part 2: Weapons of Mass Distraction

[pynchonoid]

(b) In February 1981, the State Department issued a
sensational “White Paper” based on alleged Salvadoran
rebel documents. Authored by a young, eager-to-please
Foreign Service officer named John Glassman, the paper
depicted damning links between the insurgents,
Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. A smoking gun. 

Unfortunately for Glassman and the Reagan
administration, Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan
Kwitny got access to the same documents and found
little resemblance to what was contained in Glassman’s
paper. Glassman admitted to Kwitny that he had made up
quotes and guessed at figures for the Soviet weapons
supposedly coming to the Salvadoran insurgents. 

(c) Certainly among the most extraordinary attempts to
plant evidence was the Barry Seal affair—a complicated
operation designed to incriminate the Nicaraguan
Sandinista government for international drug
trafficking. The operation began in 1982, when CIA
Director Casey created the position of National
Intelligence Officer for Narcotics. Casey’s handpicked
NIO wasted no time telling representatives of other
agencies that high priority was to be given to finding
evidence linking both Castro and the Sandinistas to
the burgeoning cocaine trade. 

Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency officers
protested that this might be counterproductive since
Cuba was the most cooperative government in the
Caribbean in the fight against drugs and there was no
evidence showing that the Nicaraguan government played
any significant role. Never mind, said the NIO, the
task was to put black hats on our enemies. 

In 1986 Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot who had trained
Nicaraguan Contra pilots in the early eighties, was
facing a long sentence after a federal drug conviction
in Florida. Seal made his way to the White House’s
National Security Council to make the following
proposition to officials there. He would fly his own
plane to Colombia and take delivery of cocaine. He
would then make an “emergency landing” in Nicaragua
and make it appear that Sandinista officials were
aiding him in drug trafficking. 

Seal made it clear that he would expect help with his
legal problems. 

The Reagan White House jumped at the offer. Seal’s
plane was flown to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,
where it was fitted with secret cameras to enable Seal
to photograph Nicaraguan officials in the act of
assisting him with the boxes of cocaine. 

The operation went as planned. Seal flew to Colombia
and then to Nicaragua where he landed at a commercial
airfield. There he was met by a Nicaraguan named
Federico Vaughan, who helped with the offloading and
reloading of boxes of cocaine and was duly
photographed—not very well, it turned out, because the
special cameras malfunctioned. Though blurred and
grainy, the photos were delivered to the White House,
and a triumphant Ronald Reagan went on national TV to
show that the Sandinistas were not only Communists but
also criminals intent on addicting America’s youth.
What more justification was needed for the Contra war
against the Sandinistas! 

Again, the Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Kwitny
played the role of skunk at the picnic, pointing out
substantial flaws in the concocted story. Vaughan, who
according to the script was an assistant to Nicaraguan
Interior Minister Tomas Borge, was shown not to be
what he claimed. Indeed, congressional investigators
found that the telephone number called by Seal to
contact Vaughn belonged to the US embassy in Managua. 

It was yet another fiasco, and Seal paid for it with
his life. His Colombian drug suppliers were not amused
when the Reagan administration identified him publicly
as a US undercover agent. As he awaited trial on other
narcotics charges in Louisiana, Seal was ambushed and
killed by four gunmen who left his body riddled with
140 bullets. 

5. Fabricated evidence also played an important role
in the first President Bush’s attempt to secure
congressional and UN approval for the 1991 Gulf War. 

(a) Few will forget the heart-rending testimony before
a congressional committee by the sobbing 15 year-old
Kuwaiti girl called Nayirah on October 10, 1990: 

“I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with
guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in
incubators. They took the babies out of the
incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies
on the cold floor to die.” 

No congressperson, no journalist took the trouble to
probe the identity of “Nayirah,” who was said to be an
escapee from Kuwait but was later revealed to be the
daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. With
consummate skill, the story had been manufactured out
of whole cloth and the 15 year-old coached by the PR
firm Hill & Knowlton, which has a rich history of
being “imbedded” in Republican administrations.
Similar unsubstantiated yarns made their debut several
weeks later at the UN, where a team of seven
“witnesses,” also coached by Hill & Knowlton,
testified about atrocities in Iraq. (It was later
learned that the seven had used false names.) And in
an unprecedented move, the UN Security Council allowed
the US to show a video created by Hill & Knowlton. 

All to good effect. The PR campaign had the desired
impact, and Congress voted to authorize the use of
force against Iraq on January 12, 1991. (The UN did so
on November 29, 1990.) “Nayirah’s” true identity did
not become known until two years later. And Hill &
Knowlton’s coffers bulged when the proceeds arrived
from its billing of Kuwait. 

Interestingly, the General Manager of Hill &
Knowlton’s Washington, DC office at the time was a
woman named Victoria Clarke. She turned out to be less
successful in her next job, as Press Secretary for the
re-election campaign of President George Bush in 1992.
But she is now back in her element as Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. 

(b) There was a corollary fabrication that proved
equally effective in garnering support in Congress for
the war resolution in 1991. The White House claimed
there were satellite photos showing Iraqi tanks and
troops massing on the borders of Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia, threatening to invade Saudi Arabia. This
fueled the campaign for war and frightened the Saudis
into agreeing to cooperate fully with US military
forces. 

On September 11, 1990, President George H. W. Bush,
addressing a joint session of Congress, claimed
“120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into
Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia.” But
an enterprising journalist, Jean Heller, reported in
the St. Petersburg Times on January 6, 1991 (a bare
ten days before the Gulf War began) that commercial
satellite photos taken on September 11, the day the
president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup
of Iraqi forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked
to provide evidence to support the president’s claim,
it refused to do so—and continues to refuse to this
day. 

Interestingly, the national media in the US chose to
ignore Heller’s story. Heller’s explanation: 

“I think part of the reason the story was ignored was
that it was published too close to the start of the
war. Second, and more importantly, I do not think that
people wanted to hear that we might have been
deceived. A lot of the reporters who have seen the
story think it is dynamite, but the editors seem to
have the attitude, ‘At this point, who cares?’” 

Does some of this have a familiar ring? 

/s/ 

Richard Beske, San Diego
Kathleen McGrath Christison, Santa Fe
William Christison, Santa Fe
Patrick Eddington, Alexandria, VA
Raymond McGovern, Arlington, VA

Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
is a coast-to-coast enterprise; mostly intelligence
officers from analysis side of CIA. Ray McGovern
(rmcgovern at slschool.org) worked as a CIA analyst for
27 years. He co-authored this article with David
MacMichael.

<http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0425-11.htm>
Published on Friday, April 25, 2003 by
CommonDreams.org 
Ex-CIA Professionals:
Weapons of Mass Distraction: Where? Find? Plant? 
by David MacMichael and Ray McGovern




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