Beyond Iran-contra: elusive enterprise at work | by Jerry Meldon | The Boston Globe, January 16, 1989

 

When and if retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and businessman Albert Hakim stand trial on Iran-contra conspiracy charges, the public will see only the tip of an iceberg.

            Secord and Hakim belong to a network – along with fellow Iran-contra figures Theodore Shackley and Thomas G. Clines – that has long operated in the intelligence and arms-trade netherworld, the gray zone between covert action and crime.

            Despite occasional run-ins with the law, some quite scandalous, the network has shown a remarkable capacity to survive. It has not hurt to have friends in high places, and they had many such friends in the Reagan administration.

            Before Reagan entered the Oval Office, Justice Department officials had targeted the network in one major investigation and had been asked by Australian authorities to cooperate in another.

            But the network not only survived the Reagan years, it engineered and profited from the supply of arms to Iran and the contras. That was possible because the Justice Department conveniently narrowed the scope of its investigation.

            Reviewing the sequence of events that led to those earlier Justice Department investigations will make clear how important it is that Second [sic] and Hakim – as well as Lt. Col. Oliver L. North – stand trial, if only for the latest in a series of shady operations.

            In the late 1960s, CIA cover operations chief Shackley, his deputy Clines and Secord – on loan to the CIA from the Air Force – together ran the “secret” war in Laos. Clines also happened to be the case officer for CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson, who is now serving a long prison sentence for shipping explosives to Libya.

            Back then Wilson was setting up commercial fronts for the CIA worldwide and, by turning the intelligence operations into profit-making enterprises, becoming a millionaire. After Shackley, Secord and Clines returned from Indochina, they were frequent guests at Wilson’s sprawling Virginia estate, along with senators, congressmen, generals and admirals.

            At one point, Clines sold Secord real estate. When it turned out to be a bad investment, Wilson bailed Secord out. When Wilson’s employment was abruptly terminated in 1976 because of his preoccupation with personal profits, Shackley reportedly appealed, unsuccessfully to Wilson’s taskmaster.

 

            Dealings with Iran

 

            But with or without cover, Wilson continued to ply his trade, which in the mid-1970s centered on weapons trafficking in the Middle East. Through Frank Terpil, another ex-CIA employee who would be convicted of arms trafficking, Wilson was introduced to Albert Hakim, Secord’s future business partner. Hakim was making his first million selling American-made surveillance equipment to the arms-hungry, oil-rich, shah of Iran.

            The shah was offered an expanding menu of gadgetry and arms by US corporations that, according to federal court documents, relied on middlemen such as Hakim to stuff the right pockets, and on the CIA and Pentagon representatives to authorize weapons transfers. In charge of the Air Force effort from 1975 to 1978 was Richard Secord, working directly under the chief of the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Advisory Group, Erich von Marbod.

            The billions the shah spent, and the payoffs to and through the middlemen, made Tehran a breeding ground for corruption. Convinced the Pentagon representatives were in cahoots with the contractors, the shah asked Donald Rumsfeld, who was then defense secretary, to fire von Marbod, who had already been reprimanded by Rumfeld’s predecessor for spending weekends at a hunting lodge owned by the contractors.

            The US ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms, a former director of the CIA, told one visitor, according to the Washington Post, that he had “never seen … so many people out of control in the Pentagon.” In July 1976, he asked the CIA director, George Bush, to send CIA officials to Iran to hear the corruption charges firsthand.

            What Bush did is unclear. Rumsfeld chose not to fire von Marbod. And according to a memorandum unearthed during the Iran-contra investigation, Shackley, Bush’s covert operations chief, sought to recruit Hakim as a CIA source.

 

            Wilson indicted

 

            But by the time the 1970s drew to a close, enforcement authorities had zeroed in on the network.

            The principal target was Wilson, whom Terpil had introduced to the influential Libyans. Wilson was indicted in April 1980 on charges he sold explosives to Col. Moammar Kadafy’s military, but Wilson remained a fugitive until his arrest two years later.

            Wilson maintains his Libyan ventures were monitored by longtime case officer Thomas Clines, and Clines’ boss, Shackley. Neither Clines nor Shackley has ever admitted knowledge of deals like those for which Wilson was convicted. Richard Secord appeared as Wilson’s character witness. But Wilson was sentenced to 52 years behind bars.

            Between his arrest and his conviction, Australian authories were feverishly investigating another of Wilson’s ventures, involving a mysterious bank that financed US intelligence operations including the subversion of the government of Australia, a close ally. In that effort, Wilson apparently took direct orders from Shackley.

