ambassador Hotel 20 minutes after the shooting, right when there was a radio blackout, which blocked descriptions other than Sirhan being put out. When I was with LAPD and working with organized crime intelligence, I wound up working with the man who had been Ethel Kennedy's bodyguard the night Bobby Kennedy was shot. There's a pattern here that I'm trying to get to. When I graduated from UCLA, I was flown back to Washington, D.C. by my family. And I was told it was to be given a recruitment pitch by CIA. I wasn't a cop yet. I was just ready to graduate with honors, Dean's List, magna cum laude and all this stuff. I was taken into the old executive office building right next to the White House. The big guy with the CIA seal behind his head had all my package, knew everything about me and everything there. He said, Mike, the agency loves you. We want you to go to work for us. What we would like for you to do is to join the agency, become a case officer, and we will put you back undercover through the L.A. Police Academy, and being an L.A. cop will be your cover. That's illegal. So I went through the interview. I took a stack of papers about that thick, which were to fill out for my clearances, and I never sent them back. I just, that was the end of it for me. I didn't want to do it. I just wanted to come out here to be a cop, drive fast, have fun, meet lots of pretty women, carry a gun, and just do the things that a young college graduate white guy would do being a cop. I really wanted to put bad guys in jail. That was what I wanted to do. Well, after I'm on LAPD, loaned the narcotics a couple of times. I was loaned into burglary and the homicide at Wilshire Division. And being groomed, I meet and fall in love with a woman who turns out to be working for CIA. She had grown up with the niece of the Shah of Iran. She knew Hagstrom, who was the daughter of Ashraf, the Shah's twin sister. She knew mafia people like Carlo Marcello in New Orleans and Carlo Gambino. She also knew key high-ranking LAPD people like Lee Goforth, the senior detective at Organized Crime Intelligence Division, who had been Ethel Kennedy's bodyguard the night Bobby was shot. Lee was also a Brigadier General in the California National Guard. Direct military connection and CIA connection. I was deeply in love. She said, well, my people are interested in having you go to work for us. They can make your career. And I was all for it. I was in love. I had her. I was promoting like a rocket ship in LAPD. But then she started talking about being in places and seeing 50 kilos of cocaine and like 1,000 M16s. Now, having worked narcotics, and I was already a narcotics expert. I had done two extended loans, and when I got promoted to detective, I was going back to narcotics. I said, man, 50 keys? That was a lot of coke in 1976. Nobody really knew what cocaine was then. It was just coming on the scene. It really happened then. And she said, our people, my people, aren't interested in the drugs. And I said, are you crazy? I said, if I'm ever in a room with 50 kilos of cocaine, somebody's going to jail. And it's not going to be me. But the stories would come. They would come in Hawaii, where she was in Hawaii and saw the guns going out and the drugs coming in. It happened in Baja, California in several places. It happened in Del Rio, Texas. It happened especially in New Orleans. It happened in the Bahamas. And over time, even though I was really enamored with the fact that she was getting letters and phone calls from Tehran all the time, that the Shah's nephew would come and pick her up and take her out for dinner, that she had all this information out of my personnel package, that she knew that Daryl Gates was going to be the next chief of police, that she knew that the LAPD intelligence captains were going to retire and where they were going to go to work afterwards. I began to get the picture that there was something really wrong with the drugs and I kept saying, I will not get involved with anything that overlooks drugs. I can't. I'm a cop and I'm an honest cop and I'm not going to break that. Well, she disappeared in 1977. So that somebody was trying to kill her. And it took me about five or six months during which time I wound up being loaned. I was on staff at the academy then to organize crime intelligence to me. And getting shot at and followed and threatened and hang up phone calls. And I'm loaned into organized crime intelligence working with Lee Goforth and Norm Bonneau. And they're asking me all these questions about Teddy and I'm keeping my mouth shut that was her name, Teddy. And eventually I was burglarized and my gun was stolen and photos of her were taken. I thought, my God, they're going to kill her. So my captain, Jesse Brewer, who you may recall was our beloved police commissioner here just after the riots, the black police commissioner who should have been chief of police, just arranged a vacation for me. He was my captain at the time. I went to New Orleans where I had found Teddy. And over the course of eight days, I saw and met people. I saw her arrangement. She had a scrambler phone in her apartment, which I later described to an Air Force officer and said, that's a KY-3. It's top secret. You couldn't even have described it unless you'd seen it. She had a black night vision device. She was meeting with personnel working for a company known as Brown and Root, a major CIA contractor, which has sheep-dipped CIA personnel into it, heavy contributors to Nixon and LBJ. People on ships on the Iranian route were taking guns to Iran to give to the Kurds. And Kurdistan and Iran is the second largest opium growing region in the world. She was meeting with former special forces personnel. She was arranging also for quantities of heroin to be dropped off on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. And the reason why they did that was because International ships can stop at oil rigs in international waters, take off the heroin, which bubble heads, those are deep sea divers, would take and put down on the pilings underwater. And then service boats would sail out from New Orleans to service the oil rigs, not subject to customs search, go down and service the rigs, retrieve the heroin, and take it right back into New Orleans. All arranged courtesy of Don Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and the CIA. So over the course of eight days, I saw all the key players. I saw her receive communication from Naval and Air Force personnel assigned to Belchius Naval Air Station. I heard her on the phone arranging for shipments of guns to be moved to certain docks at certain times. I heard her on the phone talking about picking up certain packages from certain oil rigs and bringing it in. All of that is direct admissible testimony from me in a court of law because from her position it was testimony against her interest. I heard that. I saw that.

Speaker 3: Penal interest, yes.

