SPY MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 1992
By 1966, Wackenhut could confidently state that it had secret files on 4 million Americans
SID
-- a unit, known as founder and chairman George Wackenhut's "private
FBI," that provided executive protection and conducted undercover
investigations and sting operations. Once they arrived, they rented two
gray Ford Taurus's and drove four hours to a desolate town on the
Mexican border called Eagle Pass. There, just after dark, they met two
truck drivers who had been flown in from Houston. Inside a nearby
warehouse was an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, which the two truck drivers
and the four Wackenhut agents in their rented cars were supposed to
transport to Chicago. "My instructions were very clear," Ramirez
recalls. "Do not look into the trailer, secure it, and make sure it
safely gets to Chicago." It went without saying that no one else was
supposed to look in the trailer, either, which is why the Wackenhut men
were armed with fully loaded Remington 870 pump-action shotguns.
The
convoy drove for 30 hours straight, stopping only for gas and food.
Even then, one of the Wackenhut agents had to stay with the truck,
standing by one of the cars, its trunk open, shotgun within easy reach.
"Whenever we stopped, I bought a shot glass with the name of the town on
it," Ramirez recalls. "I have glasses from Oklahoma City, Kansas City,
St. Louis."
A
little before 5:00 on the morning of the third day, they delivered the
trailer to a practically empty warehouse outside Chicago. A burly man
who had been waiting for them on the loading dock told them to take off
the locks and go home, and that was that. They were on a plane back to
Miami that afternoon. Later Ramirez's superiors told him—as they told
other SID agents about similar midnight runs—that the trucks contained
$$40 million worth of food stamps. After considering the secrecy, the
way the team was assembled and the orders not to stop or open the truck,
Ramirez decided he didn't believe that explanation.
Neither
do we. One reason is simple: A Department of Agriculture official
simply denies that food stamps are shipped that way. "Someone is blowing
smoke," he says. Another reason is that after a six-month
investigation, in the course of which we spoke to more than 300 people,
we believe we know what the truck did contain—equipment necessary for
the manufacture of chemical weapons—and where it was headed: to Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. And the Wackenhut Corporation—a publicly traded company
with strong ties to the CIA and federal contracts worth $$200 million a
year—was making sure Saddam would be getting his equipment intact. The
question is why.
IN
1954, GEORGE WACKENHUT, THEN A 34-YEAR-old former FBI agent, joined up
with three other former FBI agents to open a company in Miami called
Special Agent Investigators Inc. The partnership was neither successful
nor harmonious—George once knocked partner Ed Dubois unconscious to end a
disagreement over the direction the company would take—and in 1958,
George bought out his partners.
However
capable Wackenhut's detectives may have been at their work, George
Wackenhut had two personal attributes that were instrumental in the
company's growth. First, he got along exceptionally well with important
politicians. He was a close ally of Florida governor Claude Kirk, who
hired him to combat organized crime in the state, and was also friends
with Senator George Smathers, an intimate of John F. Kennedy's. It was
Smathers who provided Wackenhut with his big break when the senator's
law firm helped the company find a loophole in the Pinkerton law, the 1893 federal statute that had made it a crime for an employee of a private detective agency to do work for the government.
Smathers's firm set up a wholly owned subsidiary of Wackenhut that
provided only guards, not detectives. Shortly thereafter, Wackenhut
received multimillion-dollar contracts from the government to guard Cape
Canaveral and the Nevada nuclear-bomb test site, the first of many
extremely lucrative federal contracts that have sustained the company to
this day.
