> Chapter 11
"DOPE,
INC."
(By the Editors of Executive
Intelligence Review (EIR). Commissioned by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Pub. 1st
ed. in 1978, 2nd ed. in 1986, 3rd ed. in 1992 by EIR, PO Box 17390, Washington,
DC 20041-0390.)
McCoy's The Politics of Heroin describes
how the cultivation and distribution of drugs have in recent times been
secretly promoted by American and French governments via the activities of
their covert intelligence agencies. Piper's Final
Judgment enlarges the picture by including the British and Israeli
governments and agencies, and uncovering a scope of criminal enterprises larger
than just the drug trade which has been undertaken by these agencies in
cooperation with the world's organized crime rings. The EIR's Dope, Inc. seeks to identify the
kingpins at the top of the drug trade by examining the origins of the trade, by
studying the paths via which drug profits are laundered, and by tracing the
ownership of the controlling corporate entities.
The first few chapters of Dope,
Inc. serve to update the 1986 edition to 1992, and are also useful in
further fleshing out the subject matter of McCoy's and Piper's books. McCoy
discusses the cocaine trafficking attendant to the Nicaraguan Contra affair,
but the EIR is less bashful about naming names: "Colonel [Oliver] North
was the day-to-day operations officer for the Contra resupply program. But it
was Vice President George Bush, the former CIA director, who was formally in
charge of the entire Reagan administration Central America
covert operations program." Reagan created and placed Bush in charge of
the secret "Crisis Pre-Planning Group" with North as its secretary.
In that capacity, North "ran the Central America
spook show - under George Bush." The EIR quotes memos from North's
personal notebooks which indicate that North was fully aware of the cocaine
traffic to the United States
which was generating funds from American addicts to pay for Contra arms.
According to the EIR, North and other administration officials were also
involved in the arms-for-hostages swap with the Lebanese terrorists who were
holding American hostages. Negotiations were conducted with a Syrian drug and
arms smuggler named Mansur Al-Kassar, who was a supplier of arms to the PLO, a
black market partner of Syria's
Vice President Rifaat al-Assad, and a known business associate of Medellin
Cartel boss Pablo Escobar Gaviria. North did not manage to get any hostages
freed, though AlKassar's drug-running activities were protected, and though he
received, in one transaction that was uncovered, $1.5 million from North for
Soviet-bloc arms which went to the Contras. Al-Kassar's drug-runners were
suspected of being involved in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland,
on December 21, 1988, as was publicly suggested by U.S. Rep. James Traficant
among others. Syria's
role in the flourishing Middle-Eastern heroin and hashish trade into Europe, along with Al-Kassar's possible role in the
Flight 103 bombing, have both been deliberately covered up, says the EIR, by
British and American intelligence agencies.
Columbian and Middle Eastern dope trafficking seems to the EIR to have a
recurring common denominator of Israeli involvement. In April 1989, the EIR
says, "a DEA and U.S. Customs Service report was covered in the media
alleging that New York's Republic National
Bank was serving as a money-laundering facility for Middle
East and Ibero-American narcotics-trafficking organizations.
Republic National Bank is owned by Edmond Safra, a prominent Jewish banker of
Lebanese descent" having world-wide banking operations. The report said
that Safra and his bank were part of a money-laundering network run out of the
Zurich-based Shakarchi Trading Co., which "operates as a currency exchange
company and is utilized by some of the world's largest drug-trafficking
organizations to launder the proceeds of their drug-trafficking activities....
Shakarchi Trading Company maintains accounts at the Republic National Bank of New York...." Mr.
Safra, the EIR notes, in 1989 donated "a reported $1 million to his
favorite charity - the Anti-Defamation League."
(The EIR goes way beyond the brief description of the ADL which appears
in Piper's book, which simply painted the ADL as a public relations support arm
of the "Jewish Mafia" going back to 1913, with Arnold Rothstein and
Meyer Lansky its primary early beneficiaries. The EIR devotes a 49-page
appendix to the ADL, which we will briefly review in a few moments.)
On December 15, 1989, a Columbian army shoot-out with Medellin Cartel
boss Rodriguez Gacha occurred. Gacha was killed, and shortly thereafter large
stockpiles of cartel arms were seized, the majority of which were found to have
been made in Israel.
After months of investigation, it was determined that "Israeli
intelligence ... had been providing weapons and terrorist training to the
Medellin Cartel's assassination squads in collaboration with British
mercenaries.... The funds to purchase the weapons ... had been provided by the
U.S. State Department through a program personally run by Assistant Secretary
of State Elliott Abrams," who later pled guilty to Iran-Contra
crimes."
EIR continues: "The trainer of Rodriguez Gacha's killer squads was
a reserve Israeli army colonel named Yair Klein.... In a parallel operation, a
group a British mercenaries also engaged in training the cartel hit squads....
The involvement of British intelligence in the CIA-Mossad Columbia deal was
further confirmed when Louis Blom-Cooper and Geoffrey Robertson, both officials
of Amnesty International, which is funded by British intelligence, were
deployed to cover up the official U.S., British, and Israeli government
sponsorship of the Klein operation...."
A shipload of Israeli arms was transferred on April 24, 1989 in the
British Crown Colony of Antigua, to a Panamanian-registered ship, Sea Point, and "shuttled off to
Rodriguez Gacha in Columbia....
The escrow deposit to ensure that the hundreds of guns left Israel on time had
come through the Miami branch of the Israeli Bank Hapoalim" into which
Elliott Abrams had deposited the funds to purchase the arms. On December 20,
1989, just a few days after the start of the Gacha shoot-out, the U.S. under President Bush invaded Panama,
overthrew General Noriega, and installed in his place "a local Panamanian
lawyer, Guillermo "Porky" Endara. A review of court records shows
that President Endara and several of his law partners were the owners of record
of the ship Sea Point in April 1989
when the ship had delivered the Israeli weapons to Rodriguez Gacha....
[Furthermore,] in Panama City,
Endara was the co-owner, along with Rodriguez Gacha, of the drug
money-laundering Banco Interoceanico." The British-Mossad-CIA intelligence
combine thus lost or disposed of a former drug ally (Gacha) in Columbia,
but almost simultaneously picked up a new one (Endara) in Panama.
A little more light is shed on this matter by the EIR: "In 1986, in
Panama,
Gen. Manuel Noriega closed down First Interamericas Bank after it was proven
that the bank was owned by the Cali Cartel. In December 1989, U.S. occupation forces invaded Panama ... and proceeded to place
four members of the board of that same First Interamericas Bank in power - as
President, attorney general, president of the Supreme Court, and minister of
the Treasury. The result: Drug running in Panama has grown since Noriega's ouster." Bush's strategy?
"Specifically, a working alliance has been created between the U.S.
government and the Call Cartel, against the Medellin Cartel of Pablo Escobar
and Rodriguez Gacha. The result has been ... that the Cali Cartel has become
dominant among the different Columbian groups ... all with behind-the-scenes
American approval." It seems clear that Washington wants the drug trade to continue,
but that it also wants to be able to hire and fire those who it chooses to participate
in the trade.
The EIR published a report in November 1990 detailing the growth of
narcotic revenues over the immediately preceding years. The totals were
astonishing, and contradicted the Bush administration's optimistic reports on
the same subject. Growth was phenomenal in cultivation and street sales of all
the major drugs - heroine, cocaine, and marijuana. Street sales of all drugs
throughout the world had increased from $175 billion back in 1977 to $558
billion in 1989. Cumulative sales from 1977 to 1989 of drugs raised only in
Ibero-America (Mexico and
South and Central America) is nearly $2
trillion, dwarfing even Ibero-America's gigantic foreign debt of $430 billion.
Worldwide addiction continues to grow. Some 70 million Americans are estimated
to have used drugs at some point, with many of these remaining as addicts.
Consumption has jumped throughout South America, including such places as Brazil, Peru,
and Columbia.
More millions of people are users in India,
Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and other Asian countries. Europe is another very large market, with an unknown
number of consumers.