Mike Ruppert: In other words, she was basically talking about criminal stuff in my presence. That's the bottom line. I saw these people. One time I followed her down to some docks and I saw her watching a ship in some bushes. That was the second time. That was the first time I was really shot at directly. But that's all immiscible evidence. Now, I was forced out of LAPD at the end of 1978. I don't know how long I've been gone. I'm going to try to speed through this. Did your romance with her continue until then? No. It ended in New Orleans. I said, I'm out of here. This is done. July 7th, 20 years ago, last month. Ended. I said, I'm out of here. Leave me alone. I don't want to know anymore. I don't want to see anymore. I'm done. Now, I knew that my department was lying. I was forced out December 78th after the Iranian Revolution had started. And I had a tape recorded death threat. Now I knew that, and I asked to see Chief Gates because the guys in OCID were lying to me. The guys in Organized Crime Intelligence I knew were CIA. There were three guys there I knew. Lee Goforth, Norm Bonneau, and a guy named John Xavier Bach. Bach was Daryl Gates' first driver bodyguard. A CIA man. Daryl Gates' first driver bodyguard. When I resigned with a tape-recorded death threat, I had an attorney and I was smart enough and lucky enough to have planted doomsday packages in case I burned up dead, documents were going to get mailed, people were going to get called, etc., etc. This letter went to not only Sam Hayakawa, it went to Tom Bradley, Alan Cranston, Bob Dornan, and Anthony Beilenson. Now it says until Thursday, etc., etc. But notice what I say here. Two investigators from Organized Crime Intelligence... of LAPD, Lee Goforth, Charles Norman Bonneau, Nordica Theodore Dorsey, okay, of the Central Intelligence Agency, grew up with the niece of the Shah of Iran, Daryl Gates, Chief of Police, and then, in here, in the second page of that letter, that was dated December 6th, 78, we're talking about CIA, Brown and Root, LAPD files, intelligence personnel, Carlos Marcelo, the mafia figures, Dan Horowitz, Hank Friedman, intimidation, so on and so forth. Large quantities of cocaine and firearms in Hawaii, Mexico, the Bahamas, and New Orleans. That's the key part I want you to remember about this letter. The response from LAPD and the FBI was that I was insane. I was delusional. I was a mental defective. I should never have been hired into LAPD, and I was totally nuts. Okay? My attorney stuck with me. I eventually went to the LA Times. And then about a year later, something really rare happened. The American press did something good. Now, this is by a writer named Tom Renner of Newsday.

Speaker 4: Okay?

Mike Ruppert: This was November 1579, almost a year exactly after I resigned. This was an eight-page article. Guns for Drugs Trade Booming Reports Disclose. Millions of dollars worth of weapons are being smuggled into Mexico, South America, Lebanon, and so on and so forth. And what does it say in here? It says that primarily this is being run by Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, that the shipments are happening out of New Orleans, Baja, California, that place Teddy had already named, and that I had named the year before. Guns going one way, drugs going the other, both cocaine and heroin, some going to terrorist groups, some going to armed factions like the Kurds. Over eight pages, this is a replay of the letter I wrote a year before. So if I'm crazy, I'm also a prophet. What happened when this came out was I finally understood in depth that CIA was actually dealing the drugs. They weren't letting somebody do it. They weren't slightly profiting from it. They were arranging it. They were getting the money. They were running and staging and coordinating geopolitical operations through the use of drug money. And the drugs were sold to Americans in this country. I picked up the phone and called Tom Renner. I said, Tom, CIA is dealing drugs. Tom says, you're absolutely right. He says, you need to talk to a Senate investigator by the name of Bill Christensen. So I called Bill Christensen, working at the time for Senator Dennis DeConcini on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Improvements in Judicial Machinery. There's a mouthful. And I called Bill Christensen. And Bill Christensen, a Senate investigator, says, Mike, I don't know what to do. My phones are tapped. I'm being burglarized. I've been followed to and from work. My files are disappearing. Now, what this story had said was that DEA had this really secret report about all these operations of guns for drugs. And this story, Tom Runner said also, that an unnamed federal agency was sanitizing all the DIA files and stealing all of the reports linking the organized crime people to the drug trafficking. That was CIA. So I laid everything else out. I knew to Bill Christensen, and Christensen said, Mike, we've got to get you back here to testify. And that was the second time I was shot at. Not only did the hearings never take place, I couldn't find a job anywhere in the city of Los Angeles. Anywhere. I wound up working at a 7-Eleven store on Robertson. My second day on the job, I'm arrested by West LA Vice for drug liquor to a minor. I had to file bankruptcy a month later. Obviously, I'm onto something here. Now, what did I find out at this level? We're going to get to that in a minute. This is just some of the documentary evidence. You can see the date very clearly. 4-18-1980, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I got this back through a Freedom of Information Act request. You don't have to read the whole thing, but notice where the check marks are. Rupert advised because of Teddy Dorsey's association with Carlos Marcello and a claim to be a government agent. CIA and DEA are in conspiracy with other law enforcement agencies and are allowing the mafia to smuggle guns to friendly rebel groups and to smuggle drugs back into the country as payment for the guns. CIA dealing drugs, 1980. I've been saying this for a long time before Gary Webber ever got into his paper store. Unfortunately, a lot of us who have been at this for a while knew exactly what was going to happen to Gary Webber. I had mentioned Craig Fuller being my closest friend through four years at UCLA. I'm going to slide over here and get my drink. I don't know if you can read that. Craig Fuller, in the first Reagan term, was assistant to President Reagan for Cabinet Affairs. He worked directly under Ed Meese. The Herald Examiner ran stories on me. This kind of proves that I know Craig. The original of this letter was stolen from my residence three days after I confronted John Deutsch in Watts. There are six or seven letters and I still have other originals. But the original of this letter was stolen November 18, 1996, the same day that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee called me and asked me if I had original letters on White House stationery. They were stolen that night. Okay? Alright. Clearly a personal letter, wouldn't you agree? Okay? The Herald-Examiner ran stories on the October 11th and October 18th, 1981. Randall Sullivan, the date's up there, but this is the first part of the story. That's the front page of the Sunday edition. It starts there. It says continued on the back page. I got the whole back page. Not one Sunday, but two Sundays in a row. I love this. It says, Michael Rupert, that's me, was perhaps LAPD's most intelligent officer. Can't you see it for all the money I have? Okay. So through all of this intrigue and all of this, that's a very bad picture of Teddy. She was gorgeous. I mean, she was enough to make the most intelligent man really stupid. The second part of the story, the following Sunday, starts down here. And finally, down here, the second part, and it's really out of focus. Don't even try to read it. It finally talks about CIA dealing drugs. But God bless them. The Herald Examiner actually said it. Now, I've written as a writer for the LA Times. I have known that David Rosenzweig, who was the assistant managing editor, for 18 years. They've never printed a word about my story. But every time I get information on CIA and gave it to Dave Rosenzweig, who was a reporter when I met him, he got promoted. I have that effect on people. All right, so we'll turn this off for a minute because I want to say a couple things really important here.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Mike Ruppert: I was flown back again to Washington in October of 1981. I carried part two of the Herald Examiner under my arm. On October 26, 1981, Craig Fuller, whose letter you just saw, let me into the White House, the West Wing. I sat in his office directly under Ronald Reagan's butt. Actually, Ronald was on the other side of the West Wing, but I was there. And I looked at Craig and I talked to him and we talked about the personal stuff. And again, my awakening was very slow. I didn't realize. Now, you've got to understand that what I saw was happening under a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. Okay, it makes no difference who occupies the White House. Disabuse yourself of any such illusion. There are no two political parties in this country. And I sat there looking at Craig and we talked and I said to him finally, Craig, CIA is complicit in bringing drugs into this country and it's wrong. He turned into a statue. He didn't move. He didn't blink. He didn't nod. He didn't wink. He didn't grunt. He didn't burp. He didn't do anything until I changed the subject. So we had a talk. That was it. I left the White House. And I remember walking out of the White House and saying, where do I go now? And I waited around, and I went to Hayakawa's office, and I went to see Dornan. Sam Hayakawa, the Republican former president of San Jose State, or San Francisco State, was actually a wonderfully kind gentleman. He helped me quite a bit. Nobody else did. And after a week of bashing around Washington, finding that nobody wanted to hear a damn thing I had to say, this is October of 81, Oliver North was just getting warmed up here, folks. I mean, Ollie was just really starting to get in the game. I picked up the phone, and I called... the managing editor of the Washington Star. And I got right through. I'm ex-LAPD narc. I'm friends with Craig Fuller, who's known in the White House. I just left the White House.

