The Colonel's Corner The Great Heroin Coup Part 8

1:33:38 · recorded 2026-07-22 · ▶ watch on Rumble

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Transcript

0:21 Let's get our crew in here on X and we'll get started. Waiting for Bridget. She's holding up the show. How are you, SR? I hope you're doing well today. I'm doing awesome. That's great. Could it be better? Well, I guess I could be better, but no one's complaining. Nobody wants to hear you complain anyway. It is so weird that

0:58 The book that I'm reading called Spooks is going right along. I just bought that book. And it's going right along with this book, which I read two years ago. It's so crazy. It's actually freaking me out a little bit. Mainly because all of the stuff they're talking about, we're watching get undone. So lots of interesting parallels there.

1:29 All right, we're on chapter 14. Just chime in, SR, when Bridget shows up. We're starting with our old buddies in the KMT. The title of this chapter is Heroin in Southeast Asia. So the southern province where the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek was hanging out, their two commodities for exchange was...

2:03 Opium and gold, the two things the CIA covets the most. And it talks a little bit about how that area is very tribal and that it was the center of the opium cultivation that had come over from India during the Boxer Wars. We know that whole history. And that it was during World War II, obviously a hotbed.

2:34 of military operations, both internally civil war wise and externally fighting the Japanese in that area. So lots of stuff going on. And that's where we find Claire Chenault's 14th Air Force, Detachment 202 of the OSS. Detachment 202, notorious collection of special agents.

3:06 that basically form the next 30 years of CIA operations in every manner that's nefarious, both in Operation Gladio, Operation Condor, multiple coups around the world, not the least of which is E. Howard Hunt. Of course, he needs no introduction since we all know him from...

3:36 the watergate scandal guatemala everything he was at the time um part of the oss effort there of course we know he later goes on to work with our own gladio forces called the cuban exiles and china lobbyist and he becomes best buds with a fellow

4:10 french legionnaire oss agent by the name of lucy and koenig who we've talked about throughout this book so although he was not technically part of detachment 202 koenig was there like almost all the time that was his okay that was his theater of operations

4:38 parachuting into Indochina, doing all kinds of secretive, nefarious things. Indochina would remain Koenig's base of operation long after World War II, like E. Howard Hunt. He slid over from the OSS to the CIA. He operated throughout South and North Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, you know, all of the places that...

5:07 was nefariously associated with heroin, opium, or whatever. He also was the link between the CIA and the Corsican Mafia. He was Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge's middleman in the 1963 plot to overthrow South Vietnam's president, Diem, who was assassinated along with his brother, the Corsican partner in drug trafficking.

5:40 A decade later, Koenig and Hunt, working for the Nixon White House plumbers, would attempt to make it appear that the plot had been ordered by JFK. Both Koenig and William Colby, mastermind of the CIA Phoenix assassination program, were recalled to the U.S. at the start of the 70s.

6:04 After Mao Zedong's rise to power in China, OSS veterans formed a number of firms that would link both the CIA and its reactionary client regimes in the Far East together. With financial assistance from his friends in Asia, the most notorious one that I did a deep dive in a long time ago was OSS China Hand CV Star.

6:34 C.B. Starr is very interesting because C.B. Starr was operating in China and was totally pissed off that Chiang Kai-shek didn't win that civil war after World War II because he basically was the Lloyds of London of China. His C.B. Starr insurance megaplex would eventually turn into AIG.

7:06 And have offices in Building 7 on 9-11. C.V. Starr is a very interesting guy. Because if you think about it, going back before World War II and we have a formal intelligence apparatus, one of the most frequent, besides banking, use of industry for spying was insurance.

7:33 Right. Because basically anybody doing maritime trade had to have insurance. So they knew everything about everything that moved and people paid for that intelligence. So C.V. Starr was an old intelligence hand from way back. And I do mean way back. And the C.V., by the way, is Cornelius Vander Starr.

8:04 And Star is spelled S-T-A-R-R. And when I did kind of the trace of the family tree, he is related, although distantly, to Ken Star of the Clinton fiasco, Ken Star. That Ken Star is related to C.B. Star, just so you can put all the pieces together. So C.B. Star had been buying up insurance companies all over Asia to build an empire.

8:37 As brought to light during the McClellan hearings, Jimmy Hoffa's award awarded one of them, U.S. Life and a smaller company, Union Casualty, whose agents, Paul and Alan Dorfman, were among Hoffa's links to the underworld. A Teamsters Union contract, despite a lower bid from a larger, more reputable insurance company.

9:07 They gave that to them, even though it was more expensive. That's how they pay off their buddies. And then they get kickbacks for doing that, by the way. Starr's attorney was a powerful Washington-based Tommy the Cork Corcoran, who again shows up in all of these stories. Corcoran's law partner, William Youngman,

9:36 was a director of U.S. Life. Corcoran's other clients at the time was none other than United Fruit Company. What? So basically, not only is Corcoran the attorney, he's a CIA attorney acting as a civilian on the outside, by the way. And Chiang Kai-shek's influential brother-in-law, T.V. Soon, S-O-O-N-G,

10:10 was thrown into this entire mix, along with the airline Civil Air Transport, of which 60% was owned by the Chiang Kai-shek regime and 40% owned by the CIA. On behalf of United Fruit, Corcoran triggered a CIA plot in which E. Howard Hunt was the agency's chief political action officer to overthrow the Guatemalan.

10:41 presidency of Arbenz in 1954. Crazy. OSS China hand Willis Bird settled in Bangkok, Thailand, to head the office of Sea Supply, Inc. It was a CIA proprietary headquartered in Miami, thanks to Paul Helliwell, which furnished weapons to opium smuggling, KMT, and Chiang Kai-shek.

11:15 that were hanging out in Burma. William Byrd, representing Civil Air Transport in Bangkok, coordinated Civil Air Transport's airdrops to KMT troops and ran an engineering firm that constructed all of the necessary airstrips to collect the opium. Sea Supply also provided arms and aid to the head of Thailand's

11:48 45,000 paramilitary police force that the CIA was only too happy to train for them, like they trained the DINA and all of the other SAVAK, all of those. This Thailand National Police Force is basically the same thing. And in other books, $35 million was spent to

12:18 buy these people, train these people, equip these people, and as a slush fund so that anything that came into any port, airport, seaport, was never checked by customs, ever. You could take weapons, you could take guns, you could take whatever you want. Bodies, they didn't care as long as they got their paycheck. The author goes on to say they were reputedly one of the most corrupt,

12:52 paramilitary forces in history in a corruption-ridden nation, which is saying something given the fact that this is well after the SAVAK and DINA and all them have been created. And those were pretty damn corrupt. For years, his troops protected KMT opium smugglers and directed the drug trade from Thailand, along with DEA and CIA.

13:21 When President JFK in 1962 attempted a crackdown on the most hawkish CIA elements in Indonesia, he sought the prosecution of Willis Byrd, who had been charged with bribery of an aid official in Laos. But Byrd never returned to the U.S. to stand trial. Upon returning to Miami, the OSS Chief of Special Intelligence and Head of Detachment 202

13:50 none other than Colonel Paul Helliwell, was a busy man. In Miami, he had the offices of American Bankers Insurance Company. He functioned simultaneously as the Thai consul, which gave him basically diplomatic immunity in his own country as a U.S. citizen. He also was the attorney in the United States for C-Supply, which was smuggling guns and drugs.

14:23 He also was on the board of CV Star's insurance megacorp. American Bankers Insurance was itself a most unusual firm. One of its directors, James King, was also the director of Miami National Bank, through which the Lansky syndicate reportedly passed hundreds of millions of dollars to launder them.

14:53 on their way to Geneva's Swiss Exchange and Investment Bank. One of Swiss Bank's directors was Lou Poller, P-O-L-L-E-R. He also sat on the board of King's Miami National Bank. So this is the international version of the savings and loan scandal. In the 50s and 60s, tie in the KMT nationalist.

15:27 was invested in Florida's explosive development, much of it, by the way, of a company called General Development Corporation, which was controlled by Meyer Lansky, another money laundering operation. It's important to note the alliance of Southeast Asian power groups with those in Florida and Cuba. This early mutual benefit arrangement of business interests is key.

15:57 And Miami is the nerve center. The alliance was comprised of the China lobby, which was led by Claire Chenault, Shane Kyshek, and all of them. And especially Shane Kyshek's wife. OSS China hands, Cuban exiles, the Lansky syndicate, and CIA hawks pushing for an all-out involvement in Indochina and Cuba.

16:28 It coalesced between 1961 and 63, and its members had three things in common, right-wing politics, an interest in Asian opium, and a thirst for political power. The last factor led to another common denominator in which the alliance invested heavily, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Some people effectively overlapped the entire spectrum of the alliance.

16:59 Among them are Howard Hunt, Tommy Corcoran, the man behind United Fruit's dirty work. United Fruit was a client of Miami-based Double Check Corporation. That was a CIA front, too. They supplied the planes for the Bay of Pigs invasion. They supplied also the contracts to the civilian pilots that flew them.

17:28 from the American side, like the Alabama National Guard guys. Corcoran was the Washington escort of General Chenault's widow, Anne Chenault. She was considered the head of the China lobby and a key to Southeast Asian opium. Another key figure in the China lobby was weapons dealer, financier, and one of my all-time Forrest Gump heroes of,

18:02 Gladio William Pauly, the American co-founder of the Chenault Flying Tigers. Isn't that weird? There's so many aviation enthusiasts out there. And when I talk to them and they think they know everything about this time period and aviation history and, you know, they just love the Flying Tigers because we all were brainwashed to do so.