The
second thing that helped make George Wackenhut successful was that he
was, and is, a hard-line right-winger. He was able to profit from his
beliefs by building up dossiers on Americans suspected of being
Communists or merely left-leaning—"subversives and sympathizers," as he
put it—and selling the information to interested parties. According to
Frank Donner, the author of Age of Surveillance, the Wackenhut
Corporation maintained and updated its files even after the McCarthyite
hysteria had ebbed, adding the names of antiwar protesters and
civil-rights demonstrators to its list of "derogatory types." By 1965,
Wackenhut was boasting to potential investors that the company
maintained files on 2.5 million suspected dissidents—one in 46 American
adults then living. In 1966, after acquiring the private files of Karl
Barslaag, a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, Wackenhut could confidently maintain that with more than 4
million names, it had the largest privately held file on suspected
dissidents in America. In 1975, after Congress investigated companies
that had private files, Wackenhut gave its files to the now-defunct
anti-Communist Church League of America of Wheaton, Illinois. That
organization had worked closely with the red squads of big-city police
departments, particularly in New York and L.A., spying on suspected
sympathizers; George Wackenhut was personal friends with the League's
leaders, and was a major contributor to the group. To be sure, after
giving the League its files, Wackenhut reserved the right to use them
for its clients and friends.
Wackenhut
had gone public in 1965; George Wackenhut retained 54 percent of the
company. Between his salary and dividends, his annual compensation
approaches $2 million a year, sufficient for him to live in a $$20
million castle in Coral Gables, Florida, complete with a moat and 18
full-time servants. Today the company is the third-largest investigative
security firm in the country, with offices throughout the United States
and in 39 foreign countries.
It
is not possible to overstate the special relationship Wackenhut enjoys
with the federal government. It is close. When it comes to security
matters, Wackenhut many respects is the government. 1991, a third of the
company's $600 million in revenues came from the federal government,
and another large chunk from companies that themselves work for the
government, such as Westinghouse. Wackenhut is the largest single
company supplying security to U.S. embassies overseas; several of the 13
embassies it guards have been in important hotbeds of espionage, such
as Chile, Greece and El Salvador. It also guards nearly all the most
strategic government facilities in the U.S., including the Alaskan oil
pipeline, the Hanford nuclear-waste facility, the Savannah River
plutonium plant and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wackenhut
maintains an especially close relationship with the federal government
in other ways as well. While early boards of directors included such
prominent personalities of the political right as Captain Eddie
Rickenbacker, General Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch
Society leader, current and recent members of the board have included
much of the country's recent national-security directorate: former FBI
director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy
director Frank Carlucci; former Defense Intelligence Agency director
General Joseph Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J.
Rowley; former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of
President Bush's foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA
deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as
Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut's outside
legal counsel. The company has 30,000 armed employees on its payroll.
We
wanted to know more about this special relationship, but the government
was not forthcoming. Repeated requests to the Department of Energy for
an explanation of how one company got he security contracts for nearly
all of America's most strategic installations have gone unanswered.
Similarly, efforts to get the State Department to explain whether
embassy contracts were awarded arbitrarily or through competitive
bidding were fruitless; essentially, the State Department said, "Some of
both." Wackenhut's competitors—who, understandably, asked not to be
quoted by name—have their own version. "All those contracts," said one
security-firm executive, "are just another way to pay Wackenhut for
their clandestine help." And what is the nature of that help? "It is
known throughout the industry," says retired FBI special agent William
Hinshaw, "that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut."
Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA,
ex-analyst says, on a quid pro quo
ex-analyst says, on a quid pro quo
WE MET GEORGE WACKENHUT IN HIS swanky, muy macho offices
in Coral Gables. The rooms are paneled in a dark, rich rosewood,
accented with gray-blue stone. The main office is dominated by
Wackenhut's 12-foot-long desk and a pair of chairs shaped like
elephants— "Republican chairs," he calls them -- complete with real
tusks, which, the old man says with some amusement, tend to stick his
visitors. The highlight of the usual collection of pictures and awards
is the Republican presidential exhibit: an autographed photo of
Wackenhut shaking hands with George Bush (whom Wackenhut, according to a
former associate, used to call "that pinko" as well as framed photos of
Presidents Reagan, Nixon and Bush, each accompanied by a handwritten
note.
The
chairman looks every inch the comfortable Florida septuagenarian. The
day we spoke, his clothing ranged across the color spectrum from baby
blue to light baby blue, and he wore a lot of jewelry -a huge gold watch
on a thick gold band, two massive gold rings. But Wackenhut was, at 72,
quick and tough in his responses. Near the end of our
two-and-a-half-hour interview, when asked if his company was an arm of
the CIA, he snapped, "No!"
