Under Casey, the CIA initiated more than 50 major covert operations on every continent (Lest We Forget)
By Louis Wolf
When William Joseph Casey’s longtime friend and spiritual advisor, Bishop John McGann, stated in his May 10th funeral homily that “ethical questions” concerning U.S. support of the contras and on nuclear issues were “incomprehensible” to Casey, he voiced one of the most profound understatements of the Reagan era. McGann’s criticism, which reflected the views of the Catholic Bishops Conference, nonetheless startled the 300 mourners, including President and Mrs. Reagan and contra leader Adolfo-Calero.
If Reagan owes his presidency to one person, it is Casey. In the summer of 1980, the Reagan presidential campaign was in disarray and riddled with administrative and financial problems. Casey was brought in to replace John Sears as campaign manager and Reagan beat Carter.
During World War II he was commissioned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he oversaw sabotage operations in Germany and France under “Wild Bill” Donovan. After the war, he was part of a small circle that helped conceive and establish the CIA despite President Harry Truman’s avowed distrust of the idea. He also lent his OSS training to the Marshall Plan, the U.S. postwar strategy of undermining Western European socialist and communist trade unions and political leaders.
From 1950-71, Casey worked as a Wall Street lawyer, tax-shelter specialist, and author taking credit for over 30 publications such as How to Raise Money to Make Money and How to Build and Preserve Executive Wealth. In 1964, Casey faced a plagiarism lawsuit over 20 pages of text by someone else that appeared in one of his tax manuals. In court, he swore at the author’s lawyer and threatened to “kick your ass out of here.” Both the judge and Casey said later that there was indeed plagiarism, but Casey sought to blame someone else and his lawyers obtained a seal forever on the trial record. During the 1960s in at least two other known business ventures Casey earned a reputation for engaging in highly deceptive and questionable business practices. Not surprisingly, he became a millionaire.
Casey returned to government service when Richard Nixon made him head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1971, and later undersecretary of state for economic affairs and then Export-Import Bank chief. Sen. William Proxmire (Dem.-Wis.) voted against the SEC appointment saying Casey “has cut corners when he considered it to be necessary for business profits. He has wheeled and dealed his way into a personal fortune, sometimes at the expense of his clients.”
When ITT offered $400,000 to Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign as a payoff to prevent a government antitrust suit, Casey abruptly transferred 34 boxes of confidential ITT documents out of the SEC building and out of reach of congressional investigators.
Casey boasted of his many postwar intelligence-related connections before Reagan made him Director of Central Intelligence in 1980. He was founder-director in 1962 of the National Strategy Information Center in Washington, a right-wing thinktank that performs classified research for the CIA and Pentagon. From 1966-71, he served as president and executive committee member of the International Rescue Committee, which for over three decades had working relations with the CIA. In 1976, he was appointed to President Gerald Ford’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
His far-flung business interests, including stock holdings in companies with secret CIA contracts as well as his known reluctance to place his investments in a blind trust, led the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1981 to conduct an inquiry into his nomination. Some Washington observers believed the investigation would lead to his ouster but, with encouragement from the White House, the Committee upheld the Casey appointment, although they dryly stated that “he was not unfit to serve.”
Because of his role in helping bring Reagan to the White House and their close personal and ideological friendship, Casey was the first CIA director to be made a member of the Cabinet. His access to the Oval Office was unequalled among Reagan’s closest advisers. This together with a mutual fear of communism and a shared penchant for secrecy, became the basis for the biggest expansion of CIA covert activities and funding in the Agency’s history.
Between 1981 and 1986, Casey finagled 25 to 35 percent annual budget increases for the CIA, far exceeding even the Pentagon’s quantum increases. Under Casey, the CIA initiated more than 50 major covert operations on every continent. By 1984, there were some twenty operations under way in Africa alone. At present, there are major CIA operations under way in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Suriname, Mexico, Afghanistan, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Chad, Lebanon, Seychelles, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Zaire, Philippines, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Kampuchea, Vietnam, Laos, and others.
Casey was so enamored of covert actions and paramilitary operations that he personally took charge of several of the Agency’s “secret” wars. “Retired” Gen. Richard Secord testified in the Iran/contra hearings that Casey took a deep personal interest in keeping the contras supplied even though the Boland amendment prohibited such aid. Secord also stated that Casey provided a bevy of CIA lawyers who assured him the aid was “legal.” A government official observed: “They [the CIA] built in deniability…with malice aforethought,” adding that, with regard to contra aid, Casey and his key aides often worked “off the books.” Nevertheless, Casey and Lt. Col. Oliver North were actively in touch with the “private” operators including “retired” Gen. John Singlaub of the World Anti-Communist League, Andy Messing of the National Defense Council, longtime Reagan supporter Joseph Coors, and others.
Casey politicized intelligence analysis so much that he created a great deal of ill will among his own ranks. He also alienated members of Congress by his contemptuous behavior and refusal to give a straight answer when testifying (except, of course, when he was asking for funding).
Now that Casey is dead, it is likely that he will take much of the heat from the Iran/contra scandal. If, in the end, Ronald Reagan is not impeached, he will have yet another “victory” to thank Bill Casey for.