Very little of the money raised from street sales is returned and kept
by the countries raising the drugs. Some of the money is laundered by
businesses having high cash turnover, such as restaurants and casinos. A great
deal of it is sent out of the country in suitcases and deposited in off-shore
banks which don't have the laws which U.S. banks do requiring cash deposits
over $10,000 to be reported to the IRS. The great bulk of the $558 billion
annual revenue (in 1989) is deposited in banks elsewhere. "Although no
precise figures are available," says the EIR, "a leading anti-drug
prosecutor in Switzerland, Paolo Bernasconi, told Italy's La Stampa newspaper in January 1990 that the leading
money-laundering centers include the United States (Miami and Wall Street),
Canada, Great Britain, and, of course, Switzerland."
Further, far from fighting the trade, the banks are fighting to get
their share: "As the London
Economist wrote proudly in June 1989:
'It is obvious that drug dealers use banks.... The business ... has become part
of the financial system.... If you had morals or ethics in this business, you
would not be in it."' The EIR further writes, "As one banker stated in
an off-the-record discussion in London
in 1986: Dope 'is the biggest source of new financial business in the world
today.... I know banks which will literally kill to secure a chunk of this
action.' The banker worked for one of Wall Street's biggest investment houses,
Merrill Lynch."
The EIR insists that any strategy of fighting the drug trade must aim at
the drug proceeds. "A competent war on drugs must begin with a war against
the banking institutions and bankers who 'launder' Dope, Inc.'s ill-gotten gains."
And: "Shut down the drug money-laundering by the major Anglo-American
banks, and the dope cartel would choke to death on its own profits!" And:
"Dope, Inc.'s vulnerable flank is the international network of banks and
other financial institutions that 'launder' the cartel's $558 billion per year
in gross revenue.... Action by governments against the drug bankers could
rapidly shut down Dope, Inc." And yet, says the EIR, "no government
has ever touched the system which
allowed [the drug trade to develop]. At best, a few accounts here and there
have been seized. To this day, money-laundering is not even a criminal offense
in 8 out of the 15 industrial nations. In the United States, the center of the
problem, government action is a joke: No top management has ever been charged or prosecuted for
criminal money-laundering activity."
There is negligible opium or cocaine presently being grown in the U.S.,
says the EIR, but the same can't be said for marijuana. In fact, the 1987 U.S.
pot harvest was valuated by the EIR at $33.1 billion, barely less than the
receipts tabulated by the USDA of the largest single farm commodity in 1987,
which was cattle and calves yielding $33.8 billion. Marijuana receipts were
greater than any grain crop, or in fact any other commodity excepting cattle.
The major potgrowing states were Hawaii, Washington, Oregon,
California, and a set of
relatively impoverished states running from Arkansas
and Missouri through Georgia and North Carolina. A great deal of the financial
stress on farmers which helped produce this situation was the high-interest
policies of the Fed imposed during the 80's, which devastated all businesses which had become
dependent upon low-cost credit. The EIR relates instances in which banks actually
suggested to financially stressed farmers and ranchers that they try their hand
at the profitable marijuana business to help get their bank loans paid off.
We made reference near the beginning of our review to the appendix which
the EIR has included on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It's an amazing
compendium of information which utterly frees one of the misapprehension that
the ADL is simply an honorable, upright, civic-minded institution supporting
Judaism. The appendix goes into detail concerning the following matters related
to the ADL and its operations:
• What Is It? Basically, a
public relations front for the Rothstein-Lansky branch of American Organized
Crime, though it operates formally as a tax-exempt public interest organization
under Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Service Codes.
• Structure and Key Personnel: It
is an organization having a National Commission of about 150 members, a
National Executive Committee, officers, and a number of standing committees.
Membership is by nomination or invitation only. The standing committees and
their chairmen are listed.
Nine operatives in the "active core" of the ADL are listed,
some of whom are mentioned below.
Ties to Organized
Crime: This gets interesting. First mention is of former ADL national chairman
Kenneth Bialkin, who, says the EIR, masterminded the $60 million looting of
Investors Overseas Service (IOS) by financier Robert Vesco, an indicted
fugitive living in Havana
and charged with complicity in Medellin Cartel cocaine smuggling from 1974 to
1989. In January 1980, a jury ordered Bialkin's law firm to pay $35 million to
the victims of the IOS looting, and found Bialkin to be instrumental in that
fraud. The IDS was believed by law enforcement officials to have been used by
Meyer Lansky as a conduit for laundering his illicit drug profits.
A second mention is of the Sterling National Bank of New York City. It was charged by Italian
authorities in January 1982 of looting $27 million from the Banca Privata
Italiana. The chairman of Sterling,
says the EIR, "both at the time of the alleged theft and today, is
Theodore H. Silbert, another honorary vice-chairman of the ADL and the former
head of the ADL Appeal, its major fundraising arm. Law enforcement sources have
identified Sterling National as a mob front since its founding in 1929 by Meyer
Lansky associate Frank Erickson."
The EIR alleges: "A listing of ADL financial contributors and award
recipients over the recent decades reads like a 'Who's Who' of the Meyer Lansky
international crime syndicate. Longtime Lansky cronies such as Victor Posner,
Hollywood attorney Sidney Korshak, and Moe Dalitz all appear as ADL patrons.
The same pattern holds true at the regional levels of the ADL." Lots more
detail is given.
The final major mention is the Canadian Edgar Bronfman, an honorary vice
chairman of the ADL. His family's criminal dynasty started with his father Sam,
who, with Arnold Rothstein, was dispatched to Hong Kong
in 1920 to arrange for supplies of opium, and who further organized the smuggling
and retail distribution of the illegal drugs. A nephew of Edgar Bronfman
"was named in a 1972 Montreal Crime Commission report as an intimate of
local crime boss Willy Obront." Further detail is quoted from The Bronfman Dynasty by Peter C. Newman.
The Bronfmans' present holdings include Seagrams
Corp., including its majority share in E. I. du Pont de Nemours Co. The EIR says that, upon the appearance of the 1978
edition of Dope, Inc., which
prominently mentioned the Bronfman clan, Quebec
police sources said that Bronfman ordered his attorneys to sue EIR for libel,
but that, "after careful deliberation, the attorneys strongly argued
against such an action." Bronfman instead poured money into the ADL, which
then commenced a campaign of shrill attacks against Lyndon LaRouche and the
EIR.
• Ties to the Soviet Union: The
extensive relationships are detailed between major ADL figures, including Edgar
Bronfman and Dwayne Andreas, the president of the Archer Daniels Midland grain
giant, and communist bloc leaders, including the East German communist dictator
Erich Honecker, and Mikhail Gorbachev, who ascended to power in Moscow in 1985. Some of
the purposes were "to improve ADL coordination with the KGB in running
pro-Gorbachev propaganda inside the United States"
and "to move in on the 'lucrative new markets' in the liberated nations of
Central Europe - on behalf of organized
crime." Ties between the Soviets and the ADL are described going back as
far as the mid-30's, involving also the Soviet spy rings operating during World
War 2.
• Ties to the Nicaraguan Contra
Program: The ADL's ties to this covert program for developing the South
American drug trade are extensively described by reference to the participation
of several eminent ADL figures, including Carl Gershman, the director of the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the administration's agency for
secretly funding the Contras; Rabbi Morten M. Rosenthal, who, with NED funding,
produced a study pronouncing that the Sandinistas were
"anti-Semitic," aimed at marshaling Jewish support for the Contra
effort; Kenneth Bialkin, the attorney for Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi,
whose money purchased arms for Iran via the good offices of Col. Oliver North,
as part of the arms-for-hostages negotiations; Willard Zucker, who ran the Lake
Resources front company in Geneva, Switzerland, which laundered the Iranian
arms profits to the Contras; Edmond Safra, who, with Willard Zucker, owned the
corporate jets used by Oliver North and National Security Advisor Robert
MacFarland in traveling to secret conferences in Iran.
• Domestic Terrorism: The
ADL's activities as agent-provocateur within groups involving the civil rights
movement, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, the anti-war movement, and the
paramilitary Right are described, with the ADL frequently cooperating with the
FBI's Division Five in these matters. This collusive work is shown to have
extended to bombings, assaults, jury-tampering, and other illegal activities.
• International Terrorism: The
EIR focuses on the ADL efforts concerning the preparation for and/or the
cover-up after the murders of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Swedish
Prime Minister Olof Palme. Prime Minister Gandhi was murdered in October 1984,
perhaps because she was moving toward American and away from Soviet military
assistance. During the immediately preceding months, a Sikh
"extremist" group had threatened and predicted her death, and had
formed the World Sikh Organization. That organization has had assistance and
ongoing communication with the ADL, with its leader Surjit Singh being "a
close personal friend of ADL Honorary National Chairman Kenneth Bialkin."