Speaker 4: Wham.

Mike Ruppert: And I laid it all out to the managing editor of the Washington Star. And I said, the CIA's dealing drugs. And he says, Mike, that's the worst kept secret in Washington. They all know it. They all know it. They've all, always, all known it. So I came back to California. In January of 82, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I went back to my alma mater, UCLA, and I found out the ranking political science expert of the Middle East on UCLA. Notice where he's working now, by the way. Bankers Trust. I saw Paul Jabber, formerly associate professor of political science, University of California, Los Angeles. I go into his office and I start telling him my story. He says, Mike... Did you know, by the way, that I was a CIA and State Department consultant in the Carter administration on the National Security Council? I said, no. I said, oh. He said, well, listen. I have all these secrecy oaths. And I can't tell you directly what you want to know, but I've got to tell you, you're really on the money. But here's what I suggest you do. He whipped out a pen and he wrote down some dates and he said, go look up articles on these dates by William Sapphire of the New York Times and C.L. Schultzberger. Go back and read them and tell me what you find. So I went and dug up the articles and I found it and I came back to him. And this is what he said I was absolutely right on. In 1975, well, for years before that, we had been arming the Kurds who live in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. They really don't have a country of their own. To fight against Saddam Hussein, who had just taken over Iraq in 1975. But we've been arming the Kurds to fight against Iraq. Why? So that Iraq's army couldn't attack Israel. Real simple. It was just part of our balance of power strategy with Israel to keep all the Arab armies divided. Okay? March 3rd, 75, the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein cut a deal. And the deal is the Treaty of Algiers. And then the Shah says, Saddam, I'll give you the Shah al-Arab waterway. No, excuse me. Saddam gave the Shah the Shah al-Arab waterway, and the Shah cut off all the American aid to the Kurds. So Saddam could kill all the Kurds. March 3rd, 75. The only way in and out of Kurdistan was through opium smuggling routes. The Kurds had been a CIA asset since the Second World War. So a decision was made at the National Security Council level, and you can't say CIA and drugs really without saying NSC. A decision was made to arm the Kurds with heroin that would be sold in the United States. The NSC is the White House. What happened? Ted Shackley, station chief in Laos and station chief in Saigon, was promoted to deputy director of covert operations. That's CIA. Took over the covert side. Richard Secord was transferred out of Vietnam to become the heir attache to the Shah of Iran. Richard Armitage, a key player, was made a defense attache in Iran. The same players from Iran-Contra went from Southeast Asia directly to work for the Shah at the same time that we started bringing in Kurdish heroin into New Orleans in 1975. And that was ongoing, and that's what I saw in 1977. He said, you're absolutely right. That decision was a policy decision made at the NSC at the White House. Evidence. He said it to me. Admission against interest. Also evidence. See that thing, Officer's Moonlighting Probe? Now the date there is 1985, or 1984, November 17th. It talks about an LAPD officer assigned to Organized Crime Intelligence Division who has been charged with moonlighting on city time and selling secrets and doing things with a city car while he's getting a city paycheck that are illegal. The guy's name is John Xavier Bach. That was Daryl Gates' driver bodyguard, who I said was CIA when they forced me out of LAPD and they called me crazy. Well, in this LA Times story about John Xavier Bach, it says that Bach was selling his stuff to a guy named Rapaski who turned over the transcript of all the bugging that Bach had done to an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. John Bach was convicted of moonlighting for the Central Intelligence Agency on City Time.

Speaker 2: Can you slow that down? I'm lost as to why...

Mike Ruppert: This was a guy who was in organized crime intelligence when I was on loan to those guys. Knowing that they were lying to me, setting me up to be burglarized, killed, shot at, threatened, and all the stuff that was happening. Who I said was CIA, and they said, you're crazy, he has no connection to CIA.

Speaker 4: Why are they mixing the CIA up?

Mike Ruppert: Who knows why this happened? I have no idea. But it happened, and I caught it. You know? Sometimes the heavens smile on you. It would be unfortunate. Now, we get to where a lot of this stuff really broke. This is a story. This, by the way, came off an L.A. Times computer given to me by David Rosenzweig. Ben Bradley, Jr., Boston Globe. This is off Lexus Nexus. A long story, 1987. 1987. H. Ross Perot is said to have asked for probe of U.S. official, Texas industrialist, assistant secretary of defense involved in the recent transfer of arms to the CIA for sale to Iran, was involved in narcotics traffic and weapon smuggling scheme dating to the early 70s in Vietnam. This is about Richard L. Armitage. Richard L. Armitage, by the way, is Colin Powell's white son. Colin Powell was up to his eyeballs in Iran culture. All right? This story goes on for eight pages, and it talks about Ted Shackley, Richard Secord, Richard Armitage, Tom Klein, Ed Wilson, all the CIA names we know so well, Felix Rodriguez, and how Ross Perot found out about this. Now, you know Ross Perot is about that tall. I know Ross Perot. Don't hold it against me. He's got some good points. Richard Armitage is 6'4", and bench press is 400 pounds. Ross Perot walked into the Pentagon when he got this information on Armitage and backed him up into a corner and said, you're a disgrace to this country. He went to George Bush and said, you've got to fire that guy. You've got to get rid of him. You can't make him Secretary of Defense.

Speaker 4: Bush was going to make him Secretary of Defense.

