[Firestarter]

Gene Wheaton – Iran-Contra

Here’s information from another whistleblower - Gene Wheaton…
Wheaton was probably the first to make the “Iran-Contra” scandal public.

In 1971, Wheaton and his family were transferred to Iran where he was the narcotics and counter-terrorism advisor to the Shah of Iran.
Wheaton retired from the army in 1975, and went back to Iran as a “civilian”.
For 2 years he was executive assistant to a vice president of the CIA front Rockwell Corporation, and director of security for a program over there called the IBEX program.

In 1985, Wheaton became vice-president of the cargo airline National Air.
In the early 1980s, Wheaton got close to CIA paramilitary mercenary operator Carl Jenkins, who had been the commander of the biggest CIA base in Laos while Shackley was there. Neil Livingston invited Wheaton to a party, to meet Ollie North. In 1985, Ollie North asked Wheaton to help devise a plan for weapons to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan and provide airplanes for missions to the Contras.
In October 1985, Congress voted for $27 million in non-lethal aid for the Contras (which included weapons). Wheaton, Jenkins and Paul Hoven tried to get some of those $27 million to Honduras. They were told in no uncertain terms that the only way to do this was to go through Dick Secord and his aviation supply route. Wheaton refused because he knew that Secord had an unsavoury reputation.

Wheaton received direct information that Secord and his group (Oliver North, Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson and Tom Clines) were diverting aircraft and hauling illegal cargo on the side (smuggling). Secord had direct knowledge that kickbacks from the Saudi AWACS program, were used to buy weapons for the Contras (that paid handsomely for these weapons with cocaine…).
In May 1986, Wheaton personally told CIA director Bill Casey, but Casey simply denied that the agency was involved in any of this illegal stuff. Then Wheaton took his story to the journalists Newt Royce and Mike Icoca, who put it on the front page of the Hearst newspaper.

Wheaton paints the big picture like this:

Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear they conversations.
They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments,
"why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?"
(…)
Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House.
(…)
They made sure that George Bush was the chairman of each of the critical committees involving these covert operations things.
(…)
They got Bush in as the chairman of the committee to deregulate the Savings and Loans in ’83 so they could deregulate the Savings and Loans, so that they would be so loosely structured that they could steal 400, 500 billion dollars of what amounted to the taxpayers’ money out of these Savings and Loans and then bail them out.
They got hit twice: they stole the money out of the Savings and Loans, and then they sold the Savings and Loans right back to the same guys, and then the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation - the taxpayers money - paid for bailing out the Savings and Loans that they stole the money from ... and they ran the whole operation, and Bush was the de facto president even before the ‘88 election when he became president.
(…)
This crowd really believes that the unwashed masses are ignorant, that we are people who are not capable of governing ourselves, that we need this elitist group to control the country, and the world - these guys have expanded. They look at the United States not as a country, not in any kind of patriotic mode now, but they look on it as a state within a world that they control. And that’s this attitude that they have.
They’re not unlike any other megalomaniac in the world. They’re nutty as fruitcake, but they’ve got distinguished gray hair, three-piece dark suits and they carry briefcases, and they’ll stand up and make speeches just as articulate as anybody in the world, but they don’t socialize and function outside their own little clique.
My experience with them is that they could be certified as criminally insane and put away in a rubber room and have the key thrown away. That’s how dangerous they are. But they’re powerful, and they’re educated. And that makes them twice as dangerous. And that’s basically what’s running the world right now.

When Harry Truman signed the National Security Act creating the CIA, he stated in that act that they couldn’t have any police powers, and shouldn’t operate in the US.
Congressional oversight of the intelligence community was increased after the Pike and Church hearings of the 1970s, in the wake of the Watergate scandal and CIA director Richard Helms convicted of lying to Congress (there were also kickbacks from the giant arm manufacturers to top politicians worldwide…).
The “secret group” of Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and Dick Secord were forced into retirement because of the scandal over Edmond P. Wilson’s training of Libyan terrorists.

After 9/11 was staged, the restrictions on US intelligence agencies were lifted.
75 and 80-year-old retired CIA people sat with tears in their eyes and told Wheaton:

Gene, what you’re into, you understand it more than we did, and it’s absolutely true, but it’s just so big you can’t do anything about it.

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKwheaton.htm
(archived here: http://archive.is/1Y7VO)