Prime Minister Palme's murder in February 1986 was apparently to cover
up the massive arms and drug trafficking by American, British, Israeli, and
Soviet agencies that became known to him from documents obtained following a
police raid which he ordered on a trafficker in his own country. He thereupon
undertook to halt the flow of arms from Sweden
to the Persian Gulf, and his murder shortly
followed. The ADL's involvement in the cover-up is described, as is the proof
uncovered by the Swedish police of the KGB's prior knowledge of the
assassination.
• Penetration of Law Enforcement:
Despite its ties to organized crime and other less-than-legal activities
outlined above, the ADL has, with the help of the FBI, "managed to conduct
a highly successful campaign to insinuate itself into the day-today workings of
virtually every major police department and sheriffs department in the United States."
The methods and some of the results of this activity are described.
Other matters discussed, which we will not go into here, include
involvement with Israeli / Palestinian politics, ties to Mossad operations,
support of efforts by the major Midwest grain cartels to liquidate the
independent family farmer, and even the support of cultism, followed by the
creation of "deprogramming" entities to which parents of cultists
would pay big bucks to recover their children, both physically and mentally,
from the clutches of those same cults. Study of these matters, and in fact the
entire appendix on the ADL, is highly recommended, since the nature of the ADL
is so grossly misunderstood in our country, and since its works are so
pernicious.
Our strategy at this point will be to delve into the core of the first
edition of Dope, Inc., plainly
exposing the tie we presumed would appear between the dynastic banking families
and the conspiratorial combination of intelligence agencies and organized crime
rings described by Piper. We will then end by updating the organizational
structure of that combine as was seen by the EIR in their 1986 edition of Dope, Inc.
As McCoy related, the Portuguese and then the Dutch preceded the British
in running the drugs from India,
where the opium was raised, to China
and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, where it was
consumed. "By 1659," says the EIR, "the opium trade had become
second only to the trade in spices, for which opium was a medium of exchange.
By 1750, the Dutch were shipping more than 100 tons of opium a year to Indonesia,"
where, according to one historian, they took good advantage of one of opium's
side effects: its use broke down the moral resistance of its users.
The British East India Company (BEIC) started getting involved in 1715,
when they opened an office in Canton,
on the Chinese coast. They nibbled around the edges of the trade until 1757,
when, by military victory, they turned the prime opium-growing area of Bengal
(now Bangladesh)
into a Crown Colony. Profits went into the pockets of local BEIC officials,
however, and did not accrue to England
or even the BEIC itself until the effective coup in 1783, when, in the EIR's
words, "the dope trade took over Britain."
The coup was organized by Lord Shelburne, who proposed to take two
bankrupt entities, the BEIC and Britain,
which was hugely in debt at the end of the Revolutionary War, and combine them
into a single going concern. Drug profits would henceforth go to the BEIC and to Britain,
and Britain's
political establishment would protect and enhance the operations of the BEIC,
particularly its profitable drug trade. Shelburne struck an alliance with the
BEIC's Lawrence Sullivan, "whose son had subcontracted for the private
opium monopoly in Bengal," and
Anglo-Dutch banker Francis Baring. Then with money from the opium trade and
with the support of the monarchical patronage machine, "Shelburne bought
the Parliament in 1783, lock, stock, and barrel," and consolidated an
unbeatable financial and political power.
Shelburne's proposed program for returning Britain
to greatness was, says the EIR, to "expand the opium traffic and subvert
the United States
- both under the banner of free trade. The first achieved crowning success with
the Chinese Opium War; the second not until the twentieth century."
As early as 1787, the British Secretary of State proposed that Britain force the opium market into China.
Jardine Matheson was one of the trading companies entrusted to covertly manage
the opium exportation from India
to China,
hiding the BEIC's involvement. The drug trade soared, and by 1830, "opium
was the largest commodity in world trade." In China, local criminal gangs called
Triads (analogous to American "Mafia") were selected by the British trading
companies to distribute their opium into the hinterlands. The Chinese Emperor
finally resisted by seeking to expropriate the opium in the warehouses of the
trading companies, and the British declared war. It was over very quickly,
since "The Chinese forces, decimated by ten years of rampant opium
addiction within the Imperial Army, proved no match for the British." The
peace treaty, signed in 1842, delivered, besides monetary reparations, British
extraterritorial control over the 'free port' of Hong Kong, "to this day
[in 1978] the capital of Britain's global drug-running."
Britain's official policy of using mind-destroying drugs to enhance
British commerce was laid out in an 1841 memo from British Prime Minister Lord
Palmerston to the British governor-general of India: "... we must
unremittingly endeavor to find, in other parts of the world [than Europe], new
vents for our industry [opium].... If we succeed in our China expedition [i.e.,
the Opium War], Abyssinia, Arabia, the countries of the Indus, and the new
markets of China will at no distant period give us a most important extension
to the range of our foreign commerce."
The process was repeated in the Second Opium War, ending with the joint
British-French siege of Beijing
in October 1860. Out of this war, "the British merchant banks and trading
companies established the Hongkong and Shanghai Corporation, which to this day
serves as the central clearinghouse for all Far Eastern financial transactions
relating to the black market in opium and its heroin derivative." The
British had thus completed the process of opening up all of China, as Lord
Palmerston had sought in 1841, and now controlled about seven-eighths of the
Chinese drug trade, which doubled again by 1880. Its modus operandi had been:
- Addict the target population, "to sap the vitality of the
nation."
- Utilize the military as needed to install and protect the drug trade.
- Use profits to fund a criminal infrastructure to carry out the trade.
The EIR then outlines ties created by the British merchant bankers to
American bankers and traders, and something of how certain of them were drawn
into the drug trafficking business. Some of the familiar names which come up
are John Jacob Astor and his descendent Waldorf Astor, who was chairman of the
Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) during World War
2. John Murray Forbes of Boston was U.S. agent for Baring Brothers, the
"premier merchant bank of the opium traffic from 1783 to the present
day." Several other Boston
families were involved in the trade, including the Hathaway and Perkins
families. The leading banker for this group of families became the House of
Morgan. Thomas Nelson Perkins became the chief Boston agent of the Morgan Bank. Morgan
partner Willard Straight spent 1901-1912 in China as assistant to Sir Robert
Hart, the head of the Chinese Customs Service, and thus the leading Britisher
conducting the opium traffic. Straight then became head of the Morgan Bank's
Far Eastern operations. Today (i.e., 1978), the chairman of Morgan Grenfell,
which is 40 percent owned by Morgan Guaranty Trust, is Lord Catto of
Cairncatto, who sits on the "London Committee" of the Hongkong and
Shanghai Bank.
The bulk introduction of drugs into the United States came about by the introduction
of coolies onto the West Coast. They were transported there by the same British
trading companies who were running the slave trade to the South. Some 117,000
coolies entered in 1846 alone, a great many of them being opium addicts. The
opium followed them, laying the foundation for the later drug trade out of the Chinatowns of the major West Coast cities. Lincoln outlawed the
coolie traffic in 1862, but it continued without significant pause up to the
turn of the century. By 1875, officials estimated that 120,000 Americans in
addition to the Chinese coolies were addicted to opium.
As Americans and others around the world began to perceive addiction
problems in their own back yards, efforts were made to shut down the traffic,
efforts which the British sternly opposed. A Hague Convention was passed in
1905 (which the British signed and then evaded), and a proposal was brought to
the League of Nations Opium Committee in 1923 aimed at worldwide reduction of
both production and consumption to 10 percent of current values, a proposal
which the British publicly and vehemently opposed. By 1927, British statistics
showed that about 26 percent of British Far Eastern colonial revenues were
derived from opium, providing a believable rationalization for their adamant
support of the drug trade.
The next major step, taken in 1920, was Prohibition. Basic opium supply
was now available, and its transport into the country was simple enough. What
was needed was a criminal infrastructure to deliver it on American streets. The
effort started by mounting a campaign in both Canada
and the U.S.
to outlaw liquor. The agitation for Prohibition was not spontaneous. Rather, it
was deliberately funded by American families who had been drawn into the
British web. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and its offshoots
"enjoyed the financial backing of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the
Warburgs, and the Rockefellers." Tax-exempt foundations were also brought
in, "especially the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation."