            The investigation began after the body of Australian Frank Nugan was discovered next to his rifle in his Mercedes, 100 miles outside of Sydney, and after the Sydney-based Nugan-Hand Bank collapsed. Nugan’s partner, former Green Beret Michael Hand, who served under Shackley in Indochina, has not been seen since. On Nugan’s body was the card of former CIA director William Colby, who performed legal services for the bank.

            Australian officials were startled to discover that the bank’s president was retired Adm. Earl “Buddy” Yates, the former chief of staff for plans and policy of the US Pacific Command, and that one of its branch managers was Gen. Ed Black, the former Army chief of staff in the Pacific. They discovered the bank was a money laundry for drug traffickers, and that one branch, in the heart of Indochina’s heroin-producing Golden Triangle, was located in the same building as the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

            If that were not enough, the Australians also heard testimony that the bank was used by Edwin Wilson, both to finance the shipment of arms to CIA-supported forces in Angola and to arrange payoffs for the destabilization of the administration of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a troublesome critic of US policy in Vietnam.

            When the Nugan-Hand Bank collapsed, according to the Australian investigation, Clines, by then no longer at the CIA, arranged the escape from Australia of the bank’s No. 3 man, Bernard Houghton. Houghton, according to “The Crimes of Patriots” by Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitney, had been introduced to Clines by Richard Secord.

            Clines and Rafael “Chi-Chi” Quintero – a CIA-trained assassination expert who later helped Secord and Clines run the Nicaraguan contra supply operation – reportedly went to Nugan Hand’s Geneva office to recover Houghton’s travel case. According to the official report of the Australian investigation, Clines said, after removing a document, “We’ve got to keep Dick’s name out of this” – which the Australians took to mean Richard Secord.

           

            Australians were stonewalled

 

            When the Australians requested the assistance of the CIA and the Justice department, they were stonewalled. In retrospect, it was not surprising despite the fact that the Justice Department in the early ‘80s was, like the Australians, hot on the trails of Secord, Shackley and Clines. But the three were too well-connected to the Reagan administration and its brewing Iran-contra operation. As a result, the Justice Department investigations were curtailed.

            The Justice Department had been pursuing Wilson’s allegation that Shackley, Secord, Clines and von Marbod were his partners in a shady arms shipping venture.

            In 1979, Wilson lent Clines $500,000 to start up Egyptian American Transport Services Inc. – a claim Clines does not deny. EATSCO was then awarded $71 million in federal funds to ship arms to Egypt, a contract approved by the Pentagon’s Erich von Marbod, Secord’s boss then as in Iran and Indochina earlier.

            EATSCO was later charged with overbilling the Pentagon several million dollars. The company repaid $3 million and Clines, who had made a million dollars on the controversial contract, paid $110,000 in fines.

            The more sinister angle is that Wilson insists Cline’s [sic] silent partners – in addition to himself – were Shackley, Secord and von Marbod, the last two of whom were still in government. All four vehemently deny Wilson’s claim.

            Secord sent Clines a check for $30,000 just after Clines paid the fines, but Secord claims it covered an old loan. Still Secord was relieved of his Pentagon duties pending investigation of Wilson’s allegations. However, he was spared the insult of a Justice Department lie detector test, and reinstated, by Frank C. Carlucci, who was then assistant defense secretary and had been deputy director of the CIA. Carlucci is the outgoing secretary of defense.

 

            Carlucci’s friendship

 

            As to Erich von Marbod, he retired in 1981 when the Justice Department targeted him. He was later hired as a $200,000-a-year consultant by Carlucci, who between Washington appointments had assumed the presidency of an affiliate of Sears, Roebuck and Co., Sears World Trade.

            Recently, defense secretary Carlucci was part of a six-member panel of Reagan administration appointees that voted unanimously to withhold classified documents from Oliver North’s trial, compelling special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh to drop the major charges against him.

            Besides Carlucci, the network had another friend in Michael Ledeen, a State Department terrorist consultant who in 1980 penned a scathing attack on Stansfield Turner, President Carter’s CIA chief, for forcing out Theodore Shackley for his Wilson ties. Ledeen also warned Lawrence Barcella, who was prosecuting the EATSCO case, that the overbilling might have financed a covert operation. Soon thereafter the Justice Department took Barcella off the case.

            The covert operation Ledeen referred to was in all likelihood the fledgling Iran-contra affair. The Reaganites, particularly CIA director William Casey and his protege, National Security Council aide Oliver North, had little regard for conventional military and intelligence resources, and instead turned to Secord.