18:31 When I tell them about William Polly and what his role was in creating the Flying Tigers, they're just blown away because they've never heard of William Polly. Polly's name was the password to intrigue OSS China, Tommy Cochran, CIA cover firms, and arms shipments to the KMT, Chiang Kai-shek troops on Formosa slash Taiwan.

19:04 In deference of a State Department refusal of authorization, he just stepped up and filled the gap. All were either directly or indirectly connected to Polly. He also rubbed elbows with the U.S. heroin mafia when in 1963, he and Santo Traficani Jr. and Cuban exiles took part in one of the boat raids into Cuba.

19:34 That's actually one of the funniest stories of that whole time period. William Polly was a multimillionaire and owned this humongous yacht. And he lived on a canal down in eastern Miami area. He used his own yacht to take these people to Cuba to launch an invasion. It was a fiasco.

20:02 The China lobby's Southeast Asian connections naturally went via Taiwan and Chiang Kai-shek, which controlled the opium growing in the Golden Triangle. And with the CIA owned the opium CAT Airlines, Civil Air Transport Airlines, they couldn't have done the job as effectively and efficiently without all of those players. They all divvied up their own.

20:35 Here's a quote from Ross Cohen. There is considerable evidence that a number of nationalist Chinese officials, that means Chiang Kai-shek's people, are engaged in illegal smuggling of narcotics into the United States with the full knowledge and connivance of the nationalist Chinese government. Again, meaning Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan.

21:01 The evidence indicates that several prominent Americans have participated in and profited from these transactions. It indicates that the narcotics business has been an important factor in the activities and permeations of the China lobby. No shit, Sherlock. Another British writer, Frank Robinson, wrote in 1977, Taiwan is a major link in the Far East narcotics route.

21:31 and a heroin producer. Much of the chemicals necessary for transformation of morphine into heroin smuggled into Hong Kong and Thailand comes from Taiwan, not China. A dictatorship under the iron rule of Chiang Kai-shek and his son. And it was a military dictatorship. General

22:02 Chiang Kai-shek took his defeated army, was escorted onto the island by the CIA, set up residency, immediately declared martial law because the Formosans, who had lived their entire life on Formosa, wasn't having it. And they rebelled. And they were murdered in the streets by the KMT army, by the tens of thousands.

22:34 And that martial law was not lifted for 40 years. And you had your entire political class in America, to include General MacArthur, testifying in front of Congress that Taiwan was a thriving democracy as they were mowing down people in the streets under martial law. When the communists routed Chiang Kai-shek,

23:03 forces in 1949, some 10,000 KMT troops fled to Southeast Asia and settled in a remote section of Burma. Heavily armed, they soon assumed control of the entire area and intermarried with the local population. Under General Li Mai, they continued to infiltrate China properly, but each time they were repulsed. While awaiting Shang's

23:33 Signal for a final two-front onslaught. Burma's KMT army needed a source of income. Many had grown opium in southern China, and so the poppies, which flourished on the hillsides, became a cash crop for them in Burma. They have a skill. They're just going to take it everywhere, and their skill is growing opium.

23:59 Around 1950, the CIA became interested. Yeah, way before the 1950, but we'll go with the story. Became interested in the KMT troops because they had been embedded with them the entire time. General MacArthur was pushing to arm them to attack mainland China. You know, not like Korea is not going to pop off any second. But yeah, let's go on a full frontal attack on mainland China.

24:28 using the KMT army that just got their ass handed to them in a civil war. Great thinking. But when the KMT instead used the weapons against the Burmese army, Burma protested before the UN, where it was decided that 2,000 KMT troops would be flown by civil air transport to Taiwan. At the time, it was Formosa.

24:57 Those who eventually made the trip, however, were only farmers and mountain people in KMT uniforms and the weapons they took out were obsolete. That doesn't even matter because we have an entire weapons pipeline because at this point, Korea has kicked off and we have a whole shit ton of weapons we can steal and put over here and arm the KMT, which is exactly what we did, by the way. We do it all the time.

25:30 All right. So, and oh, by the way, the whole time they're sitting in Taiwan, and Taiwan's not just one island, we found out. It's like seven. And they put military forces on all seven islands, and they used all of them to launch attacks back into China for like the next 20 or 30 years, constantly attacking mainland China.

25:56 And the Chinese the entire time knew the CIA was behind all of it. And they knew that they were using opium to pay for it because it was not an authorized operation. They knew all of this. But meanwhile, tons of Chinese civilians were killed in these incursions into mainland China. But it never got written about. The junction of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, the Golden Triangle,

26:27 is the site of the bulk of the world's opium production and thereby the source of enormous fortunes, originally for the French and then for the Americans. The French effectively held control over that area until their collapse at Dien Bien Phu. And then, of course, the Americans coming to their aid towards the end of that with the

26:55 mixed airborne commando group was trying to prop up the French because they had already made a deal on cutting the opium in multiple different source revenues that they could all share. So the French Air Force managed the shipment of opium from Burma to Laos. The guerrilla corps comprised mostly of Laotian

27:28 led by Colonel Roger Trangware. The military commando group remained unusually independent despite its direct connections. To finance the second Indonesia operation, these organizations turned to smuggling gold and opium. They were in charge of the transportation.

28:00 Large quantities of opium were shipped to French Saigon headquarters and passed to the Corsican mafia, who in turn smuggled the drugs to Marseille. When the French withdrew from Indochina in 1955 after their defeat, and after the CIA had pushed aside the SDECE's occupation there, the leadership began communicating through the CIA agent Lucien Koenig.

28:28 who bridged both the French and the CIA's intel community. He offered the Americans their entire guerrilla force. Against Koenig's advice, this guy says it was refused. It was not refused, by the way. In 1955, CIA agent General Edward Lansdell began a war to liquidate the Corsican supply network.

29:00 While Lansdell, he's talking about in the theater, was cracking down on the French infrastructure, his employer, the CIA, was running the proprietaries like sea supply, civil air transport, that worked hand in hand with opium smuggling of the KMT, Chiang Kai-shek forces, and with the corrupt, bought-off Thai Border Patrol.

29:29 Lansdell and Corsican vendetta lasted several years, during which many attempts were made on Lansdell's life. Oddly enough, his principal informant on the Corsican drug routes and connections was the former French legionnaire Lucien Koenig, who had moved over to the CIA. Koenig knew just about every opium-filled smuggler trail airstrip and Corsican that had remained in Southeast Asia.

30:00 He spent his free time hanging out with the Corsicans and considered them part of his group. They never realized that he was ratting them out to the CIA. When Lansdale returned from Vietnam in the late 50s, the Corsicans had regrouped some of their losses, chartering aging aircraft to

30:31 established their own pathetic version of civil air transport called air opium. They're not very original. It functioned until around 1965. That year, Corsican nemesis Lansdell returned to Vietnam as an advisor to Ambassador Lodge. There was also an upheaval in the narcotics traffic, and perhaps the two were connected, you'd think.

31:02 CIA-backed South Vietnamese and Laotian generals began taking over the opium traffic. They didn't take it over. The CIA was basically pushing them out in front for them to hide behind. The first heroin refinery sprang up in Laos under the control of General Radicone. President Kai of Saigon

31:30 In Laos, under the control of Radicone, along with President Kai in Saigon, worked together with the CIA and Lansdale. They were working. Oh, and then they brought in Koenig with Lansdale. So that's kind of the key infrastructure head of the opium part of this whole thing.

32:02 One result of the smuggling alignment and collusion with this group is that was kind of the final push to push the French out and their air opium collapsed. The KMT Chinese and the Laotian tribesmen who cultivated the raw opium either transported it themselves to the refineries or had it flown out by the CIA.

32:33 via the civil air transport and its successor, Air America. Though the Corsicans still had access to drugs, the price was becoming prohibitive. So they're all getting starved off. And that's why you saw the opium production shift for the French from the Golden Triangle, where they were squeezed out of, into Turkey, Northern Iran, that area in there.

33:05 1967, a three-sided opium war broke out in Laos between the Burmese Shan State Warlords, the KMT Chinese, and General Radicone's Laotian Army. Radicone emerged victorious, capturing the opium shipments with the help of the U.S. So he got picked to be the winner. The KMT, for its part, managed to reassert its dominance and

33:36 entered the arrangement not within the local area, but in the bigger geographical control of that region. General Lansdale returned to the U.S. in 1967, leaving Koenig in Vietnam. The next year, Koenig greeted a new boss, Mr. William Colby.

33:58 Since 1962, Colby had run the agency's special division for covert operations in Southeast Asia, where his responsibilities included the secret war in Laos with its 30,000-man Hmong army. He shared the responsibility with U.S. Ambassador William H. Sullivan, who would later preside over the Tehran embassy during the fall of the Shah, which is what we talked about yesterday.

34:29 He's another one of those guys that just kept showing up in very convenient places. Many of the agents who ran the CIA's war in Laos had earlier trained Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion and afterwards had taken part in the agency's continued secret operations against Cuba. Since exiles were furnished by the Traficani mob, they were not. They were furnished by the CIA and the mob acted as a cutout.