Prohibition commenced first in Canada, running from 1915 to 1919.
During this period, the Canadian criminal infrastructure for the delivery of
British (and Scotch) booze was developed, centered largely on Canada's Bronfman family, who "established
the local mob contacts in the United States
[which would soon be needed], and consolidated contractual agreements with the
Royal Liquor Commission in London."
In the United States,
the Prohibition Amendment was ratified in 1917, but only went into effect via
the Volstead Act in January of 1920. Canadian Prohibition terminated just one
month earlier, giving the Bronfman's free rein in their own country to import
and manufacture distilled spirits, and to move that liquor into the hands of
the American organized crime rings under development.
The scheme worked like a charm. The needed street gangs were spawned,
and those capable of managing their internal organization rose to the top, with
Meyer Lansky being the final emergent kingpin. Even though Prohibition was
repealed in 1933, narcotic drugs remained illegal, and the criminal gangs were
enabled to continue honing their skills by branching out in other directions,
including casino gambling, prostitution, extortion, loan-sharking, etc.
Narcotics, however, was not to become their really big business until the
supply was further developed after World War 2, the monetary pathways developed
for handling the anticipated flood of illicit cash, and a cultural climate
created "conducive to fostering drug addiction."
The British stayed demurely above all this illegal fray. The heroin they
sold to Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky in the 20's was sold legally. What
the buyers did with it was their own business. Likewise the booze the British
sold to Joe Kennedy and the Bronfman family was legally sold, and what those
buyers did with it was likewise their own business, simply a matter of
"free enterprise" at work.
The EIR next plunges into how the monetary end of the drug system works.
It looks first at the size of the trade. Annual street sales in the U.S.
of the three major drugs (heroin, cocaine, and marijuana) amount to about $233
billion, according to House Select Committee on Narcotics in 1986. The
worldwide trade is accordingly estimated at about $500 billion. The first
question, says the EIR, is "How is it possible that $500 billion in dirty
money ... can remain outside the control of the law?" It is obvious that
no one bank is large enough to handle this volume of money. The EIR answers its
own question: "A huge chunk of international banking and related financial
operations has been created solely to manage dirty money." And who is
capable of creating such a network? "British banking operations [comprise]
the only possible banking network that could handle the requisite volume of
illegal traffic." That network has become qualified to do so, says the
EIR, by virtue of having handled the trade for about a century and a half, by
controlling the political jurisdiction over the major off-shore banking outlets
(whose records are invisible to target governments), by controlling the world
trade in gold and diamonds (used to hide the routes of illicit cash flows), and
by possession of the needed connections to organized crime, law enforcement,
and intelligence agencies around the world.
Off-shore banking occurs largely in Britain's
old island colonies around the Caribbean, as in the Bahamas
and Cayman Islands, and "with very few
exceptions ... is under the thumb of the British oligarchy." The bulk of
the net drug proceeds in the U.S., i.e., after paying off the crime rings
engaged in street distribution, are then "laundered" by including
such cash in bank deposits made by companies normally handling large volumes of
cash, such as casinos, race tracks, sports stadiums, commodity or other
brokerages, restaurant chains, and even department stores. Once such a deposit
is made, the illicit money is wired to an off-shore bank, following which it is
lost in an electronic maze of transfers substantially impossible to trace, even
if investigative agencies had access to offshore banking records, which they do
not.
The trick is making that first laundering deposit and then transferring
the money out of the depositing bank in such a way as to make the transaction
disappear or appear normal to the bank's computers and to later auditors. The
EIR devotes a chapter of Dope, Inc. describing
some of the illegal ways in which this can and has been done, usually involving
an inside conspirator in the bank accepting the deposit, in addition to the needed
conspirator(s) in the business establishment making the deposit. However, says
the EIR, "If the reader is beginning to suspect that thousands of bankers
and IRS officials are all in on the game, we emphasize that no such thing is,
or could possibly be the case. Dope, Inc. is a tightly run little network. What
makes it effective is that there is nothing 'abnormal' about it; it is built
into the business structure of the United States and a number of other
countries." The "good news" part of this is that the group of
conspirators is small enough to be successfully attacked. As the EIR put it,
"We know their names and addresses, and how to mop them up."
The EIR relates an instructive example at this point which involves a
small American airline suspected of delivering dope to various urban crime
centers, while simultaneously contracting with the Federal Reserve to deliver
cleared checks. The airline was partially owned by Airborne Freight of Seattle,
controlled by a New York bank called Allen and Co., the Allen being Meyer
Lansky's investment banker Charles Allen. On the board of Airborne Freight was
one James H. Carey, an executive Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank. Carey
had previously worked at Hambro's, the leading British merchant bank, for its
then president Richard Hambro, immediately following which he became CEO of
First Empire Bank, a joint venture between Hambro's and Macy's. First Empire
did banking for the Jacobs brothers, who ran a major money-laundering branch of
Lansky's empire. Carey's sponsors at Hambro's, says the EIR, "were among
the best-connected of Britain's elite: Richard Hambro's uncle, the late Sir
Charles Hambro, was chief of Britain's Special Operations Executive during
World War 2, the superior of Sir William 'Intrepid' Stephenson" who we
have met a number of times before.
But the "choke point" of dirty money was in Hong
Kong, where the huge money volume dwarfed legitimate economic
activity. The drug money estimated by the EIR to have flowed through Hong Kong
in 1978 was $10 billion, about twice Hong Kong's
total money supply. The EIR therefore focused its attention upon Hong Kong and
set about to trace that money flow back to its origins in the
British-controlled syndicates in America.
The core of control is at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (the
"HongShang"), created by the British after the Second Chinese Opium
War. The bank, says the EIR, "is the semi-official central bank for the
Crown Colony, regulating general market conditions, holding excess deposits of
the myriad smaller banks, providing rediscount facilities, and so forth. The
HongShang is also the financial hydra unifying the production, transportation,
and distribution of Asia's opium." The
colonial government and the bank "often work closely together," as
the London Financial Times is quoted, though
neither entity makes any banking statistics public. Sitting adjacent to the
HongShang in the Crown Colony are "213 deposittaking finance companies, as
well as 34 local banks and 104 bank representative offices" via which the
HongShang receives deposits from and tenders payments to the external world.
One of the bank's chores is to finance the cultivation and acquisition
of each year's new crop. This goes a little beyond legitimate agriculture,
since the financing must cover not only the equivalent of seed, fertilizer, and
equipment, but also transportation on pack mule trains, chemicals for heroin
laboratories, smuggling to ports of embarkation, private armed security forces,
and official bribery as required at each step along the way. Opium from the
farm costs about $100 per pound, grows to $200 at the Thai border, becomes
$2000 per pound for heroin out of the laboratory, and ultimately grows to about
$2 million per pound on the streets
of San Francisco, Los
Angeles, or Chicago.
The HongShang must see that the finances are in place to pay for each new
year's heroin supply, at $2000 per pound, before any of the heroin ever reaches
the final markets. Some portion of that seed money is probably available from
retained earnings by the several participants in the production,
transportation, and marketing processes. However, any and all credit which the
HongShang may have to extend within Southeast Asia,
which the EIR says might amount annually to around $150 million, can readily be
handled, particularly when it is realized that a much larger stream of money is
coming into the area than is going out.
The larger stream is labeled "reflow" by the EIR, and consists
of the cut that the Far Eastern end of the dope trade is receiving out of the
overall profits realized by the trade, the great bulk of which comes about from
the huge price markups at the street level. "In other words," says
the EIR, "the Hong Kong networks are
directly represented in the Western 'organized crime' segment of Dope, Inc.,
and take their cut in the form of a reflow of the retailing profits. Scattered
bits of evidence ... indicate that this is, in fact, how these syndicates
operate."
The business structure managing the drug trade in Southeast Asia
consists of "the old British banks and trading companies, including the
HongShang, Jardine Matheson, Charterhouse Japhet, Swire's, and the Peninsular
and Orient Lines" plus a second satellite group of "overseas Chinese
networks, under the control of London and Beijing." This latter group is
indispensable to the HongShang: "The essence of the bank's drug control is
its intimate relationship to scores of expatriate Chinese banking families
scattered throughout the Far East. The British
and Dutch connection to these families dates back to the first East India
Company penetration of the region. The central banking role of the HongShang
expresses an agreement that grew out of a century of official opium trade and
continues through to the present." The Bangkok Metropolitan Bank is cited
as an example. The bank developed the Golden Triangle's major source of acetic
anhydride, an essential component of heroin production. It has reported links
to the Triads, the expatriate Chinese secret society involved in much of the
legwork of the drug trade. Yet the Chairman of the Bangkok Bank, Chin
Sophonpanich, "is actually nothing more than a subcontractor of the
Hongkong and Shanghai Bank."