Of
course, this may just be a matter of semantics. We have spoken to
numerous experts, including current and former CIA agents and analysts,
current and former agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and
current and former Wackenhut executives and employees, all of whom have
said that in the mid-1970s, after the Senate Intelligence Committee's
revelations of the CIA's covert and sometimes illegal overseas
operations, the agency and Wackenhut grew very, very close. Those
revelations had forced the CIA to do a housecleaning, and it became CIA
policy that certain kinds of activities would no longer officially be
performed. But that didn't always mean that the need or the desire to
undertake such operations disappeared. And that's where Wackenhut came
in.
Our
sources confirm that Wackenhut has had a longstanding relationship with
the CIA, and that it has deepened over the last decade or so. Bruce
Berckmans, who was assigned to the CIA station in Mexico City, left the
agency in January 1975 (putatively) to become a Wackenhut
international-operations vice president. Berckmans, who left Wackenhut
in 1981, told SPY that he has seen a formal proposal George Wackenhut
submitted to the CIA to allow the agency to use Wackenhut offices
throughout the world as fronts for CIA activities. Richard Babayan, who
says he was a CIA contract employee and is currently in jail awaiting
trial on fraud and racketeering charges, has been cooperating with
federal and congressional investigators looking into illegal shipments
of nuclear-and-chemical-weapons-making supplies to Iraq. "Wackenhut has
been used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for years," he told
SPY "When they {the CIA} need cover, Wackenhut is there to provide it
for them." Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau was said to have
rebuffed Wackenhut's efforts in the 1980s to purchase a
weapons-propellant manufacturer in Quebec with the remark "We just got
rid of the CIA—we don't want them back." Philip Agee, the left-wing
former CIA agent who wrote an expose of the agency in 1975, told us, "I
don't have the slightest doubt that the CIA and Wackenhut overlap."
There
is also testimony from people who are not convicts, renegades or
Canadians. William Corbett, a terrorism expert who spent 18 years as a
CIA analyst and is now an ABC News consultant based in Europe, confirmed
the relationship between Wackenhut and the agency. "For years Wackenhut
has been involved with the CIA and other intelligence organizations,
including the DEA," he told SPY "Wackenhut would allow the CIA to occupy
positions within the company {in order to carry out} clandestine
operations." He also said that Wackenhut would supply intelligence
agencies with information, and that it was compensated for this—"in a
quid pro quo arrangement," Corbett says—with government contracts worth
billions of dollars over the years.
We
have uncovered considerable evidence that Wackenhut carried the CIA's
water in fighting Communist encroachment in Central America in the 1980s
(that is to say, during the Reagan administration, when the CIA
director was former Wackenhut lawyer William Casey, the late
superpatriot who had a proclivity for extralegal and illegal
anti-Communist covert operations such as Iran-contra). In 1981,
Berckmans, the CIA agent turned Wackenhut vice president, joined with
other senior Wackenhut executives to form the company's Special Projects
Division. It was this division that linked up with ex-CIA man John
Philip Nichols, who had taken over the Cabazon Indian reservation in
California, as we described in a previous article {"Badlands;" April
1992}, in pursuit of a scheme to manufacture explosives, poison gas and
biological weapons—and then, by virtue of the tribe's status as a
sovereign nation, to export the weapons to the contrast This maneuver
was designed to evade congressional prohibitions against the U.S.
government's helping the contrast Indeed, in an interview with SPY, Eden
Pastora, the contras' famous Commander Zero, who had been spotted at a
test of some night-vision goggles at a firing range near the Cabazon
reservation in the company of Nichols and a Wackenhut executive,
offhandedly identified that executive, A. Robert Frye, as "the man from
the CIA." (In a subsequent conversation he denied knowing Frye at all;
of course, in that same talk he quite unbelievably denied having ever
been a contra.)