Mike Ruppert: Bush threw Ross Perot out of the White House. 1986. You think that's motive for a short, floppy-eared Texan with a big nose to run and split the Republican vote to deny George Bush re-election? Possibly. Possibly. I've spoken to Ross Perot several times. I was his press spokesman here in 92. I wrote to him, and he called me one day. Phone rings. Mike, it's Ross Perot. How are you? He was. He said, Mike, I want you to know I read every word you sent me. I must know 30 or 40 military officers, former law enforcement officers, who have discovered CIA-dealing drugs, and they've all had their lives ruined. They've been forced into bankruptcy, shot at, threatened, coerced. Their wives and children have left them. They're all broke. You'd think they'd try something different, but they don't because it works. And then I heard a blunder. And then I heard genuine anguish in his voice. He said, you think with all of my resources I could do something about this, but I can't. They do the same thing with me, too, because it works. A guy with $3 billion. And I heard the anguish in his voice. This is also directly tied, these people, to the POWs who never came back from Southeast Asia. Alright, now we're going to move on. I'm going to skip over a lot quickly, but... This is an affidavit which was not written by a special forces colonel named Ed Cutolo. It's called the Cutolo affidavit. He generated all the information, but he didn't write it because it was written after his death. There's several ways that I've proved that. Everything is factual, though, through what is now a stack of documents that this short season several other people have. Seven other supporting affidavits, other military records and documents. We bear everything out. This is a special forces colonel talking about how he took his troops under orders of CIA into Colombia and planted radar beacons so the cocaine flights could fly below radar into Panama. full of cocaine for CIA. And he was present when the planes were met by Mungo Noriega, Edwin Wilson, Michael Harari of the Israeli Mossad. This is a long affidavit. It talks about massive domestic surveillance and the murder of many people. Five special forces colonels have been murdered because they tried to come forward with this. Mutolo, Baker, Rowe, Malvesti, and Bayard. How about 25 other people, including Archbishop Romero? were murdered when they got too close to CIA stuff. There's a former Special Forces troop, Bill Tyree, who was in prison for the murder of his wife, who was on those missions. He didn't murder his wife. It's kind of like Geronimo. They had witnesses, including cops under surveillance, with Tyree under surveillance, proving that he was not at the murder scene, who saw his wife murdered by another guy, yet they convicted him of the murder. This is what we're getting, or what Tyree is getting, and you know what the black marks mean, right? The black market is top secret. They won't tell you what's in there. Classified. These are all U.S. Army and CIA documents discussing the truth of the watchtower. These are the watchtower missions that I confronted John Deutsch with. Okay? That are all blacked out. Okay, there's page after page of this. We can prove watchtower easily. CIA even wrote, and you can see that's a CIA letterhead. CIA right there. Okay, CIA first said to Tyree, who's now been in prison for 18 years for a murder he didn't commit, there was no watchtower. And this is a letter they wrote him. The date is 92, I believe. Now look at what's in the box here. Concerning item 11a, we are currently processing a request received prior to yours on watchtower. If you wish, we can send you the same CIA-originated material if any is released. About a month after Tyree got this, the agency contacted him and said, can we have our last letter back? There is a watch tower. Now I want to turn to the biggest case here. What do you think this guy did for a living? NYPD detective. Colonel Albert Vincent Caron worked on the French Connection and the Prince of the City cases. I have held this man's personal phone book in my hand. He died in 1990 of the CIA flu. Chemical toxicity of unknown etiology. Long protracted illness. His brain just kind of disintegrated from within and burned his liver. I've held this man's phone book in my hands. And then if you find the names of CIA people like Paul Hellowell, General Richard Stilwell. I found the home address and phone number for a guy named William Casey. in Long Island, Locust Valley, Long Island. The very next entry was Pauli Castellano. You know who Pauli Castellano was? The head of the Gambino crime family. This man was the laundry man for CIA cocaine profits during the Iran conflict. He was one of several. He died in 1990, and he also held the rank of full colonel. He retired from NYPD in 1980 and moved to New Mexico. Took his whole family, his daughter's son. And I know his daughter extremely well. Every record of this man when he died disappeared. His NYPD pension, his NYPD badge, his military records, his New Mexico driver's license, his car registrations, his bank accounts, insurance policies, joint bank accounts held with his daughter. Everything disappeared. About $280,000 worth of insurance policies and about $30,000 in joint checking account with his daughter. His daughter was stuck with $40,000 in medical bills. I'm not a penny left of the guy's name. Senator Pete Domenici, who's also one of the crooked and the ugly, wrote Dean and his daughter a letter saying, well, maybe he rented a uniform when he never was in the military. Okay, well, maybe he rented a uniform 12 years earlier as a major, being careful to replicate the same decorations. I don't think so. This is one of his passport pages. These are samples of his passport stamps. This is JFK. This is London Heathrow. This is Nassau, the Bahamas. That's a money laundering cycle. His partner, James Robert Strauss, who I've just come across some really, in the last week or two, some damning information, had a company, now this is page one of five, in a court suit. Now, there were five pages of travel records, and you've got to understand that these travel records for American Airlines were taking place like Every day. Here's the date. 9-18, 9-26, 9-26, 9-26, 9-25, 9-26, 9-26, 9-18, 9-25. All employees of Strauss, Downing & Associates, an insurance agency in Albuquerque that sells fire and casualty and life insurance policies in New Mexico. Where are they going? We've got five pages showing destinations of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Cincinnati, Johannesburg, Dharan, Frankfurt, Vienna, New Orleans, Budapest, Las Vegas, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Paris, Madrid, Rome, the Jersey Islands, money laundering. Okay? I know where Strauss is and that's something I've got to hold on to because that's something I may testify about. Now, when I went to meet Dee and I went through all of this evidence about Corona I listened to everything. I gathered about 40 to 50 pages of support documentation on this guy. This guy used to come home and say, Richard Secord is such an asshole. Oliver North, if you don't remember anything, remember the name John Caffey? By the way, John Caffey is the name that Terry Reid met Oliver North under. Remember the name Amadeus, the mission Amadeus? Remember George Bush? This man talked about Elliott Abrams. His daughter knew because to her, Santos Tropicante was Uncle Sonny. Santos Tropicante went to Southeast Asia for the agency to get heroin during the Vietnam War. She knew a ton of New York mobs. And she heard her father get phone calls. It was always Amadeus that triggered it. Now she's got Strauss on tape saying that Amadeus is George Herbert Walker Bush. Okay? I met with Dee and spent time with her. We're really dear friends. And I don't believe that the sons of the father should be visited on the daughter. You know, she's a sweetheart. Her father was an asshole, pardon my French. Okay, but I love her dearly. And after watching all this stuff and looking at all this evidence, I said, there's only one man that I can think of that you need to talk to. His name is Ted Shafton. He ran the CIA station in Miami that was after Castro. He ran the station in Laos where they dealt drugs. He was station chief in Saigon. He ran covert operations in Iran and Pakistan. He was involved in Iran culture. He is the longest-running, high-ranking CIA guy I knew of. So he tracks down Ted Shackley. She finds Robert Mayhew, believe it or not, who sends her to Ted Shackley. She complains to Shackley about what happened. Her father had been buried as a staff sergeant, his highest rank in World War II. Within ten days of her contacting Ted Shackley, his headstone was changed to full kernel. And she got a copy of the order directing the change from the Pentagon. She actually stole it. Shackley did that for her. Has anybody here heard of the Tatum Chronicles? Chip Tatum, a major CIA witness who was turning up now, who has just turned up like in the last year, okay, who was flying on missions, who flew into MENA, Arkansas, where they were, believe me, millions and millions of dollars in cocaine was being flown through MENA, Arkansas, by millions of people. Chip Tatum and I have been talking, and we just met recently. Chip Tatum, I mailed Chip this picture, the first picture of Corona. Didn't tell him anything about the guy. He said, Colonel Vincent. I knew him as Colonel Albert Vincent. The guy's name was Albert Vincent Perron. Everybody used his funny name. We start talking. He describes the guy perfectly. New York accent. He says, you know, I've got to dig this up, but