            Secord had officially retired from the Air Force in 1983 with the exalted rank of deputy assistant secretary of defense to become a director of Hakim’s Stanford Technology Inc. Hired as a consultant to Stanford Technology was the retired CIA covert operations chief, Theodore Shackley.

 

            Arms for Iran

 

            In November 1984, Shackley met in Hamburg, West Germany, with the Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who reportedly fabricated the 1981 story that Libyan hit men had entered the United States to assassinate President Reagan. Shackley’s friend Michael Ledeen, who by then had become a terrorism consultant to the National Security Council, later vouched for Ghorbanifar. The arms-for-hostages deals – which freed few hostage [sic] but earned millions in arms profits for Secord and Hakim – were on their way.

            Secord was put in charge of the contra supply operation, for which he brought in his old friend Thomas Clines. According to Hakim, he, Secord and Clines were business partners on those deals.

            Secord and Hakim’s “enterprise” made $22 million in profits by selling US arms to Iran. About $14 million was diverted to the contras and the remaining $8 million was apparently profit for Secord and Hakim. The diversion of the $14 million was the principal crime for which North, Secord and Hakim were charged. They were also charged with conspiracy to defraud the American taxpayers.

            About $14 million was diverted to the contras and the remaining $8 million was apparently profit for Secord and Hakim. The diversion of the $14 million was the principal crime for which North, Secord and Hakim were charged. They were also charged with conspiracy to defraud the American taxpayers.

            North, Casey and North’s bosses at the National Security Council, Col. Robert McFarlane and Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, must have known that Shackley, Secord and Clines had been tainted by their connections with Edwin Wilson, connections that brought early retirement to all three.

            All of this should also have been known to the joint congressional committees that investigated the Iran-contra affair. Committee members should have at least read the bestseller on the Wilson case, “Manhunt,” by Peter Maas, published the summer before the scandal broke. Maas later told US News and World Report that the committee “really flubbed it on the Secord-Clines thing … They were ill-prepared.”

            At one point, in an angry letter to the publisher of “Manhunt,” Secord threatened to sue the author for libel, and labeled as a “malicious charge not supported by any evidence” Maas’ suggestion that the general had been involved with Wilson in dubious activities. But Maas, a thorough investigator, told the New York Times: “I’m not retracting anything. I have double and triple sources.”

            More recently, an associate of Thomas Clines told me that Clines had confided that Secord was indeed his silent business partner in the EATSCO venture along with Shackley, who triggered the arms-for-hostages deal through his contract with Ghorbanifar, and Wilson and von Marbod, who played no apparent role in the Iran-contra affair.

            The congressional Iran-contra committee never interrogated Clines, who refused to testify without immunity and was never granted it. Why Clines was not subpoenaed – and, unlike Secord and Hakim, was not indicted – are additional intriguing questions to bear in mind when and if the Iran-contra trials begin.

            But we should have learned by now that justice inevitably loses out when the suspects are part of the government’s own shadow network. And in the end it is not surprising that North and Casey turned to the network to do their dirty work. But Congress still has to explain why, in its official investigation, it became an accomplice to the cover-up.

 

 

The Ibex Intrigue: New Light on Old Murders | By Jerry Meldon | published in the Boston Phoenix on September 2, 1988

Written by Jerry Meldon, published in the Boston Phoenix on September 2, 1988 

On a Saturday morning in August 1976, William Cottrell, Robert Kronsgard, and Donald Smith were driving to work at Iran's Dashan Tadah air-force base. Their car was making its way through a crowded Teheran neighborhood when it was blocked by Volkswagens and rammed by a VW bus. In a flash, the men inside were shot point-blank — and murdered — by masked gunmen firing automatic weapons. 

The victims, all in their 40s, were employees of the Los Angeles-based Rockwell International Corporation, computer and communications experts assigned to a hush-hush $500 million electronic-surveillance project code-named "Ibex." Rockwell was the prime contractor. 

The shah became suspicious

Their client, Shah Mohammed. Riza Pahlevi, had visions of spying on Iran's neighbors and on his enemies at home as well. Ibex computers were counted on to allow SAVAK, the shah's CIA-trained secret police, to monitor up to 4500 telephone calls at once. In the Pentagon, however, it was no secret that Ibex was unworkable. But that did not set Ibex hardware apart from much of the electronic gadgetry the shah had ordered from US defense and security firms — for a staggering $20 billion — between 1970 and 1978. And Ibex was not the first — nor, we know, the last — such project on which the Iranian middleman Albert Hakim would make a profit.