In
addition to attempted weapons supply, Wackenhut seems to have been
involved in Central America in other ways. Ernesto Bermudez, who was
Wackenhut's director of international operations from 1987 to '89,
admitted to SPY that during 1985 and '86 he ran Wackenhut's operations
in El Salvador, where he was in charge of 1,500 men. When asked what
1,500 men were doing for Wackenhut in El Salvador, Bermudez replied
coyly, "Things." Pressed, he elaborated: "Things you wouldn't want your
mother to know about." It's worth noting that Wackenhut's annual
revenues from government contracts—the alleged reward for cooperation in
the government's clandestine activities—increased by $150 million, a 45
percent jump, while Ronald Reagan was in office. "You've done an awful
lot of research," George Wackenhut said to me as I was leaving. "How
would you like to run all our New York operations? "
IF
THAT WAS THE EXTENT of Wackenhut's possible involvement in a government
agency's attempt to circumvent the law, then we might dismiss it as an
interesting footnote to the overheated, cowboy anti-Communist l980s.
However, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida has been
conducting an investigation into the illegal export of dual-use
technology—that is, seemingly innocuous technology that can also be used
to make nuclear weapons—to Iraq and Libya. And SPY has learned that
Wackenhut's name has come up in the federal investigation, but not at
present as a target.
Between
1987 end '89, three companies in the United States received investments
from an Iraqi architect named Ihsan Barbouti. The colorful Barbouti
owned an engineering company in Frankfurt that had a $$552 million
contract to build airfields in Iraq. He also admitted having designed
Mu'ammar Qaddafi's infamous German-built chemical-weapons plant in
Rabta, Libya. According to an attorney for one of the companies in which
Barbouti invested, the architect owned $100 million worth of real
estate and oil-drilling equipment in Texas and Oklahoma. He may also be
dead, there being reports that he died of heart failure in Queen Mary's
University Hospital in London on July 1, 1990, his 63rd birthday.
Barbouti, however, had faked his death once before, in 1969, after the
Ba'ath takeover in Iraq, which brought Saddam Hussein to power as the
second-in-command. That time, Barbouti escaped Iraq, resurfacing several
years later in Lebanon and Libya. There are now reports that he is
living in Jordan—or, according to other reports, in a CIA safe house in
Florida. Those reports can be considered no better than rumor; what
follows, though, is fact.
As reported on ABC's Nightline last
year, the three companies in which Barbouti invested were TK-7 of
Oklahoma City, which makes a fuel additive; Pipeline Recovery Systems of
Dallas, which makes an anti-corrosive chemical that preserves pipes;
and Product Ingredient Technology of Boa Raton, which makes food
flavorings. None of these companies was looking to do business with
Iraq; Barbouti sought them out. Why was he interested? Because TK-7 had
formulas that could extend the range of jet aircraft and liquid-fueled
missiles such as the SCUD; because Pipeline Recovery knows how to coat
pipes to make them usable in nuclear reactors and chemical-weapons
plants; and because one of the byproducts in making cherry flavoring is
ferric ferrocyanide, a chemical that's used to manufacture hydrogen
cyanide, which can penetrate gas masks and protective clothing. Hydrogen
cyanide was used by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds in the Iran-Iraq
war.
Barbouti
was more than a passive investor, and soon he began pressuring the
companies to ship not only their products but also their manufacturing
technology to corporations he owned in Europe, from which, he told the
businessmen, it would be sent to Libya and Iraq. In doing so, Barbouti
was attempting to violate the law. First, the U.S. forbade sending
anything to Libya, which was embargoed as a terrorist nation. Second,
the U.S. specified that material of this sort must be sent to its final
destination, not to an intermediate locale, where the U.S. would risk
losing control of its distribution. According to former CIA contract
employee Richard Babayan, in late 1989 Barbouti met in London with
Ibrahim Sabawai, Saddam Hussein's half brother and European head of
Iraqi intelligence, who grew excited about the work Pipeline Recovery
was doing and called for the company's technology to be rushed to Iraq,
so that it could be in place by early 1990. And the owner of TK-7 swears
that Barbouti told him he was developing an atom device for Qaddafi
that would be used against the U.S. in retaliation for the 1986 U.S. air
strike against Libya. Barbouti also wanted the ferrocyanide from
Product Ingredient.