34:59 for it intelligence agents had intermingled with representatives of america's number one narcotics organization the same agents would now come become involved with extensive opium smuggling out of southeast asia in 67 colby devised a plan of terror for pacification called operation phoenix organized the torture and murder

35:26 of Vietnamese suspected of the slightest association with Viet Cong. Just as Lansdale was traveling home, Colby was sent to South Vietnam to put his brainchild to work. According to Colby's own testimony before a Senate committee, 21,000 Viet Cong were murdered as a result of the Phoenix's first two years. A figure the South Vietnamese said was double that.

35:58 It was during Colby's tour in Vietnam that the heroin turned out by General Racconi's labs appeared in quantity and was unusually very high quality. The great heroin wave, of course, brought the military addiction that was revealed in 1970 in congressional reports, stating that up to 20% of all soldiers returning

36:28 was hooked on heroin former air marshal then vice president um kai now alive and well in the u.s at the time of this book he's not currently alive and his underlings still controlled most of the traffic and as we've said on this ongoing saga that we research all of their operatives when they fall in vietnam

36:58 All of the killers, the drug traffickers, the CIA just scoops up and brings to the United States and puts them in your neighborhood. Well, maybe not these guys because they can afford nicer houses than we can. President Theo and his faction, comprised mostly of Army and Navy officers, were also up to their necks in drug trafficking. According to a Saigon correspondent, Theo's

37:28 closest advisor general dang van quine was the man most responsible for the monkey on the u.s army's back but the u.s saigon embassy where colby was second in command found no substance to the accusation that heroin was being given to american military it was literally handed out to them like candy

37:57 Kai's record notwithstanding, he had been removed from U.S. Operation Haylift, which flew commando units into Laos for loading his aircraft with opium on the return trips, which, by the way, they all did. They just wanted to do that so they could pretend like they were not doing it. In the face of skyrocketing military heroin abuse, the Army Criminal Investigation Division looked into

38:27 the complicity in the heroin trafficking, and filed a report at the U.S. Embassy. The embassy ignored the report and chose not to forward it to the Washington, D.C. State Department. The BNDD, which is the DEA, also investigated the roots of the heroin epidemic, but was impeded in its work, not only by the CIA, but the U.S. Embassy as well.

38:55 would be a reoccurring factor right up until probably this administration. In 1971, however, a string of heroin labs were uncovered in Thailand. In 1971, furthermore, Colby and Koenig were recalled to the United States. Colby became the deputy director of operations, the man in charge of all covert operations. More remarkably,

39:23 Was Koenig's homecoming after 24 years of periodic service to the CIA and Indochina raising the questions of why the U.S. foremost expert on Indochina had been brought back to the U.S.? Just as the crucial phase of Vietnamization was about to begin. Ironically, Corsican friends still around Koenig's departure presented him with a farewell gold medal medallion.

39:49 Of the Corsican Mafia, which Renee talks about all the time. At the war's end, the CIA admitted that certain elements of the organization had been involved in the opium smuggling. Certain elements, like the entire fucking thing. And that the illegal activities of U.S. allies had been overlooked to retain their loyalties. Yeah, because they were working for the CIA. They were being flown on CIA planes.

40:21 planes they were being fed by the cia and they were being equipped by the cia but hey they're just our allies who has no independent means of even surviving they were on their own in reality the agency had been forced to confess because of its inability to refute the tales of the returning military personnel among them green beret paul withers a recipient of nine purple hearts a distinguished service cross

40:54 a silver and bronze star. Quote, after completing basic training at Fort Dix in the fall of 65, Withers was sent to Nang Train, South Vietnam. Although he was ostensibly stationed there, he was actually loaned to the CIA almost immediately and sent to Laos. Before going there, he and his companions were stripped of their uniforms and all U.S. military

41:24 civilian credentials. They were issued Czechoslovakian guns and Korean uniforms. Paul then signed blank sheets of paper at the bottom for the CIA for them to later type out letters and send them to parents and wives if needed. All this was done to hide the fact that American troops were actually fighting in Laos and involved in the drug trade. The mission in Laos

41:55 supposedly, officially, was to make friends, be nice. About twice a week, Air America planes would arrive with supplies and be loaded up with opium and taken out. So we got arms coming in, opium going out. Arms and food, a little bit of food. The CIA reportedly did not support any form of smuggling after 1968. Another load of crap.

42:30 Del Rosario, a former CIA operative, said this. In 1971, I was in operations assistance for Continental Air Service. Yes, that's another proprietary, which flew for the CIA in Laos. The company's transport planes shipped large quantities of rice. However, when the freight invoice was marked diverse, it was heroin.

43:02 telephone with a special number would ring and a voice would say, the customer here. That was the code designation for the CIA agent who had hired us. Keep an eye on the planes from Ben Howell Sy. We're sending some goods for someone's going to take care of it. Nobody's allowed to touch anything and nothing can be unloaded, was the typical message.

43:30 These shipments were always top priority. Sometimes the opium was unloaded in the Laos capital and stored in Air America depots. At other times, it went to Bangkok or Saigon. Even while the CIA trafficked in opium, President Nixon was ranting on about the war on drugs, which again, as we talked about earlier, was primarily just

43:58 A war to kill off all the Corsicans. Chapter 15, The Cubans of Florida. Meyer Lansky, the syndicate's financial wizard and chairman from 1947, began building his Cuban empire in his early 40s. When free elections chased his close friend, dictator Batista, from office in 1944, Lansky also left the island, entrusting his empire to the Traficani family.

44:31 Santo Sr. Lansky and Batista settled in Hollywood, Florida, just north of Miami. Before long, Lansky was running an illegal casino empire on the coast. And in 47, he eliminated Bugsy Siegel and moved into Las Vegas. All the while, Lansky expanded his narcotic trade founded by Lucky Luciano.

45:01 The older mafia dons deemed initially didn't want to do it, but hey, everybody's making money, so we're in. When Florida's illegal casinos were shut down in 1950, Lansky promoted Batista's return to power in Cuba. You know, so much for your democracy. The drive bore fruit in 1952 with Traficani Sr.'s death in 54, Santo Jr.

45:30 became Lansky's right-hand man and manager of his Cuban interest. And oh, by the way, the whole restoring Batista to Cuba was CIA assisted. So they have all of this casino trade going on in Cuba. They had a base for running Havana's tourist trade and keeping tabs on all the heroin shipments that are coming through Cuba from not only Versailles, but Sicily.

46:02 to be distributed between Miami and New York. And interestingly enough, in many of the other books, we found out that they were using United Fruit, hence the importance of United Fruit in the earlier chapter, and William Polly, both who owned large, very, very large sugar plantations in Cuba. The harvested sugar was used to cut into the heroin to make more.

46:32 Money. Very convenient. Cuba was very, very convenient for these guys. Traficani Jr. had proven more talented than his father, extraordinarily intelligent and energetic. He was calm in crises. Everybody loved him. He was one of the few guys in the whole country that even Meyer Lansky wouldn't tangle with. In no time, Traficani Jr. had ingratiated himself with Batista while remaining loyal.

47:06 to Lansky, who appointed him manager of his own Florida interest in addition to those in Cuba. Lansky needed to spend increasingly large amounts of time in New York and Las Vegas, Rome, Versailles, Beirut, and Geneva. Interesting locations because they're all drug trafficking hotspots, as well as gambling and all the other vices. Many envied.

47:35 Lansky's ever-increasing power and wealth, among them Murder, Inc. Chairman of the board, Albert Anastasia. In 1957, he tried enlisting Traficani's aid in removing Lansky from the Havana scene. That was his last move. Traficani arranged a friendly meeting at New York's Sheridan Hotel. An hour after Traficani had checked out, Anastasia was murdered.

48:05 in the barbershop with shaving cream on his face. According to Peter Del Scott, certain U.S. business interests collaborated with the narcotics-linked American mafia in Cuba, as they did with similar networks in China and later in Vietnam and every other country. For the mafia supplied the necessary local intelligence, cash, and muscle against the threat of communist takeover. Communist takeover. Scott later said,

48:36 that in 1973, Cuban Americans recruited by the CIA were suspected in federal and city authorities to be involved in everything from narcotics, extortion rackets, and bombings, which is true. Inside America, there are Gladio operators. The church committee and other senates and law enforcement reports all confirm this. Again, we observe the Cuba Southeast Asia CIA triangle, and it's no secret who managed the Cuban side.

49:05 Traficani Jr., hired fast-learning natives while dictator Batista's men made the empire, quote-unquote, safe, not for democracy, for organized crime, often appearing more loyal to Traficani than anybody on the island that was actually Cuban. That's the part they always leave out of this. Cuba was turned into a hellhole.

49:34 It looked great in pictures, just like Tehran did under the Shah. Let's take all of these pictures. Everybody looks so sweet. No, no. If you go outside of the main drag, you're going to see all of the black site prisons, the torture, the people having to basically be enslaved in the sugar plantations. All of their property was stolen from them. Those are the stories you're never told.

50:00 The same thing happened under the Shah when they had the tribal unrest in southern Iran. What they decided to do is go down there and blow them all up and push them into the cities, into slums. They're much easier to manage that way.

50:20 And while it inadvertently messed up their food supply, that's not a problem because we have all of these big oligarchs in the United States, like International Harvester, who wants to come over and create all of these monopoly farming arrangements so that we can feed all those people we just shoved into your 15-minute cities. And this is back in the 60s and 70s, people. It is not now. This is an old game. They've done it all over.