The Chinese expatriate community handles a large percentage of the
legitimate commerce of the Southeast Asian region, much of it in partnership
with the HongShang. The corrupt segments of that community which handle the
drug trade "have provoked a long series of clashes with national
authorities.... The one exception is the British possession of Hong Kong, the
center of illegal operations in the area, where smugglers are members of Hong Kong's high society....
A critical element in managing the finances of the drug trade is the use
of gold and diamonds to hide the route of money transfers from point A to point
B. As the EIR puts it, "One bar of gold looks like any other; changing a
bank balance into gold or diamonds, and then changing it back into a bank
balance, is like crossing a river to avoid bloodhounds." The trade simply
could not be run without these commodities. These facts led the EIR to examine
where the gold and diamonds that were readily available in Hong
Kong came from.
First, the Hong Kong gold market was found to be run by a company called
Sharps Pixley Ward, 51 percent owned by the HongShang. The Hong Kong diamond
market was found to be monopolized by the Union Bank of Israel, which was wholly owned by Israel's
largest finance house, Bank Leumi. Following each of these commodities back to
their source brought the EIR to Harry Oppenheimer in South Africa.
Taking gold first, the market in Hong Kong involved a daily trading
volume in the hundreds of millions of dollars, on a par with the other major
gold markets in London and Zurich. The EIR quotes from an address by
British expert Timothy Green of Consolidated Gold Fields, Ltd. at the Gold
Conference of the London Financial Times
in October 1972: "It is a fact that both in 1970 and 1971 at least
500 tons of gold - that is to say half of all South Africa's production, or 40%
of total gold production in the non-Communist world - passed through unofficial
[i.e., illegal] channels on the way to its ultimate destination. These
unofficial channels usually start in gold markets such as Beirut
[since defunct], Dubai, Vientiane,
Hong Kong, and Singapore....
Their chief role - their raison d'etre - is as distribution centers for
smuggling.... Dubai has become the largest gold
market in the world, except for London and Zurich." In 1970 and 1971 the Dubai market transmitted
about 200 tons of gold, about one-fourth of South
Africa's production, into a golden pipeline toward India
and the East. The EIR notes, "The dominant commercial and gold market
force in Dubai is the British Bank of the Middle East, a 100% subsidiary of the Hongkong and
Shanghai Bank."
Many more details about the mechanics of illegal use are discussed, but
we'll try to keep focused on the bigger picture. Hong Kong, says the EIR,
"depends entirely on the London
gold pool for its supplies [of gold]. The London
gold pool is the same operation as the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, controlled
by the same London
families whose drug-running activities go back 150 years." The EIR then
offers up its details, including:
There are two major South African gold companies: Anglo-American and
Consolidated Gold Fields. The Anglo-American chairman is Harry Oppenheimer. In
1980 Oppenheimer also took 28% control of Consolidated Gold Fields. The gold
pool consists of five firms which meet daily to "fix" the day's gold
price. "Examining these firms individually," says the EIR, "we
discover such a manifold of connections that it is meaningless to speak of the London and Hong Kong gold
markets as anything but branch offices of the same operation."
The first London
pool member, Sharps Pixley, has a subsidiary Sharps Pixley Ward, which is 51%
owned by the HongShang. Other cited ties: Sharps Pixley is itself fully owned
by the London
merchant bank Kleinwort Benson, whose employee George Young "was the
number-two man of British intelligence throughout the 1960s." Kleinwort
Benson's deputy chairman is Sir Mark Turner; the chairman of Rio Tinto Zinc,
which was founded a century ago by a member of the Matheson family with the
opium-trading profits of Jardine Matheson. Members of the Matheson family are
still large shareholders in the HongShang.
The second pool member is Mocatta Metals, a majority share of which is
owned by Hong Kong's second largest bank, the
Standard and Chartered Bank, whose predecessor, the Standard Bank, was created
a century ago by Cecil Rhodes. Standard and Chartered has for years been
closely interlocked with the HongShang. Mocatta Metals' current chairman is Dr.
Henry Jarecki, who has of late been investigated for illegal activities. The
EIR says that European intelligence sources have alleged that Jarecki's money
laundering activities in the New York
City area have helped fund the activities of the
Mossad. Other details are discussed.
The third pool member is Samuel Montagu, which is wholly owned by the
Midland Bank. Midland
also owns 20% of Standard and Chartered, thus standing behind Mocatta Metals as
well. Sir Mark Turner, mentioned above, "is a director of both Midland
Bank and Samuel Montagu. The Montagu family is heavily intermarried with the
Rothschilds, Montefiores, and Samuels. One of the family's proteges is
HongShang board member Philip de Zulueta."
The fourth pool member is N.M. Rothschild and Sons, which commenced Hong Kong operations in 1975. The Rothschild name
appeared in our earliest reviews, and will frequently appear again.
The fifth and last member of the London
gold pool is Johnson Matthey. Both it and N.M. Rothschild and Sons are
"interlocked several times over with both the HongShang and the major
South African gold producers, Consolidated Gold Fields and Anglo-American, who
control between them 90% of South
Africa's gold output."
Going briefly to diamonds, the second commodity facilitating the opium
trade, we noted above that the Hong Kong market was under the financial control
of Israel's
largest finance house, Bank Leumi. That bank in turn is under the control of
Barclays Bank, "on whose board sat Harry Oppenheimer and the Oppenheimer
family. itself." Harry Oppenheimer, who is first of all the manager of the
largest South African gold producer, Anglo-American, is also the presiding
manager of the De Beers Corporation, which runs the worldwide diamond cartel.
De Beers was created in 1888 by Cecil Rhodes (again!). Today the diamond cartel
sells raw diamonds to 300 secret, select customers, following which the
purchased diamonds are sent to either Antwerp or
Ashqelon, Israel for cutting. The Israeli
processing is financed by Bank Leumi, the Antwerp
processing by the Banque Bruxelles-Lambert. The latter bank is "controlled
by the Lambert family, the Belgian cousins of the Rothschilds." I think
that we could fairly say at this point that a pattern has emerged.
Whereas the "reflow" of drug profits to the HongShang and
other destinations in the Far East is no doubt
desired to be entirely in laundered, readily negotiable form, some portion of
it apparently trickles in in small U.S. bills which still require
laundering, since Hmong peasants and other legmen in the trade much prefer
goods, gold, or their own local currency. One such laundering attempt by the
HongShang and five other Hong Kong banks
illustrated this need when an American bank receiving large cash deposits from
them was caught by the U.S. Treasury department, and fined $2.25 million, for
not reporting deposits greater than $10,000 from 1980 to 1984 aggregating
some $3.43 billion. The bank in question
was the Crocker National Bank of San
Francisco, which is closely tied to the HongShang.
"Indeed," says the EIR, "the HongShang is the parent company of
the Crocker Bank," with both of them being owned wholly or in part by the
London-based Midland Bank. Note that the fine amounted to about 60 cents per
$1000 of illegal deposits, a truly negligible laundering "cost."
The true nature of the drug and supportive financial operations in Hong
Kong are well-known to U.S.
officialdom. The EIR notes, "In testimony before the House Select
Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control in 1984,
Assistant Secretary of State Dominick Di Carlo pointed to Hong Kong as 'the
major financial center for Southeast Asia's
drug-trafficking. Hong Kong-based trafficking organizations operate throughout
the world."' The EIR further quotes a 1984 Presidential Commission on
Organized Crime which noted that the currency being repatriated from Hong Kong
in small bills "exceeds the total volume of all currency transactions with
any European country," including France and West Germany. The commission
discounted any notion that the flood of small bills could be anything other
than dope money.
There is one aspect of the drug trade which is not well known, however, or which is at least officially denied.
That is the matter of the involvement of the People's Republic of China
(PRC). On this issue, the EIR takes explicit exception to the allegations of
Alfred McCoy in his The Politics of
Heroin. The issue is important enough for us to clearly identify.