I've got a picture of this man taken April 12, 1985 in Honduras with George Bush. I'm waiting to see the picture. I'm waiting to see if Chip stays alive long enough to find it and get it to me, or if I stay alive long enough to hold on to it. If the picture surfaces. But he identified this man as having been with George Bush. Testimony. I was there. I saw. He was posing as George Bush's doctor. Now I want to go to the other side of the coin. Colonel Jim Sabo. Chief of Air Operations at El Toro Marine Air Station. Now, in that position, he was in command of the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma and Marine Corps Air Station El Toro and the Yuma Proving Grounds. He came across evidence, clear evidence, in 1990 that CIA was flying drugs onto his bases. In C-130s, we're not talking about it. We're talking about 2,000 kilos out of crack, no pun intended, onto his base. He was murdered January 12, 1991. January 21, 1991. They ruled it a suicide. Even though he was knocked unconscious from behind and a shotgun was shoved so far in his mouth it sheared off his uvula and he aspirated blood for 10 minutes before his brain was blown out, meaning he was unconscious when he was shot, they ruled it a suicide. In my work, I have come across something like 190 mysterious suicides in the military. Stalin had purges. Why can't we? I'm not sure they're all connected to that, but many of them I know were connected to CIA drugs. Now, I want to stop there real quickly. Is there any evidence? Did I connect? Do you think there's evidence that CIA deals drugs? Somebody say something, please. Yeah. Okay. Now, I want to tell you how they're playing us. I want to read you something. And I knew this was going to happen. This is from this book. I spent many lunch monies on this $50 law book. National Security Law. It came out just a year ago. It has many court cases relevant to national security. What I'm going to read you is from a decision rendered in the U.S. Appellate Court in Washington, D.C. Cases Hobson v. Wilson, U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, 1984, this judgment was rendered. This had to do with COINTELPRO. Anybody know what COINTELPRO is? I know Mike does. He's been a victim of it. CIA had a parallel operation to COINTELPRO known as CHAOS. During the war years, FBI and CIA were out to get all the dissenters, all the people challenging the government. And in this case, Hobson was suing the government. And they finally, by some miracle, extracted these highly classified documents out of FBI. This is COINTELPRO, but the CIA operation was exactly parallel. This is what they found. This is what the court said. Secret FBI memoranda from the late 60s and early 70s revealed the truest purpose of COINTELPRO, and by inference, the CIA's parallel operation, Chaos. These documents finally surfaced in this case. Quote, among the primary goals of COINTELPRO was the prevention of coalitions among black nationalist groups and between black nationalist groups and the predominantly white New Left. Thus, the COINTELPRO Black Nationalist Program was intended to prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community. It sought to promote political differences within new left organizations and between new left and black organizations, and to exploit opportunities to foment animosity. Quote, the result as disclosed by the trial record was at least four categories of activity interfering with plaintiffs' legal protest activities. One, efforts to create racial animosity between blacks and whites. Two, interference with lawful demonstration logistics. Three, efforts to create discord within groups or to portray a group's motive or goals falsely to the public. And four, direct efforts to intimidate the plaintiffs. When the Gary Webb stories broke, the immediate spin put on all of this was that a bunch of crazy blacks in South Central Los Angeles were alleging that CIA agents were standing on the corner of 82nd and Hoover selling drugs directly to get black people hooked. I went on the Michael Jackson show while the Gary Webb story was running, and I said, I don't know about CIA agents standing on a corner in South Central. I know about CIA bringing in thousands and thousands and thousands of kilos all over this country. A lot of it went to South Central. But you can't support the allegation that a CIA guy was selling it directly to South Central. I don't think they cared. I think they were happy to see it go there and crack made it sell all the faster. I think that's clear. But the spin got put on. And what did the press say? And what did the Senate say? Those crazy minorities are prone to conspiracy theories, aren't they? And what did the whites say? Hey, it was just happening to them damn blacks. Well, it was happening all over the country. Ricky Ross, in the course of four years of dealing drugs, sold four tons of cocaine. That's a lot of coke, isn't it? One CIA drug ring in Mexico on El Feliz Gallardo And Rafael Caro Quintero were selling four tons a month. And those are the guys that killed Kiki Camarena. And that doesn't touch John Hull. It doesn't touch Noriega. It doesn't touch Fiorificos de Puntarenas. It doesn't touch all the other CIA. It doesn't touch what Celia Castillo was seeing at Ilopango. There was too much drugs just to have been sent to South Central. A lot of it was set aside to go to South Central with deliberately racist intentions, but the spin got put on that it was the blacks. Why? To keep the blacks from aligning with the whites. Because they know in Washington that this issue is never going to get solved. until blacks and whites can stand and hold hands together. So what do they do? They keep us apart. And that's their strategy right there. You just heard it. And they're playing the same thing right now. When the Gary Webb stories got retracted, it wasn't retracted, corrected, the corrections came when the San Jose Mercury News said, well, we really didn't have enough proof to show that CIA was deliberately targeting South Central. Get the point? Hence, we throw the whole story out. That makes perfect sense to me, doesn't it to you? We're being played like suckers at a carnival. And we fall for it. We fall for it all the time. We've been falling for it for years. And I knew this was going to happen. And I said before, and it's happened within our own coalition, I said before this wasn't about genocide. The British colonized China 350, 400 years ago with opium. What happened? How did they do that? You know why? Why? Because China was unified with one emperor, a strong country. It had tea and silk and all these spices and all these things that the British wanted. And the emperor and the unified China said, you can't have them for the price you want to pay. So the British started smuggling in opium and hooked the population. And by the way, it has nothing to do with race because anywhere a colonizing power has injected addictive opium or cocaine, the population got hooked. Black, white, brown, yellow, or yellow doesn't make any difference. That's a law that they know it works everywhere. So what happened in China? As soon as the British stuck in the opium, China broke up and you had all these warlords running around fighting each other. And the British got exactly what they wanted. What happened when the cocaine turned up in South Central? When I was a cop on the streets here, there were two gangs. Actually, three. The Crips, the Brims, and the Pyrus. And they only fought each other. They never fought between themselves. By 1984, 85, you had 100 sets in this city fighting each other. The warlords, broken up, divide and conquer, fight. And once again, they got exactly what they wanted. People divided, people afraid of each other, people not trusting, people saying it's a black problem, it's not a white problem, and as long as we're doing that, we're all happy. Ben Franklin said, we must all hang together or else we shall surely hang separately. Now, I'm privileged to walk equally with respect among groups on the far left, you know, and I can walk into South Central, and I talk to Maxine's office, and I can walk into the far right. And you know what? You guys are all saying the same damn thing. The same thing. You know? I'm not endorsing one left or right. I'm still a cop just trying to put bad guys in jail. And I'm watching how all of my support and all of the people who are just so gullible are just going to lay around and fish. Saying exactly the same thing. The problem is that there's many reasons to say many different things. There's many other issues. But I have always maintained that CIA dealing drugs was the easiest case to prove. And if we could just unite one time on one issue, we could crack the door with this case. Because there's a ton of evidence. I put 20 years of my life into this. And I'm not very hopeful today. I'll tell you why I'm not very hopeful. I don't know what it's going to take. I don't know how. Some miracle. Who knows? Maybe I'm a John the Baptist. Maybe someday. And that's the other problem I see. Everybody's always looking for a Messiah. And I am not a Messiah. I don't want to be a Messiah. I don't intend to be. That's the wrong way to approach this. Because I get tired of people looking for me to do for them what they ought to be doing for themselves. Once you guys know this, you can talk about it just as well as anybody else, because you have the same rights I do. We're all citizens. That's the common ground we start from. So I think I'll shut up there. If I haven't piqued anybody's interest and take questions, then we'll go as long as you want to go. Dave, you had a question?