50:51 All right, back to the story. Sorry, I got off on a little tangent there. So with Fidel Castro won January 1959, Alistair Batista, Lansky and Traficani were in trouble, though they were expelled from their Cuban kingdom nearly a year lapse before the syndicate departed. Same with the State Department, by the way, because they were still thinking they could co-opt.

51:20 Castro. And the CIA had aided and abetted him in the mountains with arms and training and everything. So they hadn't lost all hope at this point. They're still thinking that they can get Castro on their payroll. Some would argue eventually he did, but not at this point. Along with Chafikani and Lansky, half a million Cubans left the island in the following years. Some 100,000 settled in New York City.

51:51 around Manhattan's Washington Heights and New Jersey Hudson County. Another 100,000 headed to Spain, which is very interesting. Spain seems to be a hotspot. And yes, Otto Skorzeny was there to train them. Others went to Latin America. Oh, like Falcon, the guy that we caught in Mexico, that was the drug kingpin who the newspaper all said he was a Cuban. No, he was a Cuban exile.

52:22 that the CIA trained to be a kingpin and then put in Tijuana to run their drug network into Southern California. That's how they switch up this narrative. He's a Cuban. No, he was not a Cuban. He was a Cuban exile that came to Miami and was trained by the CIA and installed in Mexico to run a cartel. Okay. Out of the...

52:49 Traficani-trained core of Cuban officers, security staff, and politicians, Cuban mafia emerged under the mobsters' control. It specialized in narcotics, first in Latin America cocaine, then Marseille heroin. With the Cuban, Traficani also grabbed control. And by Traficani, they mean the CIA. They're working together. They even...

53:16 had gotten involved in some gold mines in Latin America. Besides the Cubans who comprised the main ring of this organization, Traficani also closely worked with Harlan Blackburn Mob, a break in the mafia tradition. But the core of the Traficani family remained Italian, and the Italians dealt in drugs. In 1960, his man Benedetto Benny the Cringe,

53:49 Ndavislio negotiated the opening of a narcotics route in Canada. The representative of Corsican boss Joseph Orsini, Benedetto and his brothers, there's one, two, three, four of them, eventually ran Traficani's Montreal-bound smuggling network to drop them into the United States from the north.

54:16 And they joined the New York wholesaler, Louis Carrillo, who was also in Canada. Traficani settled in Tampa, but continued to run some of his activities from Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters Local in Miami. Traficani and David Yaris, a Sam Giacono Chicago mobster, was instrumental in founding Local 320, which according to McClellan,

54:45 hearings was a front for their narcotics trafficking. After losing his Havana paradise, Meyer Lansky used straw men to buy up the Grand Bahama Island and erected a new gambling city in the city of Nassau. But though Lansky and Traficani each survived in style, neither they nor their Cuban exiles relinquished hopes of returning to Cuba.

55:12 Moreover, they were not alone in the dreaming of overthrowing Castro. The CIA, in particular, let their imagination run and called on their old China hand, General Edward Lansdale. In 1960, the CIA had asked a contract agent, Robert Mayhew, the right hand man of Howard Hughes at the time, to contact mobster John Roselli.

55:41 Roselli was introduced to Mayhew and Traficani and not introduced to him. They're all they all know each other. Mayhew, Traficani, Giacana all together. The agency had previously stationed an agent on Cuba who was to flash green lights when assassination opportunities arose. His name was Frank Angelo Florini, a one time smuggler of weapons.

56:10 to Castro's revolutionary army for the CIA. Through this later assignment, Fioroni had made acquaintances with Traficani. In February of 61, Mayhew, Traficani, and Roselli met at Miami's Fountain Blue Hotel. There, Mayhew gave the Hoods untraceable poison capsules to kill Castro. They were supposed to be smuggled into the island to poison him.

56:43 It failed. Traficani engineered more attempts, including one in September of 62, blah, blah, blah. We know all of that. And he spends the next little bit talking about many of those. But I did want to, all of the rest of the stuff is the Bay of Pigs and stuff like that, that we already know about. But there's a couple of things I want to mention. He goes through the people that were involved, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Bender, and all of those.

57:10 A runner-up to Hunt for the most intriguing CIA conspirator award is Bender. Bender was a German refugee whose true identity remains a matter of speculation. Some contend that he had been a Galen organization, meaning Operation Gladio, network under the name of Drescher. Others contend it was Droller.

57:40 the former security chief for Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo, claims that Bender was in fact Friends Swend, S-W-E-N-D, a Galen collaborator Nazi that was hanging out in Peru. Prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion, Swend was allegedly the CIA's man in Dominican Republic as Don Frederico.

58:09 There he purportedly planned the invasion, along with mobster Frank Costello and the ex-Cuban dictator Batista. So you see here the critical blending of Operation Gladio people in Europe, operations not just in Cuba, but all throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. They're all, it's one big network. You cannot separate the two.

58:38 And then it goes on to say that Polly had had a big state in Cuba prior to Castro's takeover. He had owned the Havana bus line, sugar refineries, sugar plantations. He also controlled the airline into Cuba. So he was making money hand over fist on everything that happened in Cuba. William Polly was, which is why he was a multimillionaire and why they were all pissed off.

59:09 when Castro unseated Batista. And it had much more to do with that than anything else. And then, of course, they talk about some of the early stages of the Bay of Pigs, which we can get into tomorrow. That's it. Yes. And it's a generalized one. Because we know so much of our history.

59:49 has been twisted, distorted, manipulated in order to get us in a certain frame of mind, so on and so forth. We know that, like, Russia wasn't always the bad guy. But there's also always, like, bad guys and then badder guys, okay, so to speak. Yeah. Like, is China... Okay, they're not as nefarious.

1:00:24 as we've been led to believe. Would you say that is a correct and true statement? There is a deep state in every country is the better way to say that. There are people that reside in, they have an entire area in Southwest China that is like a no man's land.

1:00:50 You can go in there. I watched a guy's video of him going in there. You can go in. There's no Chinese authority in there at all. They have no control. And if anybody comes in there from the Chinese government, they'll kill them. So Macau is very much the same way as far as kind of operating as its own haven of nefarious shit. Every country has elements in it that has lasted.

1:01:20 significant long time, not a new country I'm not talking about, that's going to have nefarious people in it. I believe that it is very obvious if you follow the people that have been canned, some of them like actually sentenced to death in China, that you can definitely make the argument that he is trying to clean up

1:01:50 whether it's, you know, all of the nefarious people. I don't think you're ever going to get to the point where China is going to openly admit that they're not a communist country or that they're going to relinquish the control that they feel necessary because of their large population to have a style of government that is not a republic.

1:02:14 And that goes back to the argument about not every government needs to have the exact same style of governmental entities in order for you to have mutually agreeable policies. It's just like you can be Methodist and I can be Baptist and we can still have mutual interest. You can be Catholic and I can be Christian and we can still have mutual.

1:02:43 um or baptists and we can have mutual um things that we can agree to live in a city together and it can function perfectly normal for everybody in the city you don't have to agree on every single aspect and that's the problem with force feeding because we know it was never about democracy blah blah blah it was always about um the raping and stealing of resources from these countries on

1:03:12 what style of government was imposed by these nefarious assholes. So I don't think you're ever going to get, because one size doesn't fit all. People have different cultures. Some cultures, you have to have a strong man. You basically have to have a leader. And that leader has to be around for a very long time. And they have to be very, very tough. That's not the way we want to live.

1:03:42 we can actually get along with a country that lives that way um sr go ahead thank you colonel and i want to thank everybody here on youtube on rumble and on spaces i'm sitting here thinking about this and what's going on and we've just gotten rid of the french connection you've got everything in latin america taken care of

1:04:17 At this point, what more could they possibly want? I don't get it. What do you mean everything in Latin America taken care of? Everything in Latin America from El Salvador to... Oh, no, no, no, no. We're in the late 50s, early 60s. None of that's happened yet. We haven't overthrown Brazil. We haven't overthrown El Salvador. We haven't overthrown Chile. No, Operation Condor is just getting started. My bad, my bad.

1:04:48 yeah yeah um war hamster go ahead you said something interesting about whether z is doing some things to clean up china's version of the deep state um i've been describing the international syndicate as you call it the shadow state as i've been calling it the last past years a little bit differently lately it's more of a network that operates both outside the law above the law and below the law

1:05:17 And this network is international in scope. We're talking about the exact same thing, but I'm using a little bit different terminology for a reason. And I'll share some of that on Friday. Those debates Patrick Henry had me on his book of Trump on Monday night as a guest. And the main topic he wanted me to talk about was, of course, the Primakov Doctrine, which set Russian foreign policy in 1998 forward. And it's pretty important to understand.

1:05:45 and he wanted to take that argument into a lot of the badlands guys have the theory of this uh sovereign um alliance and my question is like look i understand the argument entirely that you're making with the sovereign alliance but i i see nothing that i consider documented evidence that china and z is actually doing anything um beyond continuing to send 600 000 spy students to our country

1:06:11 You know, hit us up with COVID, steal intellectual property, et cetera, et cetera, and rattle the swords in foreign policy. And then we had Trump's speech last week, you know, showing about how things have evidence of Chinese election interference. Yesterday, Trump makes a comment. Yes. That things are different in China than they were five years ago. Correct. Now, that's got my spidey sense saying, OK, I mean, I still don't see the documented evidence, but I'm open to.