With respect to PRC involvement, McCoy claims in his book: 1) that Harry
Anslinger, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was wrong in
claiming PRC involvement; 2) that the Golden Triangle opium cultivation and
collection area excluded any portion of the PRC, specifically Yunnan province;
3) that all opium production within mainland China was terminated upon the
Communist conquest; 4) that Vietnamese officials were primarily responsible for
pushing drugs onto American soldiers, in order to raise money to support their
corrupt political infrastructure; and 5) that the Hong Kong drug business was
run by the heads of Chinese criminal syndicates who had fled from Shanghai just
before the Communists arrived.
The EIR takes issue with each of these claims, even to the point of
alleging that McCoy was led to make them because of his own sympathy with the
anti-Vietnam War movement, and his desire to help stop the war by exposing the U.S.
government's complicity in promoting the drug trade. The EIR's footnote on Part
III, Chapter 7 says in part (p. 278): "Experts on the Southeast Asian
theater at the time McCoy wrote simply doubt the author's integrity. McCoy had
available to him a mass of documentary evidence showing that roughly half the
Golden Triangle growing area lay within the confines of Communist China's
Yunnan province.... McCoy simply chose to ignore this evidence, or, more
accurately, to attempt to refute it with unsubstantiated assertions.... McCoy's book cannot be taken seriously as
far as the PRC issue is concerned." [EIR's emphasis]
With respect to the PRC, the EIR updates to 1992 what it first wrote
back in 1978, and also adds an entirely new appendix covering the PRC's
involvement. The EIR's evidence is extensive. They start by quoting comments
made by Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai in a 1965 conversation with Egyptian
President Nasser: "Some of [the U.S.
troops in Vietnam]
are trying opium, and we are helping them. We are planting the best kinds of
poppies especially for the American soldiers in Vietnam.... Do you remember when
the West imposed opium on us? They fought us with opium, and we are going to
fight them with their own weapons.... The effect this demoralization is going
to have on the United States
will be far greater than anyone realizes."
It is through the triad of the PRC and the British and expatriate
Chinese in Hong Kong that the PRC will realize
its share of the drug trade profits, says the EIR. It quotes from a Reuters
report of Sept. 25, 1982 in which British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew
to Beijing to consult with PRC elder statesman
Deng Xiaoping on the future of Hong Kong. From
there she flew to Shanghai to have lunch with
Sir Y. K. Pao, an expatriate Chinese and British knight who is a board member
of both the HongShang and the Chase Manhattan Bank, and who runs Hong Kong's Worldwide Shipping, which manages the world's
largest merchant fleet. From there she went to a shipyard in Shanghai and performed the naming ceremony
for one of Pao's new ships, called World
Goodwill. She told the Shanghai mayor,
"The ship is the symbol of the close relation between China, Britain,
and Hong Kong."
The EIR continues, "Since the late 1950s, Beijing
has deliberately integrated its external financial affairs with the top British
drug-running firms in Hong Kong and Macao
and the overseas Chinese drug wholesaling and dirty money networks throughout
the Orient.... Beijing's financial dependence on
Hong Kong is a matter of public record. On
Oct. 2, 1978, Chase Manhattan's newsletter East-West
Markets estimated that the financial flow into mainland China in 1978 (excluding [payments for] exports)
through Hong Kong would total $2.5 billion....
Beijing does all its banking through Hong Kong, largely through the Hongkong and Shanghai
Bank, and secondarily through the Standard and Chartered Bank. The astonishing
$2.5 billion financial reflow back to Communist China represents the fruits of Beijing's twenty-year
program of moving into the higher echelons of the drug traffic, by agreement
with the British.... Beijing's current policy
represents a direct line of continuity between the current regime and Britain's nineteenth-century corrupt
collaborators in China.
Correspondingly, the fortunes of the Beijing Communists are linked to the opium
trade and the British oligarchy. They have staked China's economy - its capacity to
import urgently needed foreign goods - on the opium trade."
Much more detail and lines of evidence are offered by the EIR in the
update of their old material, including the complicity of the PRC intelligence
service, the PRC's participation in the Hong Kong gold market, Hong Kong's act
of self-protection by moving its heroin labs out of Hong Kong, another joint
venture between Sir Pao and the PRC in 1980, born out of an earlier discussion
with Margaret Thatcher in London, and more.
Then in their new appendix, the EIR seeks to summarize the then-present
(1992) state of the PRC involvement. The cover-up of the PRC's drug war against
us far exceeds in effectiveness the Warren Commission attempted cover-up of the
Kennedy assassination. The PRC cover-up was orchestrated by Henry Kissinger
following his trip to China
in 1972. Nixon fought it, but was outmaneuvered and eventually driven from
office. The PRC never did stop growing and distributing opium, though they
outlawed its domestic consumption, ruthlessly enforced that proscription, and
brought production under state monopoly control. "Corroborated reports
indicate that today [1992] the PRC is the world's largest opium producer, [at]
800 metric tons of opium per year....
The Hong Kong-based Liberation
Monthly reported in December 1989 that the PRC provides 80% of the
high-quality heroin selling on the international market.... A San Jose Mercury article, published
May 16, 1975, explained why [such details were seldom seen]: 'A secret federal
report, the Mercury has learned,
pinpoints the PRC as the producer of quantities of heroin that have been
detected in the Bay area. The report ... supposedly is being kept under wraps
... for fear its release could affect detente between the U.S. and China." This makes it clear
enough that official Washington is well aware
that the PRC is growing and distributing drugs to the U.S. It's only the public that
doesn't know.
The EIR appendix discusses the drug routes out of the Golden Triangle,
including the Yunnan
province, and something about the local controlling entities. It quotes the
Thai police chief who predicted that the 1989 opium harvest would increase to
2000 tons, over triple the 600 ton yield in 1981. The new figure includes PRC
opium raised in Yunnan and smuggled into Burma for delivery through Thailand. Eyewitnesses are quoted
concerning the Yunnan
operations. Several PRC leaders of the drug operations are identified. Also discussed
is Beijing's relatively new attempt to bring distribution under their own
in-house control in place of that of the expatriate Chinese, since the latter
are too prone to invest their profits in legitimate businesses outside of the
PRC instead of sending it all back to mainland China. Gang warfare has broken
out in such places as Amsterdam
over this issue.
The EIR then backs up a few years to further examine the recent origins
of the current PRC-British drug venture. The EIR's sources are recently released
documents of both the U.S. State Department and Britain's
Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) covering the years of the
Communist conquest of China.
The EIR recalls first that the RIIA was created in 1919 by Lord Milner, in
furtherance of the tasks he undertook as administrator of the Rhodes Trust to
fulfill the wishes of Cecil Rhodes. Those wishes were expressed in Rhodes' will (somewhat abridged) as follows:
"To establish a trust, to and for the establishment and promotion
and development of a secret society, the true aim and object whereof shall be
the extension of British rule throughout the world ... and especially the
occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy
Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia [Crete],
the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed
by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and
Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral
part of the British Empire, the consolidation of the whole Empire ... and
finally, the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars
impossible and promote the best interests of humanity. 11 In support of this
strategic policy, the events respecting China
and Britain
during the World War 2 period went something as follows. Britain became convinced during 1942 that they
would lose the support of the American public if they disavowed the Atlantic
Charter's declaration in favor of self-determination for all, and instead
insisted upon retaining autonomy over their enclaves in the Far
East. In particular this included the portion of Shanghai
which they administered, Shanghai
coincidentally being the world's center for refusing opium into heroin. The
RIIA and its offspring, the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), therefore
proposed and pushed an alternative policy of fostering Maoism.
Why? One clue appears in a 1976 book by Peter Vladimirov, the Soviet
liaison to Mao Zedong's wartime headquarters in the north-central Chinese city
of Yenan, in
which Vladimirov alleged that Mao supported the continued cultivation around
Yenan of opium as a major cash crop, a practice begun before Mao's arrival. He
also questioned Mao's "close contact with American visitors connected to
the IPR." A second clue appeared in a 1978 issue of the RIIA's journal International Affairs. Victor Farmer, of
the RIIA's Far Eastern Committee, is reported to have stated following a 1944
visit to the Far East: "I have met some
[Chinese] Communists and their ideas are very open-minded. If you could get rid
of this ultra-nationalist clique in the saddle at present in Chungking
... I think that the way would be open for a compromise with the Communists;
and an effective compromise."