Speaker 4: Yeah, you mentioned the Traficante that was towards the end of your lecture. He was doing some work for the CIA. Is that the same guy that's involved in the Miami mob?

Mike Ruppert: Absolutely. Uncle Sonny Santos Traficante was... It was kind of a really unique relationship. Lucky Luciano, Santo Traficante, and Meyer Lansky were like the three biggest mafia figures throughout the 40s. Santos stayed extremely powerful in the southern region. Carlos Marcelo, the mafia don, even answered to Santos Traficante. In 1970... 1968, Santos Traficante went courtesy of CIA to Laos, Cambodia, and Burma. You know, and was protected by them, and that was right into the Golden Triangle. So Tropicante was also extremely involved when Castro took over Cuba in the early efforts of CIA to kick Castro out so that the mob could get their casinos back and do their money laundering. Remember I mentioned in World War II, in the early part of World War II, we had these blockades, right? I mean, we were at war. We thought the Germans were going to land and the Japs were going to land. Our borders were sealed. the population of addicts almost went away completely. So did the demand, believe it or not. So interdiction is successful. So if we can ever confront this issue, and it's going to be bloody ugly when we do, if we can ever confront this issue, we can look to a sharp reduction in the addict population, just as a result of drying up the supply. Stuart.

Speaker 2: I have a question. From your talk, it's clear that the CIA-Contra crack connection isn't unique in that the CIA has been dealing drugs historically. Can you talk about how the crack epidemic might have unique aspects? I've heard talk of large quantities provided on consignment. that there seemed to be a deal between the Medellin cartel going to the east and the concert coming to the west. Was there something different about the crack epidemic?

Mike Ruppert: Yes, I think there was. And I do have to say that I do believe that the guys in CIA were acting... from racist motives. But the whole CIA involvement in drug trafficking was not specifically and exclusively directed at minorities. That's where I draw the distinction. Ricky Ross was fronted a lot of cocaine.

Speaker 2: The unique thing about crack... Did that happen earlier with the Gambino families? Did they operate that way?

Mike Ruppert: Well, who knows how the mob worked. Was there a marketing scheme like Flandone worked out? No. First you have to understand... The whole history. Because drug trafficking is basically something that's created only by outlawing something. You can't create the trade until you make it illegal to do something. Like it was with prohibition and booze. That's how Bronfman and Kennedy and all those guys made their money from the account of home. The organized crime connections with heroin. Heroin was always pretty much a straightforward commodity. Opium, you smoked in a pipe. When you refined opium, you got first morphine, then diacetylmorphine, which is heroin. Heroin, then you would cook up in a spoon and shoot. It's always been that way. You'd get a spoon of heroin, and you might get two hits from a spoon, depending upon how good this stuff was. On Island Street, it's Mexican ground. That's always worked the same way, only the price has gone up and down. Cocaine's different. cocaine was really not really well known. I mean, it was a drug used by musicians and some really wealthy people, you know, and a few eccentrics through the 70s. When I was sent to the DEA school in 1976, now check this out. The official policy of the Drug Enforcement Administration was that the least addictive and least harmful drug of all, including marijuana, was cocaine. They were setting the stage for what was coming. Okay? Cocaine at the time that I was on the street, 76, 77, was running, my God, it was probably 250 a gram. Really expensive stuff, but there wasn't much around. By the time crack appeared, coke was going for maybe 50 for a half cheap. Okay? Still, that was out of the price range of people in South Central Los Angeles, or poor people. Okay? What happened was, was that crack... Gave you a $10 hit, which gave you this monstrously intense high, but it wore off after about 30 minutes. It was the perfect psychological vehicle to addict poor people, just like the little knobs of opium were. Just like it worked with GIs in Southeast Asia. You could buy some Annunia and Cow Keys heroin right outside of the Nang for $2. Okay? Some of his opium, which you would smoke. Okay? Or the heroin, which you would... For $2. Okay? But a six-pack of beer would cost you five bucks. Well, shit, what's the logical choice, man? So that psychology works everywhere regardless of the race to which it is applied. But you've got to understand this about crack. Crack wasn't some major discovery in 1980. Crack was literally turning cocaine back into what it was when it was called basuco. When they first crush the leaves in the pit, they come out with a cocaine base. And they had addicts in Bolivia and Peru and Ecuador and all these countries in South America that would smoke the paste, and that's crack. And that was before they turned it into powder. See? So what happened when you cooked it with baking soda and ether and all the stuff that you do here to make crack cocaine was literally turning it back into the chemical form that it was when it was first crushed out of the coconut. So the process was very well known. Was there a genocidal plot behind that? My answer to that is I would take the same position that the U.S. Supreme Court took in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. What, you say? In 1954, the Supreme Court said, we don't have to decide whether segregation existed in school systems as a result of an intentional act. We can say that there is de facto segregation because all the blacks live here and all the blacks live there. We're not going into the intention. I would take the same position with South Central. But four tons a month couldn't be consumed if every person in South Central Los Angeles was smoking 24 hours a day. That had to go to whites and Latinos, American Indians, and everybody else in the country. So that's kind of going to help.