1:06:40 What you just said earlier about China maybe trying to clean up that part, that part of that network and also the Sovereign Alliance. But again, I need documented evidence before I'm going to go with it. And it just got interesting yesterday. Yeah, I don't like the term Sovereign Alliance. I know they like branding things and I'm absolutely I think you have to have common terminology to convey ideas.

1:07:10 But I those are not terms that I would have used. And the reason why, as you guys well know, that we selected the International Syndicate is because every book that I've read, this operation, both the oligarch operation, which is like the mafia dons and the Praetorian Guard, which are.

1:07:40 the intelligence um operators function as a criminal mafia syndicate and so we wanted to use

1:07:51 to get out of the terminology of cabal and all of those nefarious things because you had all of the people back when we first started doing this yet all these people coming up with all of these harebrained ideas trying to discredit real truth um coming out by labeling things all of these weird things and then the media would run with all of these weird things where you can't critique

1:08:17 the description of this thing being an international syndicate because it is international and it does function as a syndicate. It moves as a hive from one location following the exact same set of principles and processes from one country to another country simultaneously, whatever. Go ahead, Illini. I think, I think the way that I like it,

1:08:46 Operation Gladio and criminal syndicate are good. A phrase that I found is harder to attack, I think, is starting to stick with me, is unusual revolving door network, which is really hard to attack. You could use it to describe basically anything from like John McCone, you know, being at IT&T, you know, to Robert Mayhew's interactions, you know, with the Cuban anti-communists and the CIA.

1:09:16 and the Mafia, as well as Intertel. And I think when you describe it that way, you keep it kind of vague, but you also, you know, kind of say this is kind of weird. And then it allows you to basically say it's the same pattern happening over and over and over again. And then you can come up with the primary source documents that basically run all the way to the ground.

1:09:46 And a lot of the cases, like the truth from the primary source documents is more bizarre than what the journalists and what the authors and everybody else want to say it is. And that's because we know so much more of the foundation now.

1:10:05 Because that's what I found. To your point, I didn't mean to cut you off, but to your point, when you go back now and look at some of these source documents, they didn't have what we have. And some of them miss completely big things in these documents because they don't have what we have now. So I totally agree with you. So the play is.

1:10:27 It isn't to call them criminals. It isn't to get angry or anything. It's to just go to the primary source documents and just sort of hold up the different contradictions and how close they are in proximity to each other. And basically just ask people, like, you know, for instance, the USS Liberty, they shot out the radio antenna, but they missed the flag. And those two things are right next to each other. How did the pilot miss the flag but saw the antenna?

1:10:57 No, no, they shot the flag down. That was one of the first things they did. Okay, and they shot the flag down too, so they could see it. Yeah, the first flag. But then they ran out their second ceremonial flag right away and put it back up because they still were thinking that they had made a mistake. See, they wanted a picture of that ship from their gunship photos without that flag so they could say that they had mistakenly identified it. So it was one of the very first things they took out along with the antennas.

1:11:27 So look, in my view, this all kind of points back to like Matthew 23, where Jesus is going against the teachers of the law and how they say one thing over here, they say another thing over there. And you've got this revolving door network of lawyers happening behind the cover of privilege, doing weird stuff, coming up with one thing over here, coming up with another thing over there.

1:11:52 You've got, you know, Revelation 18, 23, you know, with with them, you know, leading the world astray with their pharmakia. And there's a number of different interpretations of the Greek word. And and all you have to do is just kind of gently hold the two contradictory facts against each other and just keep doing it over and over and over and over again. And just doing it kind of gently and respectfully and not in a way to accuse people.

1:12:21 but simply to point out the simple truth of the matter. Right. And that's the reason why, to your point about the criminal nature of it, that's why I never use that word. I call it an international syndicate. Brian Cates loved to shove that word criminal into it. That's for somebody to figure out whether it's criminal intent or not. And we do exactly what Illini says. We just give you the information. We give you the source documents that these authors have dug up.

1:12:48 I go through all of their footnotes. And I will tell you when I think they make a mistake in their assessment of something, I'll tell you that I do based on somebody else's writings. But yeah, I think our whole job is giving people this information so they can make their own opinion. We're not going to all agree on every aspect of it, especially when it comes to intent and why they were doing some of this stuff.

1:13:17 But anyway, all along, go ahead. Yeah, Colonel, I just want to mention relating to Claire Cheneau and Anna Cheneau in this period, you know, Anna Cheneau was, I believe, one of the earliest tenants in the Watergate Hotel and office complex. And, you know, as you know, she's very significant figure in what some people call.

1:13:51 the the first October surprise uh which would be you know October 1968 the second October surprise being 1980 but um and it's it's very interesting because you know what you describe what we just saw described again here is a kind of interruption and switcheroo going on in the internet international drug trading you know this time

1:14:21 coming out of, you know, Taiwan, China, and, you know, the Chiang Kai-shek star insurance network. And Claire Chenot was right there in the center of it. And Nixon, you know, just to familiarize people with what's described as the October 1968 October surprises, the idea that Nixon...

1:14:47 Kind of sent a round-the-back message to the South Vietnamese government to delay proposed peace talks with President Johnson so that Nixon would win the 1968 elections. In other words, that Johnson-Humphrey's chosen candidacy of LBJ continuity would get a kind of bump from these talks.

1:15:18 And so, yeah, it's also, I put an article on this in the bubble that I strongly encourage people to read. It's by Jim DiEugenio, whose site, kennedysandking.com, is just absolutely outstanding, in my opinion. And also, he has a couple of other articles that follow up from this one, but it's about, you know.

1:15:47 the 1968 october surprise but also it's it's worth mentioning you know that a key kind of linchpin in that uh outreach of nixon to the south vietnamese government was our good friend senator john tower of texas and you know he's a guy with seemingly a toe in so much so many things including letters back and forth to um oswald's mother

1:16:21 That are very interesting. And also, of course, Senator Tower dies in that plane crash either the day before or day after Senator Kerry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Senator Hines of Pennsylvania in 1991. There were two plane crashes, one the day after the other. And we know that both of those senators had been like very into the initial.

1:16:51 Senate investigation of H.W. Bush's involvement in Iran-Contra. And this was right leading into the 1992 Bush campaign. So there's that. And that and that. And, yeah, lastly... All along, don't forget Gary Caridori's crash, too, who was investigating Bush as well. I'm sorry, who's crash? Gary Caridori of the Omaha, Nebraska Franklin scandal. This would have been like 91. Okay, then.

1:17:23 Okay, sorry. Don't want to forget that one. Very interesting. I definitely need to investigate that. I was ignorant about it. Yeah, that's the whole Franklin scandal of them shipping kids in. Yeah, they killed him too. Interesting ticket timing. But just lastly, Colonel, there is a truly amazing YouTube, and I hope that our Google minders, which I call...

1:17:51 Google them to have not taken it down yet. But there's a truly amazing or was at least a truly amazing YouTube of that conversation of LBJ and Richard Nixon on dated November 8th, 1968. And I urge everybody to listen to that. It's truly fascinating. And what's noteworthy from like that at the 50,000 foot range, if you'll pardon me stealing your.

1:18:21 metaphor kernel that's okay that um is it it's really seems like there was intense um kind of bureaucratic pressure to get lbj and nixon on a phone call and just batten down these hatches because it's it was seen it seems to have been seen by a lot of people as a potentially really explosive you know not just scandal because that suggests like managed fake

1:18:49 corruption but a big deal yeah that can explode right so um yeah read up jim g jenny was articles and give your listen to yourself that um october 8th nixon and lbj phone call because it's almost like you could see like big you know the bureaucrats are saying look we've got to keep our nominal leaders nominal leading okay guys get in the room got it

1:19:19 Okay, Warhamster, go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to address Brian Case calling it the criminal syndicate because it's only partially correct, as you pointed out. And that's why I was saying it's a network that functions above the law, outside the law, within the law, and below the law. And I cut that down to three. The oligarchs, the old money, they don't quit crimes. These are the people that own the banks. They're doing the cross-border.

1:19:50 They run the multinational corporations. They've got their government entities, whether it be through diplomacy or espionage. And the fact that you've got espionage means you have to network with organized international crime. So there's three levels of it, and it's a giant network. It's a syndicate. If you're at the top, I'm using network for a reason, because I'm trying to get it mapped out, and it works better than network, but they both work. You'll see that the people that sit in the...

1:20:20 But basically, they sit in their castles and they're making the rules and stuff like that. You're not going to see them rubbing elbows socially with the underworld. You've got a middleman for all those contacts and stuff like that. And that's where a lot of the government espionage comes in. The question is, how big is it? And I always go back to David Rothkopf's superclass statement of how big the upper class is.

1:20:44 you you are just describing because i'm now five books into my um mafia deep dig the the hitmen never meet the top council in new york ever they never see them um that is the very definition they separate themselves from that do they authorize hits yes

1:21:08 Do they authorize activity of the CIA, like through Solomon and Cromwell? Yes. You know, if you have, to your point, if you have Rockefeller sitting in his office and he doesn't like Salvador Allende or Arbenz or whoever it is, and he just says, well, we're going to have to do something about that. He doesn't have to say, go overthrow that. We just need to do something about that.

1:21:34 And Sullivan and Cromwell, as his attorney, then goes back to their office and they call their Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer that's pretending to be the CIA director and says, hey, we got to do something about this. And then they turn around and Alan Dulles does not meet with the hitman either. He doesn't task that out. He just simply says, we got to do something about that and get me a plan. That's exactly how the network was created.