An "effective compromise" was in fact obtained, primarily
through the efforts of Sir John Henry Keswick, of the hereditary drug-trading
family which founded Jardine Matheson. Sir John Henry was attached to the
British embassy in Chungking during World War 2, and was in regular contact
during this period with Chou En-lai, who was running the Chinese Communist
legation in Chungking. Concerning that
compromise, the EIR says that both the RIIA and the State Department documents
"yield the same interpretation: the creation of the PRC included an
alliance between the British dope-runners and the Chinese dope-runners. This
was negotiated from the British side by Sir John Henry Keswick and from the
Chinese side by Chou En-lai. The Chinese team also prominently included top
figures in the opium trade ... [including] elements of the so-called Green
Gangs, [who] ran the opium trade not only in the Far East
but throughout the far-flung Chinese expatriate community. 11
The EIR continues: "From both the British and the Chinese side, the
alliance was explicitly against the United States. The Chinese knew it,
and said so, the British knew it, and said so, and American diplomats cabled
home that the United States
had been shafted."
The British then replaced their "pro-colonialist" policy with
the "softer" pro-Maoist policy, with the help of the pro-Maoist IPR
group in the U.S. State Department centered around John S. Service and John
Carter Vincent. When the Communists finally took over China, Americans were infuriated at
what they thought were Communists in the IPR who had infiltrated the State
Department and helped bring about the Communist victory. The fact that the IPR
was a British entity serving British foreign policy objectives was a deep
secret never remotely guessed at by the general public or the U.S. Congress.
Concerning the IPR, the EIR summarizes: "The dead giveaway on the IPR's
British character is the organization's move to Canada subsequent to the 1950
McCarran Committee investigation, which mistook pro-British treason for
pro-Communist treason. With hearty British cheers, the disgraced IPR moved to Canada ... [where it] came under the official
sponsorship of the Canadian Institute
of International Affairs,
the local RIIA subsidiary...."
And what did the British get out of their secret deal? First, the PRC
granted them continued control over Hong Kong.
Second, the PRC in 1949 let them move the Shanghai
heroin laboratories into Hong Kong. Third, as
early as 1947, the Chinese banking community in Shanghai
was organizationally divided between a PRC faction which remained on the
mainland and an "expatriate" faction which soon left for
British-controlled Hong Kong. The two factions
remained in close contact, however, thereby creating the financial ties between
the PRC, the expatriate Chinese, and the British which "would later [be
used to] underwrite the Far East narcotics
traffic."
Around 40 million Chinese died in the post-war PRC consolidation.
Americans and others of the West have since suffered vast narcotics addiction.
To what bottomless depth is it possible for human corruption to fall?
Lord Humphrey Trevelyan was appointed in 1951 as British ambassador to
the PRC. He is credited with laying the groundwork for the later American
commercial opening to the PRC, executed by Henry Kissinger. Trevelyan today
sits on the Board of the British Bank of the Middle East,
and also on the board of British Petroleum, "along with John Keswick's
brother Sir William Johnston Keswick, and various other members of the boards
of the HongShang and the RIIA Council. Lord Trevelyan completed the circle by
taking the chairmanship of the Council of the Royal Institute, while keeping an
active hand in the opium business through the British Bank of the Middle East."
The EIR has included a fascinating chapter on the history of the
Canadian Bronfman family, of which we can only scratch the surface. First came
Yechiel Bronfman, "a grist mill owner from Bessarabia,
Romania," who emigrated
to Canada
in 1889, sponsored by the Moses Montefiore Colonization Committee, created in
1872 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, Baron Alfred de Rothschild, and others in the
Zionist community. In Canada,
says the EIR, the Bronfman family "first turned to selling wood, then to
horse trading, and then most successfully to the hotel business (and
prostitution)." The Bronfinans, who shortly attained multi-millionaire
status, were selected by the British to import and distribute British liquor
during the Canadian Prohibition period, and then to export that same liquor to
the U.S.
during the American Prohibition which started immediately thereafter. During
the Canadian Prohibition, two of the Bronfman sons, Sam and Abe,
"collaborated with the Hudson's
Bay Company - in which the Keswick family of Jardine Matheson had controlling
interest - to buy the Canadian Pure Drug Company," utilized to enable the
legal distribution of "medicinal" alcohol. But the family's major
assignment came with American Prohibition, when it was charged with selecting
the American gangs which would distribute British liquor, and smuggling that
liquor to them. That success led to the use of the same network to distribute
opium from the Far East.
Arnold Rothstein, who had started the serious work of creating an
American crime syndicate consisting of members who would cooperate instead of
seeking to kill each other, was himself killed in 1928. His work was picked up
by one John Torrio, "a Bron$nan man" says the EIR, who was better
able to work with the Italian crime elements in the U.S. than Rothstein or Bronfman
himself could. Torrio was very successful, and he was later followed by Luciano
and ultimately by Meyer Lansky. The crime kingpins, however, were the
Bronfmans, who were beholden to the British elites, who were the Bronfmans'
financiers, their political protectors, and their booze and opium suppliers.
The EIR devotes a whole chapter to the Permindex operation. Of course
that entity also leads back to the British, and makes the involvement of such a
person as Major Louis Bloomfield, the personal attorney of the Bronfman family,
much more understandable. Bloomfield, the Chairman of the Board of Permindex,
was recruited in 1938 into the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) where
he worked under Sir William Stephenson to implement an agreement negotiated by
Stephenson (for Winston Churchill) and President Roosevelt to allow
"British intelligence to set up shop in the United States and to
effectively merge its operations with those of the FBI and military
intelligence.... Bloomfield,
described by numerous authors and associates as a practicing homosexual,
developed a deeply personal friendship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Through that relationship, Bloomfield
was able to retain his powerful position in Division Five long after the end of
the war. As late as 1963, when Bloomfield
was case officer in the assassination plot against John F. Kennedy, he was
still a top official in Division Five."
Let's pause to reconsider the Kennedy assassination. The operative
elements of a plausible scenario might be as follows:
Joe Kennedy was supplied booze by Bronfinan and the British, and (like
Bronfinan himself) remained interested his whole life in becoming a part of,
and being accepted by, the British elites.
Upon JFK's election, Joe and his son John started doing the task
assigned by the British-Bronfman combine of expunging the unwanted Mafia
elements from the American crime syndicate and preserving the desired ones,
including Lansky and Traff carte.
The Kennedys did OK until their anti-Semitism got in the way, causing
them to choke on Israel's
covert development of nuclear weapons.
The British, seeing their
creation, Israel,
being threatened, concurred with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's
desire to terminate John Kennedy.
The assassination was then ordered and executed as described by Michael
Collins Piper in Final Judgment.
The Permindex operation is discussed in very great detail, as is its
more modem replacement entity known as Resorts International, which is the real
headquarters organization of the overtly criminal aspects of the drug business,
*including drug and gun-running, and assassination. A whole chapter is
also devoted to the well-developed and long-planned British effort to lure
American youth into drug usage, i.e., to develop their drug market, resulting
in the paroxysm of the 60's with which we are all familiar. We will resist the
urge to go into these matters as well, and content ourselves to discuss just
two other topics covered in this uniquely valuable book.
The first has to do with the EIR's description of the organization of
the family elements within the oligarchy which is attempting to control us.
Some of the family names at the top go back to the 1300's. The religious and
other ties that bind them together are described. Some of the family names are
Bruce (from King Robert Bruce of Scotland), Russell, Villiers,
Keswick, Inchcape, Pease, Matheson, Mackay, Churchill, Lloyd, Cecil, and
Lytton. These folks hide their involvement in the illegal activities which
afflict us by utilizing several camouflaging layers of subordinates who do
their dirty work for them. Law enforcement officials call these layers
"cutouts." There are three cutout layers below the elite oligarchy,
says the EIR:
"The first is a front for Jewish-surnamed criminal elements. [In
the first edition of Dope, Inc. were
the words, 'In the West, the prime cutout ... is the Zionist lobby.... In China
(it was) the corrupted Soong family which carried out the day-to-day business
operations of Jardine Matheson.'] This cutout begins at the top with a cohesive
grouping of Hof
uden ('Court Jews') who have served British monarchs and Venetian doges for
generations. These families have a centuries-long unbroken tradition of
attaching themselves to the predominant noble houses of Europe: the Venetians
and Genoese, the nobility of Amsterdam, and then when the Dutch nobility was
merged with the British in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, the
Hofjuden centered themselves around the British and have served it to this day.
