Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection
Helliwell, Castle Bank, Bruce Rappaport, and BCCI
One of these mainstream figures was the mysterious E.P. Barry, an investor with both Helliwell and Rappaport. One of the very few things known about Barry is that he was in OSS during World War II, and that towards the end of the war Donovan appointed him head of OSS Counterintelligence (X-2) in Vienna.136 OSS X-2, or Counterintelligence, was the most secretive and highly classified of the OSS branches, and the one whose precise mission was to penetrate the German Sicherheitsdienst [SD].137
According to a 1946 OSS Report, “an equally interesting X-2 activity was the investigation of RSHA [SD] financial transactions” (Operation Safehaven).138 In the course of these investigations, the U.S. Third Army took an SD major “on several trips to Italy and Austria, and, as a result of these preliminary trips, over $500,000 in gold, as well as jewels, were recovered.”139 Some of the Nazi gold recovered under Barry’s supervision was subsequently used to finance U.S. intelligence operations in Germany in the immediate post-war years.
Barry, with this intriguing background, represents the continuity between the Helliwell intelligence-drug connection which flourished until 1972 (the year the IRS’s Operation Tradewinds began to investigate the Bank of Perrine) and the BCCI intelligence-drug connection which flourished after 1972 (the year BCCI was founded).
Like Khashoggi before it, BCCI had the ability to broker Arab-Israeli-China arms deals, as well as its contacts to western intelligence and politicians. Indeed, the bank seems to have largely inherited Khashoggi’s function as an agent of influence in the Middle East and elsewhere after the United States, by the Corrupt Federal Practices Act of 1978, outlawed direct payments by U.S. corporations to foreign individuals.140
BCCI also inherited and vastly expanded Khashoggi’s use of money to influence and corrupt American politicians. BCCI’s Pakistani president, Agha Hasan Abedi, rescued Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Secretary Bert Lance from bankruptcy, and thereby developed a relationship with Carter himself.141
A Senate report on BCCI concluded that
BCCI’s systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated. …The result was that BCCI had relationships that ranged from the questionable, to the improper, to the fully corrupt with officials from countries all over the world, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Colombia, the Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, the Ivory Coast, India, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.142
And from two well-researched books by journalists from Time and the Wall Street Journal, we learn that among later highly-placed recipients of largesse from BCCI, its owners, and its affiliates, were
- Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker, who declined to investigate BCCI;143 and
- Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which declined to investigate BCCI.144
From the annex:
145 Olmsted’s intelligence connections dated back to wartime service on the staff of General Albert Wedemeyer in China, where he was in charge of clandestine operations and in that capacity worked with OSS. He was thus a senior figure in what I am tempted to call the OSS China connection, which united so many of the people who were prominent in Helliwell’s post-war global drug connection.
We have already mentioned Helliwell himself, who was head of the Special Intelligence branch of OSS in Kunming before he created Sea Supply Corp in Bangkok. Willis Bird was the deputy chief of OSS China and then became the most important figure in Sea Supply after Helliwell’s return in 1951 from Bangkok to America. C.V. Starr, later represented by Corcoran, opened his insurance empire in China to the creation of an OSS network outside the OSS-KMT cooperation agreement.
See Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 267 (Starr), 273 (Bird), 326 (Helliwell).
But this is not the whole picture. Elsewhere I have dealt with the post-war activities of other members of the small OSS Detachment 202 under Paul Helliwell in Kunming:
- E. Howard Hunt
- Ray Cline
- Lou Conein
- John Singlaub
- Mitchell WerBell
All of these men went on to develop post-war connections for the CIA with drug-traffickers: Hunt in Mexico, Cline in Taiwan, Conein in Vietnam, WerBell in Laos, and Singlaub with the World Anti-Communist League which Hunt and Cline had helped to create (Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 20, 207).
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