1:22:04 That's a syndicate. When the original multinational corporations, the trading companies, would go into the ports and to get information, you had to have the underground contacts, stuff like that. But the people collecting all the checks, they don't know these shadowy figures. They don't need to. I know. They've got middlemen. Back then, they would use corporate lawyers or corporate agents. Now, they've incorporated that into the government. And that's where the problem is. How do you shake loose the boxes? That's exactly right.

1:22:34 Fox is watching the hen house. That's exactly right. Yep. Illini, go ahead. Then I've got to run. So, Colonel, I mean, I guess my question is, it seems like a lot of these different organizations, you know, have their own, you know, administrative states, you know, within them. Like, I think Howard, like IT&T is probably one example. Yes. You know, Hughes Corporation is, you know, in the 70s was probably another example of it, where you've got this Ben Gooden, Howard Hughes.

1:23:03 you know, staying in the penthouse of the Sands Hotel, you know, as basically his inner circle is basically running the business for him, you know, watching the whole thing. And I guess, you know, I guess my question is, you did a really good write-up very recently on Howard Hughes. Maybe I missed it in The Great Hero and Coup, but otherwise...

1:23:31 you know what what's what's the source material for that the book the book called um spooks um it has all of that information um i'm not gonna do that whole book but i have marked a couple of chapters that we definitely have to do out of that book um because it flushes out a lot of the details of stuff that i've not seen in other books

1:23:57 Um, because again, what's totally weird and completely unplanned. I have had this great heroine coup sitting on the top with, um, Alfred McCoy's book, um, on my, for a year. These are the two books that always gets, um, when I got the devil's chest, uh, chess board and I went, oh my God, I got to do that one before them. Um, so these books have sat here.

1:24:24 And it just so happens that one of the footnotes in an article I was reading referenced the book called The Spooks. And in order to validate the article that I was reading, I'm like, I don't have that book. I got to get that book. So I got the book. And I didn't realize at the time that it was going to go so much into the mafia aspect because I just finished four other books. What was that one that I just read?

1:24:53 finished uh vicious circles that's total mafia um and like whatever the three other ones were so i'm on a mafia spin here and um i didn't realize when i got the spooks book that um because i just wanted to verify some of the sourcing that it was going to be primarily about the the mafia as well and this whole and

1:25:18 It almost parallels The Great Heroine Coup. It has so many of the same players, but because it's a much bigger book, it goes into a lot more detail. It's an amazing book with a lot of really good information in it. So it's kind of serendipitous that I'm reading this book and...

1:25:46 the great heroin coup that we're doing at the same time, because there's such an overlap in the players that I'm able to, you know, provide some more information about that. And yeah, the part about Howard Hughes is amazing. Especially the part, the way he, they, so just since you brought it up, the way they describe the fact that his.

1:26:12 I want to just read this one part because it's crazy if you think about it. Now, back in the time, if you go back and look at some of the news articles about the Howard Hughes, his office was broken. And when you read about let me just find that part right here. So.

1:26:39 The company is called Summa, S-U-M-M-A. And it says that there was a break-in originally to a guy's office that stole a scrambler, which was a way to... There was a private detective that had recorded a whole bunch of nefarious shit. He gets knocked off.

1:27:06 in Los Angeles and they had a whole bunch of tapes and it was, um, he used to do all of these recordings of all of these Hollywood people. So when they got knocked off, that scared the shit out of everybody. Cause he had dirt on everybody. And one of the things that was stolen was this scrambler from a office break in, not the actual Hughes headquarters break in. Um, and they, and they thought that.

1:27:35 It was this detective getting this scrambler so that he could interpret some of the things that he had taped that he couldn't understand without the scrambler translating it. Because it like puts all kinds of weird sounds and stuff. But if you have like the scrambler piece of it, you can decipher what is actually being said. It's like a de-scrambler, I guess would be the better way of saying it.

1:28:02 It describes the building this way. It says, the building was the central nervous system of the billionaire's empire, serving as a clearinghouse for communications related to all Hughes affairs, aerospace, mining, gambling, transportation, television, film, radio, sports, aviation, litigation, philanthropy. By every account, the facility was an electrician's dream. I don't know about that. That sounds like a nightmare to me, but whatever.

1:28:31 The most sophisticated counter espionage devices in existence were throughout the building. From a third floor reception area, security personnel monitored banks of closed circuit televisions trained upon every corridor and interest. Movements within the building were indicated by an electronic grid whose red button flared along the path taken by any visitor. So they've got lighting systems. And I've been in a retina scanned.

1:28:59 like Hugh Clarence building before. And that's a crazy experience. It was like seven stories underground. Everywhere you went, the lighting lights up your path as you're going. So people can see the lights in front of the door that somebody's approaching. There's a light hanging out of the ceiling about.

1:29:20 18 inches down just so that you can see it through your doorway. It starts spinning as soon as it sends a human body coming down the hallway so they know somebody's coming because you're not supposed to be talking when people are walking past your doorway. I mean, the places are crazy. So I've been in some of these places. I know what they look like. It goes on to say that inside the safes were lined with lead.

1:29:50 The vaults exceeded banking specifications. There were equipment to screen out or garble radio laser beams that might have been used to eavesdrop on conversations or computers. Other devices surveyed the air currents to detect unauthorized disturbances. And there were even an alarm mechanism to warn of X-ray intrusion. This fact was brought to light during a litigation between Howard Hughes and TWA, which he used to own.

1:30:19 In the course of the legal proceedings, Hughes' attorney accused their opposite numbers of attempting to read documents in the safes at Romaine, which is their headquarters, by focusing x-rays upon the building from outside. Subsequently, the attorneys explained that they had gotten that wrong. We need to redact that because that was classified at the time. One might think, therefore, that the Romaine headquarters was burglar-proof.

1:30:47 as three billion dollars could buy modern technology armed guards plural could make it and yet it was knocked over on june 5th by four people who displayed all the sophistication of teenage people trying to sneak liquor out of their dad's cabinet very simply we were told the burglars rock walked in the front door with two tanks of um a settling

1:31:16 torch gas on a steel dolly. The four men wrestled a single security guard, Mike Davis, to the ground after Davis and a switchboard operator, and there were numerous on duty, I don't know where they went, were tied up. The intruder spent four hours torching open the vaults before fleeing without an alarm in the entire building sounding.

1:31:42 They were all on dual circuits. There was not overlap for that. So they couldn't have just like cut a wire outside. It said the pillage wasn't discovered until the next day. By the time the top secret files, including papers setting out the terms of that Glomar Explorer contract, which was given to them basically by the CIA to raise that nuclear Soviet Union sub.

1:32:13 At least $60,000 in cash. CDs were missing. And it was not ever solved. That's just crazy. So anyway. Why are you so mad? Then I got to go. Because tonight's dinner night. Real quick. Who was the author of that book that you're talking about? The author is Jim Hoogan. H-O-U-G-A-N.

1:32:46 Okay. Thank you. Sure. All right, guys, I'm going to run out of here. Um, we've got a quite a show tonight on alpha warriors show at nine o'clock. So I hope to see you guys in the chat over there. Um, it's going to be very interesting. I'll put out a little blurb while I'm at dinner. Um, my teeth go ahead. I got a whole pass. If I can stay awake, I'll be there. Okay. Awesome. All right. That'll be fun. All right, guys. Take care.

1:33:17 See you guys tonight at nine or tomorrow at four. Take care, everybody. See ya.

Entities here

Claims made here

CIA funded Kuomintang book_quoted ▶ 2:03

“Opium and gold, the two things the CIA covets the most. And it talks a little bit about how that area is very tribal and that it was the center of the opium cultivation that had come over from India d…”

E. Howard Hunt operated_in Vietnam book_quoted ▶ 4:38

“parachuting into Indochina, doing all kinds of secretive, nefarious things. Indochina would remain Koenig's base of operation long after World War II, like E. Howard Hunt. He slid over from the OSS to…”

Lucien Conein operated_in Indochina book_quoted ▶ 4:38

E. Howard Hunt member_of CIA book_quoted ▶ 4:38

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. appointed E. Howard Hunt book_quoted ▶ 5:07

“was nefariously associated with heroin, opium, or whatever. He also was the link between the CIA and the Corsican Mafia. He was Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge's middleman in the 1963 plot to overthrow S…”

E. Howard Hunt attempted_coup_against Ngo Dinh Diem book_quoted ▶ 5:07

E. Howard Hunt relationship_with Corsican Mafia book_quoted ▶ 5:07

William Colby headed Phoenix Program book_quoted ▶ 5:40

“A decade later, Koenig and Hunt, working for the Nixon White House plumbers, would attempt to make it appear that the plot had been ordered by JFK. Both Koenig and William Colby, mastermind of the CIA…”

C. B. Starr relationship_with Kenneth Starr book_quoted ▶ 8:04

“And Star is spelled S-T-A-R-R. And when I did kind of the trace of the family tree, he is related, although distantly, to Ken Star of the Clinton fiasco, Ken Star. That Ken Star is related to C.B. Sta…”

Jimmy Hoffa did_business_with New York Life Insurance Company book_quoted ▶ 8:37

“As brought to light during the McClellan hearings, Jimmy Hoffa's award awarded one of them, U.S. Life and a smaller company, Union Casualty, whose agents, Paul and Alan Dorfman, were among Hoffa's lin…”