Speaker 2: What do we do about the consignment?

Mike Ruppert: Ross was fronting a lot of cocaine. There is no question about that. That was done by Blandon. And certainly Manessis was aware of it. Ricky, you know, had... bit a little bit active beforehand. I mean, it wasn't like he was a virgin when all this started. So they knew they had a reasonably okay player who was going to go out and sell the stuff. And so on. Cocaine has been fronted. Enormous quantities, yes, were fronted to him. But see, Blondone was given orders. When CIA sends case officers out to do something, They might send three or four case officers into a country with three or four groups of agents under their control. And they might say, your objective is to X. Okay, whatever it is. Infiltrate the government. Infiltrate the defense ministry. One case officer may recruit a bevy of prostitutes, female. One case officer may recruit a bevy of homosexual prostitutes. One case officer may try to get the guy gambling. You see what I'm saying? They're really goal-oriented. So CIA put out this mission. First, Ronald Reagan and George Bush took all the checks off the national security establishment with the Contra War. They said, support the Contras and fund them any way you can. And all of these crooks from CIA had now walked right into absolute power. And the mission was to generate cash. So the CIA set out to generate cash. Blondone had had marketing training, as I recall, here in the States at MIT or someplace. He had a degree in marketing, for God's sake. So he just applied his skill. His mission was to generate cash. He said, South Central, there's a ton of money down there. I can do it with crack. Let's go get it. Screw them people down there.

Speaker 4: I just wanted to throw out a few other things. Obviously there are a lot of different perspectives, and from the perspective of CART, I'd say, because I don't want to speak for the Crack the CIA coalition, but I think that some of the things you have to look at is the period of time, what was going on in the world as this began to develop here in Los Angeles. And it's not a coincidence that they were using this to attack the Nicaraguan Revolution, because as you look at what was happening in the period, in the late 70s, as that revolution came to power, the forces that we're talking about were actually on a defensive in the world. I mean, the CIA, the U.S. government, there were a lot of victories being won. You talk about the Shah of Iran, of course, the Shah of Iran was also overthrown in that period. There was a revolutionary struggle going on in Iran, and they already had people who were working with Khomeini while they were still trying to prop up the Shah. These are very far-sighted people that we're talking about. The CIA had a lot of irons in the fire. But they very much wanted to destroy the Nicaraguan Revolution. They very much wanted to put the finishing touches on the black liberation struggle in this country. This was a period of time when there was, in fact, a reassertion. The late 70s, early 80s There was renewed activity of the Black Liberation Army, for example, in this country. They targeted, for example, Dr. Mutubu Shakur, who was someone who had been a leader of the Black Liberation Movement for many, many years, and in particular had something called BANA, which was the Black Acupuncture Association of North America, which was using acupuncture anesthesia as a method of treatment and detoxification for patients. addicts. And Dr. Shakur led a movement around the slogan, you have to replace the desire to get high with the desire to be free. And was having very, very effective political and social organizing of addicted populations in the black community. He was identified as a COINTELPRO target long after they swore that COINTELPRO no longer existed. So they were targeting the Nicaraguan revolution because They had to break that revolution. They saw an upsurge in liberation movements continuing. This is why Ronald Reagan came in as president. And so, in this country, in this same period of time, they did put forward a fairly open doctrine coming out of the Trilateral Commission that the problems of the United States a destabilization they saw going on in this country had to do with too many gains, too much democracy, what they called an excess of democracy. And specifically they targeted black and Hispanic populations for what they called spatial deconcentration. And this went on all around the United States and in Los Angeles. And the effect of it in Los Angeles was the de-industrialization that we've seen, destruction of the economic base in South Central Los Angeles, you know, and then you have a generation of young people with no sustenance except for the drugs that are brought in. So I'm not saying that it was not, I agree it was not exclusively targeted at the black community, but there was a social struggle going on in the world and they saw very clearly that there were forces inside this country that they were very much afraid would align with international forces that they saw building up. So, in my mind, it is no coincidence that this exact operation of, you know, crack cocaine, the Contras' guns into, you know, and it was not just drugs. Some of the stuff that came out in the Gary Webb article was about bringing weapons into the community to arm these warlords. And to substitute, they have a very conscious strategy that's called the pseudo-gang strategy that they put out in all their stuff about how to deal with the potential of revolutionary formations. Growing up is that you create counter-revolutionary armed organizations that can create chaos. And the same thing happened in earlier periods with some of the gang activity they used to counter the Black Panther Party. They were ahead of the curve on some of this. I do believe that they saw potential for developments in this country getting out of hand. And if you read some of the anti-immigrant stuff from the same period, some of these people specifically said that they saw Nicaragua as a fuse to ignite the bomb of Mexico that would blow up in this area. So I do believe that there's very conscious bargaining of the black and Latino communities. I agree that it spread out very, very widely, and I think that white people inevitably are going to become victimized in the same way, that because we live in an empire, everybody becomes a subject. We can't, you know, I mean, Mike said we're all citizens, but I think the fact is that None of us are citizens anymore. None of us have the prerogatives of what citizenship really means. Because we're living in an empire, and we're all subjects of an empire. And I think this process of disillusionment, hopefully, will lead us to the kind of unity that Mike has talked about.