Assisting
Barbouti with these investments was New Orleans exporter Don Seaton, a
business associate of Richard Secord, the right-wing U.S. Army general
turned war profiteer who was so deeply enmeshed in the Iran-contra
affair. It was Secord who connected Barbouti with Wackenhut. Barbouti
met with Secord in Florida on several occasions, and phone records show
that several calls were placed from Barbouti's office to Secord's
private number in McLean, Virginia; Secord has acknowledged knowing
Barbouti. He is currently a partner of Washington businessman James
Tully (who is the man who leaked Bill Clinton's draft-dodge letter to
ABC) and Jack Brennan, a former Marine Corps colonel and longtime aide
to Richard Nixon both in the White House and in exile. Brennan has gone
back to the White House, where he works as a director of administrative
operations in President Bush's office. He refused to return repeated
calls from SPY Interestingly, Brennan and Tully had previously been
involved in a $$181 million business deal to supply uniforms to the
Iraqi army. Oddly, they arranged to have the uniforms manufactured in
Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania. The partners in that deal were former U.S.
attorney general and Watergate felon John Mitchell and Sarkis
Soghanalian, a Turkish-born Lebanese citizen. Soghanalian, who has been
credited with being Saddam Hussein's leading arms procurer and with
introducing the demonic weapons inventor Gerald Bull to the Iraqis, is
currently serving a six-year sentence in federal prison in Miami for the
illegal sale of 103 military helicopters to Iraq. According to former
Wackenhut agent David Ramirez, the company considered Soghanalian "a
very valuable client."
Unfortunately
for Barbouti, none of the companies in which he made investments was
willing to ship its products or technology to his European divisions.
That, however, doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't get some of what
he wanted. In 1990, 2,000 gallons of ferrocyanide were found to be
missing from the cherry-flavor factory in Boa Raton. Where it went is a
mystery; Peter Kawaja, who was the head of security for all of
Barbouti's U.S. investments, told SPY "We were never burglarized, but
that stuff didn't walk out by itself."
What
does all this have to do with Wackenhut? Lots: According to Louis
Champon, the owner of Product Ingredient Technology, it was Wackenhut
that guarded his Boa Raton plant, a fact confirmed by Murray Levine, a
Wackenhut vice president. Champon also says, and Wackenhut also
confirms, that the security for the plant consisted of one unarmed
guard. While a Wackenhut spokesperson maintains that this was the only
job they were doing for Barbouti, he also says that they were never
paid, that Barbouti sniffed them.
This
does not seem true. SPY has obtained four checks from Barbouti to
Wackenhut. All were written within ten days in 1990: one on March 27 for
$168.89; one on March 28 for $24,828.07; another on April 5 for $756;
the last on April 6 for $40,116.25. We asked Richard Kneip, Wackenhut's
senior vice president for corporate planning, to explain why a single
guard was worth $66,000 a year; Kneip was at a loss to do so. He was
similarly at a loss to explain a fifth check, from another Barbouti
company to Wackenhut's travel-service division in 1987, almost two years
before Wackenhut has acknowledged providing security for the Boa Raton
plant.
Two
former CIA operatives, separately interviewed, have the explanation.
Charles Hayes, who describes himself as "a CIA asset," says Wackenhut
was helping Barbouti ship chemicals to Iraq. "Supplying Iraq was
originally a good idea," he maintains, "but then it got out of hand.
Wackenhut was just in it for the money." Richard Babayan, the former CIA
contract employee, confirmed Hayes's account. He says that Wackenhut's
relationship with Barbouti existed before the Boa Raton plant opened:
"Barbouti was placed in the hands of Secord by the CIA, and Secord
called in Wackenhut to handle security and travel and protection for
Barbouti and his export plans." Wackenhut, Babayan says, was working for
the CIA in helping Barbouti ship the
chemical-and-nuclear-weapons-making equipment first to Texas, then to
Chicago, and then to Baltimore to be shipped overseas. All of which
makes the story of the midnight convoy ride of David Ramirez, recounted
at the beginning of this article, rather less mysterious. SPY has
learned that this shipment is now the subject of a joint USDA-Customs
investigation.