Paul Dorfman member_of New York Life Insurance Company book_quoted ▶ 8:37

Thomas Corcoran did_business_with United Fruit Company book_quoted ▶ 9:36

“was a director of U.S. Life. Corcoran's other clients at the time was none other than United Fruit Company. What? So basically, not only is Corcoran the attorney, he's a CIA attorney acting as a civil…”

Chiang Kai-shek secretly_owned Air America book_quoted ▶ 10:10

“was thrown into this entire mix, along with the airline Civil Air Transport, of which 60% was owned by the Chiang Kai-shek regime and 40% owned by the CIA. On behalf of United Fruit, Corcoran triggere…”

CIA secretly_owned Air America book_quoted ▶ 10:10

E. Howard Hunt attempted_coup_against Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán book_quoted ▶ 10:10

Willis Bird headed C Supply Inc. book_quoted ▶ 10:41

“presidency of Arbenz in 1954. Crazy. OSS China hand Willis Bird settled in Bangkok, Thailand, to head the office of Sea Supply, Inc. It was a CIA proprietary headquartered in Miami, thanks to Paul Hel…”

C Supply Inc. supplied_arms_to Kuomintang book_quoted ▶ 10:41

Willis Bird did_business_with Air America book_quoted ▶ 11:15

“that were hanging out in Burma. William Byrd, representing Civil Air Transport in Bangkok, coordinated Civil Air Transport's airdrops to KMT troops and ran an engineering firm that constructed all of …”

CIA trained Thai National Police Force book_quoted ▶ 11:48

“45,000 paramilitary police force that the CIA was only too happy to train for them, like they trained the DINA and all of the other SAVAK, all of those. This Thailand National Police Force is basicall…”

Paul Helliwell headed American Bankers Insurance Company of Florida book_quoted ▶ 13:50

“none other than Colonel Paul Helliwell, was a busy man. In Miami, he had the offices of American Bankers Insurance Company. He functioned simultaneously as the Thai consul, which gave him basically di…”

Paul Helliwell headed Detachment A book_quoted ▶ 13:50

Paul Helliwell member_of C. B. Starr book_quoted ▶ 14:23

“He also was on the board of CV Star's insurance megacorp. American Bankers Insurance was itself a most unusual firm. One of its directors, James King, was also the director of Miami National Bank, thr…”

Lansky syndicate laundered_money_for Miami National Bank book_quoted ▶ 14:23

James King member_of Miami National Bank book_quoted ▶ 14:23

James King member_of American Bankers Insurance Company of Florida book_quoted ▶ 14:23

Lou Holler member_of Miami National Bank book_quoted ▶ 14:53

“on their way to Geneva's Swiss Exchange and Investment Bank. One of Swiss Bank's directors was Lou Poller, P-O-L-L-E-R. He also sat on the board of King's Miami National Bank. So this is the internati…”

Lou Holler member_of Swiss Exchange and Investment Bank book_quoted ▶ 14:53

Meyer Lansky secretly_owned General Development Corporation book_quoted ▶ 15:27

“was invested in Florida's explosive development, much of it, by the way, of a company called General Development Corporation, which was controlled by Meyer Lansky, another money laundering operation. …”

Anne Chenault headed China Lobby book_quoted ▶ 17:28

“from the American side, like the Alabama National Guard guys. Corcoran was the Washington escort of General Chenault's widow, Anne Chenault. She was considered the head of the China lobby and a key to…”

William J. Polk founded Flying Tigers book_quoted ▶ 18:02

“Gladio William Pauly, the American co-founder of the Chenault Flying Tigers. Isn't that weird? There's so many aviation enthusiasts out there. And when I talk to them and they think they know everythi…”

William J. Polk supplied_arms_to Kuomintang book_quoted ▶ 18:31

“When I tell them about William Polly and what his role was in creating the Flying Tigers, they're just blown away because they've never heard of William Polly. Polly's name was the password to intrigu…”

William J. Polk did_business_with Santo Trafficante Jr. book_quoted ▶ 19:04

“In deference of a State Department refusal of authorization, he just stepped up and filled the gap. All were either directly or indirectly connected to Polly. He also rubbed elbows with the U.S. heroi…”

Chiang Kai-shek operated_in Taiwan book_quoted ▶ 22:02

“Chiang Kai-shek took his defeated army, was escorted onto the island by the CIA, set up residency, immediately declared martial law because the Formosans, who had lived their entire life on Formosa, w…”

Kuomintang operated_in Burma book_quoted ▶ 23:03

“forces in 1949, some 10,000 KMT troops fled to Southeast Asia and settled in a remote section of Burma. Heavily armed, they soon assumed control of the entire area and intermarried with the local popu…”

Li Mi headed Kuomintang book_quoted ▶ 23:03

CIA funded Kuomintang book_quoted ▶ 23:59

“Around 1950, the CIA became interested. Yeah, way before the 1950, but we'll go with the story. Became interested in the KMT troops because they had been embedded with them the entire time. General Ma…”

Roger Traowara headed Laos book_quoted ▶ 26:55

“mixed airborne commando group was trying to prop up the French because they had already made a deal on cutting the opium in multiple different source revenues that they could all share. So the French …”

French Forces trafficked Golden Triangle book_quoted ▶ 26:55

Lucien Conein member_of CIA book_quoted ▶ 28:00

“Large quantities of opium were shipped to French Saigon headquarters and passed to the Corsican mafia, who in turn smuggled the drugs to Marseille. When the French withdrew from Indochina in 1955 afte…”

Edward Lansdale member_of CIA book_quoted ▶ 28:28

“who bridged both the French and the CIA's intel community. He offered the Americans their entire guerrilla force. Against Koenig's advice, this guy says it was refused. It was not refused, by the way.…”

Lucien Conein spied_on Corsican Mafia book_quoted ▶ 30:00

“He spent his free time hanging out with the Corsicans and considered them part of his group. They never realized that he was ratting them out to the CIA. When Lansdale returned from Vietnam in the lat…”

Vang Pao operated_in Laos book_quoted ▶ 31:02

“CIA-backed South Vietnamese and Laotian generals began taking over the opium traffic. They didn't take it over. The CIA was basically pushing them out in front for them to hide behind. The first heroi…”

Army Criminal Investigation Command investigated Paul Withers host_asserted ▶ 37:57

“Kai's record notwithstanding, he had been removed from U.S. Operation Haylift, which flew commando units into Laos for loading his aircraft with opium on the return trips, which, by the way, they all …”

Paul Withers member_of Operation Haylift host_asserted ▶ 37:57

Operation Haylift trafficked Laos host_asserted ▶ 37:57

U.S. Embassy covered_up Army Criminal Investigation Command host_asserted ▶ 38:27

“the complicity in the heroin trafficking, and filed a report at the U.S. Embassy. The embassy ignored the report and chose not to forward it to the Washington, D.C. State Department. The BNDD, which i…”

CIA impeded Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs host_asserted ▶ 38:27

William Colby reassigned CIA host_asserted ▶ 38:55

“would be a reoccurring factor right up until probably this administration. In 1971, however, a string of heroin labs were uncovered in Thailand. In 1971, furthermore, Colby and Koenig were recalled to…”

Lucien Conein reassigned United States host_asserted ▶ 38:55

CIA trafficked Laos host_asserted ▶ 39:49

“Of the Corsican Mafia, which Renee talks about all the time. At the war's end, the CIA admitted that certain elements of the organization had been involved in the opium smuggling. Certain elements, li…”

Paul Withers member_of CIA host_asserted ▶ 40:54

“a silver and bronze star. Quote, after completing basic training at Fort Dix in the fall of 65, Withers was sent to Nang Train, South Vietnam. Although he was ostensibly stationed there, he was actual…”

Paul Withers trained Fort Dix host_asserted ▶ 40:54

CIA supplied_arms_to Paul Withers host_asserted ▶ 41:24

“civilian credentials. They were issued Czechoslovakian guns and Korean uniforms. Paul then signed blank sheets of paper at the bottom for the CIA for them to later type out letters and send them to pa…”

Air America trafficked Laos host_asserted ▶ 41:55

“supposedly, officially, was to make friends, be nice. About twice a week, Air America planes would arrive with supplies and be loaded up with opium and taken out. So we got arms coming in, opium going…”

Del Rosario member_of CIA host_asserted ▶ 42:30

“Del Rosario, a former CIA operative, said this. In 1971, I was in operations assistance for Continental Air Service. Yes, that's another proprietary, which flew for the CIA in Laos. The company's tran…”

Continental Air Services trafficked Laos host_asserted ▶ 42:30

Continental Air Services front_for CIA host_asserted ▶ 42:30

CIA trafficked South Vietnam host_asserted ▶ 43:30

“These shipments were always top priority. Sometimes the opium was unloaded in the Laos capital and stored in Air America depots. At other times, it went to Bangkok or Saigon. Even while the CIA traffi…”

CIA trafficked Bangkok host_asserted ▶ 43:30

Meyer Lansky founded Cuba host_asserted ▶ 43:58

“A war to kill off all the Corsicans. Chapter 15, The Cubans of Florida. Meyer Lansky, the syndicate's financial wizard and chairman from 1947, began building his Cuban empire in his early 40s. When fr…”

Meyer Lansky relationship_with Fulgencio Batista host_asserted ▶ 43:58

Meyer Lansky entrusted Trafficante crime family host_asserted ▶ 43:58

Meyer Lansky eliminated Bugsy Siegel host_asserted ▶ 44:31

“Santo Sr. Lansky and Batista settled in Hollywood, Florida, just north of Miami. Before long, Lansky was running an illegal casino empire on the coast. And in 47, he eliminated Bugsy Siegel and moved …”

