The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee Harv

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The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee Harv

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Apr 29, 2016 1:55 pm

This is probably one of my lengthier blog posts because I wanted to try to do justice to examining the scope of how deep the many layers of what went into creating Iran/Contra went. So for those of you who want to dig into this, I'd love to hear about what I missed.


Thursday, April 28, 2016

The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee Harvey, Osvaldo

In downtown Los Angeles, there is a place called the Civic Center Mall. It is known as containing the largest concentration of government employees in the United States outside of Washington, D.C. On a personal level, it is an area I spent a great deal of time hanging out with the LA branch of the #Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall of 2011. But it is also an area where a plot to assassinate President Jimmy Carter was foiled on May 5, 1979 that may have influenced future events that put in motion the sinister forces that conspired to perpetrate one of the grossest violations of the U.S. Constitution known as the Iran/Contra scandal.

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Civic Center Mall Photo credit: http://www.paulrwilliamsproject.org



The Iran/Contra scandal was revealed on November 25, 1986 by Edwin Meese as a criminal enterprise where funds from the sales of US arms to Iran were diverted to the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. There is the known scandal covered by the mainstream media that led to the histrionic hearings where Lt. Col. Oliver North displayed his crisp uniform and his not-so-crisp memory, the Tower Commission issued their report which like most government commissions uncovered minimal criminality and zero systemic accountability, and all outstanding indictments for six of the known perpetrators (former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert C. McFarlane, Alan Fiers, Clair George and Duane Clarridge) were pardoned by lame-duck President George H. W. Bush as he was about to leave office.

But there are also the more clandestine elements not as widely publicized that illustrate just severely our democratic processes have been subverted. Just to mention a few, there was the "readiness exercise" called Rex-84 in which Oliver North worked with FEMA to draw up plans to, among other things, detain hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens, surveillance and detention of political dissidents, including US citizens, and identifying scenarios for suspending the US Constitution. There was the CIA-Contra-crack scandal that I've written multiple blog entries on that Gary Webb lost his career and his life over. There was the financial legerdemain perpetrated by these shadow networks through shady institutions like BCCI, another scandal I've written about previously.

Intersecting all of these elements were the "secret teams" of intelligence agents, military operatives and others working in the private world of covert operations detailed in the book The Iran Contra Connection by Jonathan Marshall, Jane Hunter and Peter Dale Scott. These covert teams probably existed on an ad hoc basis throughout US history (General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket gives a good summary of how this happened prior to WWI.) but really became institutionalized in 1947 with the creation of the CIA and the NSC. One of the first prime examples of this type of secret team was what Paul Helliwell did for Chaing Kai-Shek's Kuomintang Army (KMT) in Taiwan in the 1950s. A career OSS/CIA officer, (who also helped Walt Disney set up an unconstitutional form of government on his Florida land purchase for what would ultimately become Disney World) Helliwell tried to prepare Chaing's KMT for a future mainland China invasion by setting up a clandestine arrangement for CIA fronted companies Civil Air Transport (CAT) and the Sea Supply Corporation to ship opium for the benefit of the KMT. CIA involvement with the drug trade continued into the 1960s as focus shifted from a presumed offensive out of Taiwan to a defensive posture in Laos and Vietnam. CAT was renamed Air America and was extremely important in maintaining covert, often illegal operations. Helliwell was transferred to provide business cover for the CIA's Cuban operations in 1960.


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Paul Helliwell Photo credit: http://www.spartacus-educational.com

more at link...

http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2016/ ... ay-of.html
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Re: The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee

Postby Rory » Fri Apr 29, 2016 6:11 pm

Great post. Very detailed and informative, thank you.,

One thing - for a shadowy overlord of the mythical elite, can this guy get some help getting his tie on straight?

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Re: The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee

Postby zangtang » Fri Apr 29, 2016 6:22 pm

the straight tie is already here, its just not correctly distributed.......
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Re: The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Apr 29, 2016 6:32 pm

Yeah, the tie is perfectly fine. It's his head that's crooked.

Great post Robert and very informative. Thank you. I don't recall reading about Helliwell before with regard to the Iran-Contra affair.

Edited to add:

I misread that about Helliwell and now understand the correlation. My apologies.
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Re: The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Apr 29, 2016 8:17 pm

Yeah, the tie is cool, the turkey jowls need a tuck. Like he couldn't afford one.

Helliwell basically laid the foundation on which a very twisted asylum was built. Iran/Contra doesn't exist without the secret teams fueling the covert ops.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee

Postby 82_28 » Sat Apr 30, 2016 6:14 am

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Here’s what’s weird about this story, sneaked out as it were on Christmas morning of one of us’s first year of life, thus totally oblivious of the history in the making he was about to experience. It’s that the official history (at least wikipedia’s entry) shows no mention of this bid to buy Pan Am Airways. However, wikipedia does give us a glimpse into a much different world and much different time:

“In 1942, while waiting at Foynes, County Limerick, Ireland for a Pan Am Clipper flight to New York, passengers were served a drink today known as Irish coffee by Chef Joe Sheridan.[32]

During World War II most of the Clippers were pressed into military service. Pan Am pioneered a new air route across Western and Central Africa to Iran, and in early 1942 the airline became the first to operate a route circumnavigating the globe. Another first occurred in January 1943, when Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first US president to fly abroad, in the Dixie Clipper.[33] During this period Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was a Clipper pilot; he was aboard the Clipper Eclipse when it crashed in Syria on June 19, 1947.[34]”

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Also see Iran’s role in the “conspiracy theories” of Pan Am flight 103 here

December 25th, 1974

Links at link!

http://classifiedhumanity.com/post/2936 ... neaked-out
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Re: The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon May 02, 2016 3:07 pm

Thanks for that 82_28. The timing of that, 1974, coincides with Dick Armitage's efforts to bring Tehran into the loop for the drug laundering profits through Nugan Hand. Makes sense they would try to make that purchase: diversify their new found wealth. Or maybe they wanted to use those big planes to transport more than just passengers!
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Re: The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee

Postby NeonLX » Tue May 03, 2016 10:28 am

Hey! Until just now, I never realized that the author of the "American Judas" blog is a member of this august forum.

Wow. Thank you (times a billion), Mr. Paulsen.
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Re: The Origins of Iran/Contra: From the Bay of Pigs to Lee

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue May 03, 2016 5:00 pm

NeonLX » Tue May 03, 2016 9:28 am wrote:Hey! Until just now, I never realized that the author of the "American Judas" blog is a member of this august forum.

Wow. Thank you (times a billion), Mr. Paulsen.


Thanks, NeonLX! I'm glad you enjoy reading it!
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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