When
we asked George Wackenhut what was being shipped from Eagle Pass to
Chicago, the sharp, straightforward chairman at first claimed they were
protecting an unnamed executive. He then directed an aide to get back to
me. Two days later, Richard Kneip did, repeating the tale that had been
passed on to David Ramirez—that the trucks contained food stamps. We
told him that we had spoken to a Department of Agriculture official, who
informed us that food stamps are shipped from Chicago to outlying
areas, never the other way around, and that food stamps, unlike
money, are used once and then destroyed. All Kneip would say then was,
"We do not reveal the names of our clients.
WACKENHUT'S
connection to the CIA and to other government agencies raises several
troubling questions. _ First, is the CIA using Wackenhut to conduct
operations that it has been forbidden to undertake? Second, is the White
House or some other party in the executive branch working through
Wackenhut to conduct operations that it doesn't want Congress to know
about? Third, has Wackenhut's cozy relationship with the government
given it a feeling of security—or, worse, an outright knowledge of
sensitive or embarrassing information—that allows the company to believe
that it can conduct itself as though it were above the law? A
congressional investigation into Wackenhut's activities in the Alyeska
affair last November [see "Sure, but Wackenhut Must Have Its Good
Points, Right?," page 54} began to shed some light on Wackenhut's way of
doing business; clearly it's . time for Congress to investigate just
how far Wackenhut's other tentacles extend.
Additional reporting by Eric Reguly, Margie Sloan and Wendell Smith
SURE, BUT WACKENHUT MUST HAVE ITS GOOD POINTS RIGHT?
Not
Wackenhut's labors on behalf of Arab despots aren't the company's only
unsavory episodes. Here are some ocher items from our Wackenhut file:
*
Wackenhut's right-wing politics have not been confined to supporting
U.S. administrations. In 1977, Wackenhut obtained special permission to
operate in Belgium; according to Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan's The Terrorism Industry, Wackenhut
'quickly got involved with right-wing terrorists who were themselves
linked to state security agents." Wackenhut's local director in
Brussels, Jean-Francis Calmette, was a rightist who had hired and given
combat instruction to members of Westland New Post, a Belgian fascist
group. Wackenhut left Belgium in the early 1980s, following accusations
that its guards were luring immigrant children into basements and
beating them.
*
Tom Carpenter of the Washington-based Government Accountability
Project, a nonprofit organization thee protects whistle-blowers,
considers Wackenhut a major oppressor. At many of the nuclear
installations guarded by Wackenhut, the company works to identify and
discourage whistle-blowers. Earlier this year, an investigation by the
Energy Department's Inspector General's Office into the illegal use of
electronic eavesdropping equipment at plants run by Westinghouse and
other private companies in the nuclear-energy business found 147
different pieces of surveillance equipment; one could listen in on 200
phones at once. Many of the bugs had been planted by Wackenhut. The
private companies agreed to dismantle the equipment, and sent the bugs
off to a Department of Energy training center in Albuquerque. As it
happens, the training center is operated by Wackenhut These are not the
only complaints against the company. Robert Jacques of the Energy
Department's Inspector General's Office told SPY "We have had hundreds
of complaints about Wackenhut."
*
This August a House committee was due to release a report on its
investigation into the way Wackenhut's Special Investigations Division
handled a job for one of its clients, the oil consortium Alyeska. The
committee has been looking into allegations, reported on 60 Minutes and
elsewhere, that Wackenhut had conducted illegal surveillance of an
outspoken Alyeska critic, Chuck Harnel, who has funneled information
about the oil consortium's safety and environmental abuses to Congress
and the media for more than a decade. Wackenhut is accused of setting up
a phony environmental-law firm and offering money to Hamel to discover
his Alyeska sources. Wackenhut says it operated legally.
*
While Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA in clandestine
adventures, sometimes it just goes off on its own. That's what happened
last year, when Wackenhut's dirty work on behalf of a client helped
bring down a presidential aide and fueled unrest that led to an
attempted coup against the democratically elected, pro-American
government of Venezuela.