Mike Ruppert: By the way, supporting what he said real quickly, Chip Tatum has on his website, and I have the address, He has a tape that he says he made while he was flying Michael Harari and Buddy Young, Bill Clinton's director of security. He was working at CIA the whole time. In which Harari says, and this is a quote, yeah, a lot of this cocaine is directed for South Central and for black communities because what we're going to do is get all the niggers hooked and put them in prison. Quote. Now, And I believe it. What I'm saying is that, oh my God, I watched the end result of that, that when something like that comes out, it's no longer an everybody problem anymore. It's solely a black problem, and we're all screwed again. You see what I'm saying? Because the drugs were going to white families as well. But, God, that's the way this disinformation works. It becomes solely something not to support what you said. And this is a concern of the people on the far right, the conservatives. They're all really ticked off now about the communist Chinese who are trying to buy the Long Beach naval base and turn it into sovereign Chinese territory. You guys know about that, Costco? Okay. They bought a huge parcel of land up near Ponding. And they're going to ship tons and tons and tons and tons of goods if they get this going up an area straight through called the Alameda Corridor. Where does the Alameda Corridor run? Right through South Central. When was all that landed? purchase, when the property values were driven down. So we're talking about opposite ends of the same conspiracy here. Get the point? The right's worried about one part, the left's about the blacks over here, the whites over here, and we're all missing. It's one octopus strangling everybody.

Speaker 2: Okay? It's not just that whites use drugs also, but it's who's in the prisons. That's a whole separate... But it's connected. Yes, it is. And it is that we all hang together. It's so easy for the whites to think we all hang as long as all these good upstanding people who never went to prison because we never did anything wrong all hang together. But as long as there's... Even ignore a million people, a lot of them in prison and it's really... As long as there's breath in this body, I'm going to say...

Mike Ruppert: I'm in no less danger than any black man and vice versa. And until we recognize common peril and act from a common basis, we're all units in this fight. We're not going to get anywhere until we can find the common basis. You first and then you because you had your hand up long enough.

Speaker 4: Yeah, I was just kind of curious why the San Jose Mercury news story came out. I've always kind of been curious. Are we supposed to... Am I supposed to think this just happens just because some news reporter stumbled upon it and published it?

Mike Ruppert: Well, I know part of the genesis of that, and I'll tell you quickly. Patrick Formey, who runs the Center for the Preservation of Modern History and publishes the Bailey Williams... up in Santa Barbara. It's very tight with a lot of, with Oliver Stone and Andy Davis who directed The Fugitive and a lot of people with money look into this stuff. Very ardent progressives. And Patrick knew the former girlfriend of a major drug dealer and of Carlos Lader who was Oscar Daniel Blandon's ex-girlfriend. And she told him the story and Patrick called Gary Webb. So I know that part of the genesis right there. And she came up with the stuff which Gary Webb started putting out. But I tell you, I had exactly the same question when that came up. Why did these stories come out? Because I don't believe... This is controlled media here we're talking about, folks. Everywhere, controlled. For those of you who don't know, when Capital Cities purchased ABC, William Casey was the senior lawyer for Capital Cities.

Speaker 4: Does everybody know who William Casey is?

Mike Ruppert: Ronald Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence. arranged a buyout of a major network by Capital Cities Broadcasting. The media is controlling something. I don't know. I've got a lot of questions about that myself. I wish I could answer that. I know Gary Webb personally.

Speaker 4: What effect does it have for the CIA to suddenly come under attack?

Mike Ruppert: See, what you're missing is the Hegelian dialectic of all of this. And the Hegelian dialectic from Hegel says that you create a problem so that you can solve the problem. And in solving the problem, get the results you want. CIA got attacked. They raised the Contra issue again. Because it really hadn't died. The Christich Institute in 86 and 87 was 100 times bigger than the crack the CIA coalition was. So what I'm saying is the issue hadn't quite died. But they raised it up. Then they knocked it down. And while they knocked it down... you know, they created some more racial tension in the country. I don't know how it all works, okay? Because they know better, they got access to more information than I do.

Speaker 3: Yes? What is the logical, or the hope for outcome, you know, in the work at, you know, the Craft the CIA Coalition, and you are doing? What kinds of audiences, in terms of, you know, church groups, in terms of more mainstream audiences, Are we hopeful in how we're reaching?

Mike Ruppert: Abolishing CIA would not solve the problem, but I really kind of like what Jim Garrison said. He didn't know if we changed anything, but they sure know that they have been danced with. We're not just awful. laying down, rolling over, and saying, okay, let's have some fascism. And Mort Saul was a very famous comedian for a long time. He was one of Jim Garrison's deputies. He's been fighting this stuff for 30 years, and he's lost a wife. His son just died recently. And Mort said, the road to fascism is paved with liberal intentions.

Speaker 4: And he's absolutely right. Zeke Hyatt.

Mike Ruppert: Bear in mind here, we're going to have some time If we're not all asleep, in the next two or three months, a really major opportunity to relight this and to prove to them that we aren't victims of their mind games. Remember I said that the Inspector General's offices of CIA and Department of Justice have committed to and are compelled to come back with their reports. Now what you're going to see in September or October is going to be CNN, you know, one of those newsreaders going, the inspector generals of the CIA and Department of Justice today announced that they had concluded their year-long investigation into recent allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking. Their report says, quote, we have found no evidence of any agency involvement after an exhaustive study, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, that's the opportunity. That's the chin. The future of this movement, the future of this issue, I think the future of free will in America is going to hinge upon what kind of reaction comes at that time. Now, we've got a couple things working in our favor. The Honorable Maxine Waters, and I do not believe she is a messiah. She is politically vulnerable. Her Records Act was just killed in committee. That was to declassify documents. But she has been a vociferous vocal pitbull on this issue. Now, picture coming back with no reports what Newt Gingrich and what the Republicans are going to say if she doesn't fight back. They're going to say, look at that crazy black bitch. She went out and stirred everybody up and there was nothing to it. She's not credible. That's what they're going to do to attack her. Do you think she's going to let that happen? She can't afford to let that happen. She's going to have to fight back with what she knows. Now whether she fights back alone or with a lot of blacks and a lot of whites and a lot of people screaming behind her is a different story. I hope that she doesn't sell out just for parody and sentencing. Because I would like a little justice after 20 years and I know a few other people would. But the fight ain't over yet.