"The Hofjuden have less than nothing to do with the Jewish people,
their well-being and aspirations for themselves and their posterity. These
families' only relation to the Jews has been to periodically call down
persecution upon them, and then to excuse their own role in it by their
surnames [i.e., hide their role by
claiming to be one of the persecuted Jews]. One cannot condemn the Jewish
people for the centuries of crimes committed by the Hofjuden, whose primary
victim has been that people itself.
"Among these top families are the Montefiores, servants of the
Genoese nobility since the thirteenth century; ... the Goldsmids and Mocattas,
leading bullion merchants for the British royal family; ... the Oppenheimers,
controllers of a large proportion of the diamond and gold mining in South
Africa; the Sassoons, the first Hofjuden to settle in India and devote their
resources primarily to opium production; ... the Canadian de Hirsch family,
bankrollers of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to Canada; the
Rothschilds, with a long-standing special interest in subverting the American
republic; and the other 'Our Crowd' banking families of Warburg, Schiff, Meyer,
Loeb, Schroder, etc....
"The second major layer of cutouts [consists of] the emigre
nobility and pseudo-nobility of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean
- the Jesuit / Russian Orthodox, or 'Solidarist' nobility.... Typical of these
families are the Radziwills, leaders of the Polish Solidarists; the
unreconstructed fascist Ferenc Nagy of Permindex; the de Menils, [involved in
Permindex]; the di Spadaforas, representatives of the Italian House of Savoy in
the Permindex Assassination Bureau; and of course, the families of minor
nobility such as one wellknown Brzezinski. The political family of William F.
Buckley, Jr. and James Buckley are permanent hangers-on of the Jesuit emigre
circles, and promoters of drug decriminalization.
"The third and most active 'cutout' [consists of] the Socialist
International front organizations in North America.
[Included are] Social Democrats U.S.A. and the League for Industrial Democracy,
... [which] are the funding sources for pro-drug and pro-terrorist
organizations: the Institute for Policy Studies, the Communist Workers Party,
Yippies, and the rotten American Civil Liberties Union networks epitomized by
William Kunstler."
The first edition of Dope, Inc. was
more explicit about the relationship between the Hofjuden and the Jewish
people. The EIR there stated:
"The Hofjuden should not be confused with the Jewish people.... The
only relation the Hofjuden have had to Jewry is that of persecutors and
tormentors. As the clandestine operations bureau of the oligarchy, they quickly
learned that they could augment their capabilities tremendously by subjecting
Jews to waves of persecutions and then recruiting terrorized Jews into Zionist
organizations that had as their ostensible aim the 'survival' of Jewry! In
street parlance, the Hofjuden have run a six-century-long protection-extortion
racket against the Jewish people - to the overall effect of building up a
sizable 'Zionist' network at the disposal of British Secret Intelligence. This
traditional relationship to Jewry was carried to its [logical] conclusion in
the 20th century when the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Oppenheimers, Schroders, and
other Hofjuden became the leading financial backers of Adolf Hitler.
"One of the greatest benefits that the Hofuden gained by their
complicity in Hitler's genocide of the East European population was that they
could henceforth hide behind the memory of the awesome fate of millions of Jews
and conduct the filthiest sorts of operations - from drug-running to terrorism
to genocide against Arab and related populations - without being exposed for
these crimes against humanity. Whenever any critic attempted to expose these
crimes, he was quickly assaulted as a 'Nazi,' a 'fascist,' or an
'anti-Semite."'
Our final effort will be to summarize the EIR's view of the
organizational structure of Dope, Inc. as of 1986. The oligarchy, says the EIR,
views the world's peoples as so many "talking beasts" to be utilized
as desired in the service of the oligarchy. Narcotics serve that purpose as an
efficient tool for both control and profit, since it weakens the resistance of
the target populations, and also brings in several hundred billion dollars annually to help grow the oligarchy's various
criminal projects. These projects presently include depopulation (fewer proles
are needed to harvest the required food, fiber, and minerals), destruction of
national sovereignty, debt collection, destruction of the Western Alliance, and
the reduction of U.S. power to 25% of its post-World War 2 strength.
The effort is led by the families owning or controlling the network of
major London banks and holding companies, including
the HongShang, the Oppenheimer interests, Barclays Bank, the London gold pool, etc. Bronfman's Canadian
enterprises are controlled by Eagle Star Insurance, a major London financial corporation, which in turn
is jointly run by Barclays, Lloyds, Hill Samuel, and N.M. Rothschild and Sons. Canada itself is little more than a colonial
tool in the hands of the British elites, useful in helping to bring the U.S.
to heel.
A large-scale effort to "buy up" American finance was launched
following Nixon's (i. e., Paul Volcker's) removal of the gold backing from the
dollar. A 40% de facto devaluation occurred with respect to gold-based European
capital pools, and, combined with a troubled stock market, the London
and other European elites found easy pickings, particularly among the U.S.
brokerage firms. One of the first to go was George Ball's Lehman Brothers,
followed by Lazard Freres, Drexel Burnham Lambert, and others. Then in 1981,
Salomon Brothers, investment banker to Citibank, and perhaps the most powerful
investment banker on Wall Street, merged with Phibro, the Oppenheimer trading
arm. An indicator of the great strength of the European financial power in the U.S. security markets, which helped to bring
about these foreign takeovers, is that foreign equity investment amounted in
1980 to about 20% of the value of all U.S. stocks. Much of the money
brought to bear in our markets is suspected to be "drug money," much
of which otherwise disappears from the world's balance sheets.
Back in the early 60's, the First National City Bank had hired a
Dutchman, Robert Meyjes, who proposed to set up a "private international
banking" division of the bank. He did so, and sent some 600 bank trainees
through the division in the next 10 years. Meyjes is now in Citibank's Paris office, and his
"trainees" are scattered in various banks around the world, running
an "old-boy" network of covert "banking," privately
handling the deposits of people who are not anxious to say where their money
came from. David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank quickly caught on (they
referred to it internally as "looking for Mafia money"), and followed
suit, not very successfully, says the EIR, until they accepted onto their board
Mr. Y.K. Pao, the vice-chairman of the HongShang, prior to which they found no
entry into Hong Kong's lucrative activities.
Further consolidations took place in the 80's. Lehman Brothers had been
taken over by Kuhn Loeb, which was in turn taken over by American Express, on
whose board Henry Kissinger was elected in 1984. American Express also absorbed
Shearson Hayden Stone, which had just previously gobbled the German-Jewish
investment bank Loeb Rhoades. American Express then became the monster Wall
Street umbrella called Shearson Lehman American Express. The board member of American
Express who managed that series of mergers was attorney Kenneth Bialkin, the
then-current [ 1986] chairman of the ADL.
Henry Kissinger is the at least nominal head of Kissinger Associates,
whose members, says the EIR, "represent a de facto board of directors for
the entity we call Dope, Inc." The members include:
Mario d'Urso, who ran the old Kuhn Loeb international department, and is
now "the New York
chief for the Jefferson Insurance Company," a joint arm of the two giant
Italian insurance companies which control the fortunes of the ancient Venetian
trading families.
Britain's Lord Carrington,
the cofounder of Kissinger Associates and a former director of both Hambro's
Bank and Barclays Bank.
Lord Eric Roll of Ipsden, the chairman of the London merchant bank S.G. Warburg.
Kissinger Associates is represented in Hong Kong
by Sir Y.K. Kan, who also "represents the four overseas Chinese families
which control the Hong Kong-based Bank of East Asia."
The EIR summarizes as follows: "The monster we identified in 1978
has molted, shedding such skin as the Banco Ambrosiano and Investors Overseas
Service, only to multiply in extent and influence. Six years ago, the narcotics
traffic menaced all future generations of youth. Now it is the center of the
gravest threat to Western civilization since the fourteenth century. Slowly,
belatedly, the governments of the West have acknowledged the extent of the
problem, and, in their lumbering fashion, accepted parts of the analysis we
offered six years ago. But effective, ruthless action has yet to be taken
against the citizens and institutions who have brought the dregs of the
financial underworld to the apex of power in political life." The EIR has
also said, however, that the malefactors are known, and given the political
will, the cleanup job can be accomplished.