On
June 21, 1991, Wayne Black, the director of Wackenhut's Special
Investigation Division, flew from Miami to Caracas. He traveled on an
Abu Dhabi Passport, using the name Wayne Jenkins--the same name he'd
used while heading the Alyeska business. The purpose of this trip was to
destroy the reputation of Orlando Garcia, the chief of security for
President Carlos Andres Perez.
According
to Gus Castillo, a former FBI special agent who worked Wackenhut, Black
began last summer to plant false information about Garcia with
Government officials, members of opposition parties and other
influential Venezuelans. Black stories concerned an investigation by the
Venezuelan attorney general into accusations that a munitions company
owned by Gracia has taken money from the army for weapons it failed to
supply. Garcia denied any wrongdoing but resigned rarer in the year and
was placed under house arrest. "You would not be wrong in saying that
Wackenhut helped gee Orlando Garcia out of the government," says a
source in the Venezuelan government.
Soon
the stories Black had spread took on a life of their own. President
Perez, who had been hailed by President Bush as "one of the great
democratic leaders of our hemisphere," was suffering a bout of
unpopularity. Austerity measures he had implemented had lowered the
standard of living. New allegations of corruption by a member of the
president's inner circle fueled this unrest, and in February 1992 a
group of midlevel army officers attempted a military coup. In the end,
Perez survived an attack that claimed three of his bodyguards; 17
soldiers and 42 civilians were also killed. Meanwhile, Orlando Garcia
fled to Paris.
Wackenhut
helped instigate this episode neither to forward a political philosophy
not to protect any security interests, but simply for a fee. The client
was Blanca Ibanez, a wealthy 38-year-old V Venezuelan expatriate now
living in Boa Raton who is the mistress of Jaime Lusinchi, Perez's
predecessor as president. In addition to her duties as Lusinchi's
personal secretary and mistress, Ibanez had another
responsibility—regulating the flow of hard currency in and out of
Venezuela. After she left public of office, her activities were
investigated, and she was suspected of stealing more than $300 million.
The person in charge of that investigation was Orlando Garcia.
In
May 1991, Ibanez flew to Miami; when she arrived, she and her luggage
were searched by U.S. Customs officials. The search was conducted at the
request of Venezuelan officials, who were hunting for financial records
and evidence of offshore accounts. Nothing showed up, but Ibanez was
clearly rattled. Soon afterward, she had her American attorney hire
Wackenhut to stymie the Venezuelan government's investigation of her.
Obviously, Wackenhut was successful, although apparently only in the
shots run. This past June, the Venezuelan attorney general indicted her
for influence-peddling.
*
Michael Riconosciuto is the mysterious convicted drug dealer who became
a government informer and then became a Wackenhut employee, and who is
now back in jail [see "Badlands," April 19921 He told SPY that during
the early 1980s he was "working for Wackenhut to adapt Inslaw's Promis."
Promis is the computer program allegedly stolen by
Reagan-administration officials from Inslaw, a software company, and
resold for private gain. Although Wackenhut denies any involvement with
improper appropriation of software, Riconosciuto said in an interview
with SPY that he "met with George Wackenhut and John Ammarell [a
Wackenhut board member and consultant to George Wackenhut] in Las
Vegas." Riconosciuto went on to say thee accompanying him was Dr. John
Philip Nichols, the former CIA agent and Wackenhut business partner who
was running the shadowy activities on the Cabazon Indian reservation in
the California desert. Riconoscinto says that during their Vegas evening
together, George Wackenhut ask how his work on the software was coming
along.
Such
comments from a twice-convicted felon would normally be dismissed out
of hand. But in an interview with SPY Wackenhut's John Ammarell confided
that such a meeting did indeed take place in Las Vegas. "I don't
remember any specific conversations," Ammarell said, "but I think we
were there to discuss the sale of George's yacht, the Top Secret. I
think Nichols said he had a potential buyer." So: The wealthy president
of a large security company with CIA ties and one of his board members
meet with a drug dealer. electronics expert and a spook Burned arms
supplier—and all they discuss is the sale of a boat?
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