Meyer Lansky trafficked Cuba host_asserted ▶ 44:31

Meyer Lansky promoted Fulgencio Batista host_asserted ▶ 45:01

“The older mafia dons deemed initially didn't want to do it, but hey, everybody's making money, so we're in. When Florida's illegal casinos were shut down in 1950, Lansky promoted Batista's return to p…”

Trafficante crime family member_of Meyer Lansky host_asserted ▶ 45:30

“became Lansky's right-hand man and manager of his Cuban interest. And oh, by the way, the whole restoring Batista to Cuba was CIA assisted. So they have all of this casino trade going on in Cuba. They…”

CIA assisted Fulgencio Batista host_asserted ▶ 45:30

William J. Polk did_business_with Cuba host_asserted ▶ 46:02

“to be distributed between Miami and New York. And interestingly enough, in many of the other books, we found out that they were using United Fruit, hence the importance of United Fruit in the earlier …”

Trafficante crime family relationship_with Fulgencio Batista host_asserted ▶ 46:32

“Money. Very convenient. Cuba was very, very convenient for these guys. Traficani Jr. had proven more talented than his father, extraordinarily intelligent and energetic. He was calm in crises. Everybo…”

Meyer Lansky appointed Trafficante crime family host_asserted ▶ 47:06

“to Lansky, who appointed him manager of his own Florida interest in addition to those in Cuba. Lansky needed to spend increasingly large amounts of time in New York and Las Vegas, Rome, Versailles, Be…”

Trafficante crime family assassinated Albert Anastasia host_asserted ▶ 47:35

“Lansky's ever-increasing power and wealth, among them Murder, Inc. Chairman of the board, Albert Anastasia. In 1957, he tried enlisting Traficani's aid in removing Lansky from the Havana scene. That w…”

Albert Anastasia attempted_assassination_of Meyer Lansky host_asserted ▶ 47:35

Peter Del Scott asserted CIA book_quoted ▶ 48:05

“in the barbershop with shaving cream on his face. According to Peter Del Scott, certain U.S. business interests collaborated with the narcotics-linked American mafia in Cuba, as they did with similar …”

CIA recruited Cuba host_asserted ▶ 48:36

“that in 1973, Cuban Americans recruited by the CIA were suspected in federal and city authorities to be involved in everything from narcotics, extortion rackets, and bombings, which is true. Inside Am…”

Trafficante crime family managed Cuba host_asserted ▶ 49:05

“Traficani Jr., hired fast-learning natives while dictator Batista's men made the empire, quote-unquote, safe, not for democracy, for organized crime, often appearing more loyal to Traficani than anybo…”

Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgencio Batista host_asserted ▶ 50:51

“All right, back to the story. Sorry, I got off on a little tangent there. So with Fidel Castro won January 1959, Alistair Batista, Lansky and Traficani were in trouble, though they were expelled from …”

CIA aided Fidel Castro host_asserted ▶ 51:20

“Castro. And the CIA had aided and abetted him in the mountains with arms and training and everything. So they hadn't lost all hope at this point. They're still thinking that they can get Castro on the…”

Otto Skorzeny trained Cuba host_asserted ▶ 51:51

“around Manhattan's Washington Heights and New Jersey Hudson County. Another 100,000 headed to Spain, which is very interesting. Spain seems to be a hotspot. And yes, Otto Skorzeny was there to train t…”

Trafficante crime family did_business_with Harlan Blackburn host_asserted ▶ 53:16

“had gotten involved in some gold mines in Latin America. Besides the Cubans who comprised the main ring of this organization, Traficani also closely worked with Harlan Blackburn Mob, a break in the ma…”

Benedetto Andrisano member_of Joseph Orsini host_asserted ▶ 53:49

“Ndavislio negotiated the opening of a narcotics route in Canada. The representative of Corsican boss Joseph Orsini, Benedetto and his brothers, there's one, two, three, four of them, eventually ran Tr…”

Benedetto Andrisano negotiated Canada host_asserted ▶ 53:49

Trafficante crime family founded Teamsters Local host_asserted ▶ 54:16

“And they joined the New York wholesaler, Louis Carrillo, who was also in Canada. Traficani settled in Tampa, but continued to run some of his activities from Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters Local in Miami. Tr…”

Trafficante crime family did_business_with Jimmy Hoffa host_asserted ▶ 54:16

Benedetto Andrisano did_business_with Louis Carrillo host_asserted ▶ 54:16

Teamsters Local front_for Trafficante crime family host_asserted ▶ 54:45

“hearings was a front for their narcotics trafficking. After losing his Havana paradise, Meyer Lansky used straw men to buy up the Grand Bahama Island and erected a new gambling city in the city of Nas…”

Meyer Lansky acquired Bahamas host_asserted ▶ 54:45

CIA contacted Robert Maheu host_asserted ▶ 55:12

“Moreover, they were not alone in the dreaming of overthrowing Castro. The CIA, in particular, let their imagination run and called on their old China hand, General Edward Lansdale. In 1960, the CIA ha…”

Robert Maheu relationship_with Howard Hughes host_asserted ▶ 55:12

Robert Maheu introduced Johnny Roselli host_asserted ▶ 55:41

“Roselli was introduced to Mayhew and Traficani and not introduced to him. They're all they all know each other. Mayhew, Traficani, Giacana all together. The agency had previously stationed an agent on…”

Frank Fiorini supplied_arms_to Fidel Castro host_asserted ▶ 55:41

Frank Fiorini member_of CIA host_asserted ▶ 55:41

Robert Maheu supplied_arms_to Johnny Roselli host_asserted ▶ 56:10

“to Castro's revolutionary army for the CIA. Through this later assignment, Fioroni had made acquaintances with Traficani. In February of 61, Mayhew, Traficani, and Roselli met at Miami's Fountain Blue…”

Frank Fiorini relationship_with Trafficante crime family host_asserted ▶ 56:10

Johnny Roselli attempted_assassination_of Fidel Castro host_asserted ▶ 56:10

Trafficante crime family attempted_assassination_of Fidel Castro host_asserted ▶ 56:43

“It failed. Traficani engineered more attempts, including one in September of 62, blah, blah, blah. We know all of that. And he spends the next little bit talking about many of those. But I did want to…”

Gary Droller member_of Gehlen Organization speculative ▶ 57:10

“A runner-up to Hunt for the most intriguing CIA conspirator award is Bender. Bender was a German refugee whose true identity remains a matter of speculation. Some contend that he had been a Galen orga…”

Gary Droller relationship_with Frank Sturgis speculative ▶ 57:40

“the former security chief for Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo, claims that Bender was in fact Friends Swend, S-W-E-N-D, a Galen collaborator Nazi that was hanging out in Peru. Prior to the Bay of…”

Frank Sturgis member_of Gehlen Organization speculative ▶ 57:40

Frank Sturgis planned Bay of Pigs Invasion speculative ▶ 58:09

“There he purportedly planned the invasion, along with mobster Frank Costello and the ex-Cuban dictator Batista. So you see here the critical blending of Operation Gladio people in Europe, operations n…”

Frank Costello planned Bay of Pigs Invasion speculative ▶ 58:09

Fulgencio Batista planned Bay of Pigs Invasion speculative ▶ 58:09

William J. Polk owned Cuba host_asserted ▶ 58:38

“And then it goes on to say that Polly had had a big state in Cuba prior to Castro's takeover. He had owned the Havana bus line, sugar refineries, sugar plantations. He also controlled the airline into…”

Anne Chenault member_of Watergate Hotel host_asserted ▶ 1:13:17

“But anyway, all along, go ahead. Yeah, Colonel, I just want to mention relating to Claire Cheneau and Anna Cheneau in this period, you know, Anna Cheneau was, I believe, one of the earliest tenants in…”

Richard Nixon ordered_assassination_of Vietnam host_asserted ▶ 1:14:47

“Kind of sent a round-the-back message to the South Vietnamese government to delay proposed peace talks with President Johnson so that Nixon would win the 1968 elections. In other words, that Johnson-H…”

John Tower member_of October Surprise host_asserted ▶ 1:15:47

“the 1968 october surprise but also it's it's worth mentioning you know that a key kind of linchpin in that uh outreach of nixon to the south vietnamese government was our good friend senator john towe…”

John Tower died_in Vietnam host_asserted ▶ 1:16:21

“That are very interesting. And also, of course, Senator Tower dies in that plane crash either the day before or day after Senator Kerry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Senator Hines of Pennsylvania in 1991. Th…”

George H.W. Bush member_of Iran-Contra affair host_asserted ▶ 1:16:51

“Senate investigation of H.W. Bush's involvement in Iran-Contra. And this was right leading into the 1992 Bush campaign. So there's that. And that and that. And, yeah, lastly... All along, don't forget…”

Howard Hughes owned Summa Corporation documented ▶ 1:28:02

“It describes the building this way. It says, the building was the central nervous system of the billionaire's empire, serving as a clearinghouse for communications related to all Hughes affairs, aeros…”

Summa Corporation located_in Romaine documented ▶ 1:30:19

“In the course of the legal proceedings, Hughes' attorney accused their opposite numbers of attempting to read documents in the safes at Romaine, which is their headquarters, by focusing x-rays upon th…”