The Rockwell engineers were not the only Americans murdered in Teheran in those years. One Air Force colonel was assassinated in 1975. Another had been gunned down two years earlier. All five homicides were pinned on members of the Islamic Marxist Guerrillas — the Mulaheedin — a score of whom were eventually executed by the shah's government for those alleged crimes. 

But what was the motive for the Rockwell murders? The pat answer is that the Mujaheedinare terrorists whose enemies thenincluded all Americans, military and civilian, who propped up the shah's repressive  infrastructure. Now comes a chilling, alternative hypothesis: the three men were actually murdered to keep them silent about kickbacks from the Ibex contract to corrupt American officials. 

The source of this scenario is Gene Wheaton, a former Army and Air Force criminal investigator. He became Rockwell's security chief for Ibex in 1977 and stayed on in that position through the American evacuation of Iran in 1979. His investigations into the Rockwell murders continued after his employment with Rockwell terminated. 

Was North's network involved?

Earlier this year, Wheaton gave a sworn deposition in support of a lawsuit filed by journalists Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan against Hakim, Major General Richard Secord (USAF, retired), and 27 others. The journalists charged the 29 defendants many of whom had secretly armed the Nicaraguan contras at the behest of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North — with operating a racketeering conspiracy. Their alleged crimes include the May 1984 bombing of a press conference of a contra leader in Costa Rica at which Avirgan was severely injured. Secord, Hakim, and North have all been indicted by Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh for defrauding American taxpayers and for related charges.
On June 23, two years after it was filed and four days before it was scheduled for trial, the two journalists' lawsuit was abruptly dismissed for lack of evidence by presiding judge lames L. King of the US District Court in Miami. Lawyers for the plaintiffs — who are affiliated with the Washington-based Christic Institute — have filed an appeal. 

Before the case was dismissed, the plaintiffs' lawyers had deposed a number of interesting witnesses. However, Judge King limited the scope of discovery to the years 1982 through '86 to focus on the Iran-contra affair, a move that technically precluded questioning Wheaton about earlier events. The judge's ruling transformed Wheaton's deposition hearing into a tug-of-war between attorneys, with the plaintiffs' representative struggling to get Wheaton's version of the Ibex murders out in the open. In between the forensic sparring, Wheaton said enough in the depositions to prompt Secord to sue him for $6 million. (Secord earlier had sued Leslie Cockburn, author of a book on the Iran-contra affair. for $38 million.)

 The Phoenix has obtained a copy of Wheaton's deposition. In it, he claims that his personal investigation has led him to conclude that the three Rockwell officials were murdered 12 years ago to cover up corruption — that is, kickbacks — in the Ibex deal. 

In relating Wheaton's controversial allegations, the Phoenix does not seek to imply that it has either corroborated them or concluded that what Wheaton suggests is true. However, the seriousness of his allegations, their relevance to the Iran-contra affair, and Wheaton's credentials argue for their publication. 

According to Wheaton's deposition, in 1985 he was drumming up business in Washington for an air-cargo firm of which he was vice-president. His contacts in northern Virginia's "spook" cornmunity led him to the office of Florida Republican Congressman Bill McCollum, an avid supporter of the contras who would later serve on the joint congressional Iran-contra committee. According to the deposition, Wheaton found himself in the midst of Oliver North's covert operations in support of "freedom fighters' worldwide.

Discussions with McCollum aide Vaughan Forest and with Robert Owen, a man who played Friday to Oliver North in the contra supply effort, focused on the Afghan Mujaheedin. When Wheaton suggested that his own firm bid for an air-supply contract, he stated in the deposition, he was told that he would have to take his marching orders from North's favored suppliers —Secord and his business partner, Hakim. 

Wheaton was taken aback. Secord and Hakim were associated with what Wheaton perceived as a network of arms traders and Pentagon and CIA officials to whom Wheaton claims his investigations, beginning with the Ibex case, have consistently led him.

According to Wheaton's testimony "I told them [Forest and Owen] that these men had been involved in scandalous, publicly documented cases in the past, involving kickbacks on foreign military sales cases; on dealings with laundering large amounts of payoffs ... on military programs in the Middle East through Swiss bank accounts; and that these men had previously been involved with [former CIA agent] Ed Wilson — who is spending 52 years in the federal prison in Marion, Illinois... 

"I told them I had been conducting a 10-, 12-year investigation on the assassinations of some Americans that were involved in programs that these people were involved in, and that I wasn't going to be involved in a program involving the Afghan freedom fighters or the contras, if I had to deal through those people.... I thought the US government was heading for a major embarrassment if they continued to deal with them." 
That was a year before the Iran-contra scandal broke. 

Wheaton was on the mark about a national embarrassment. However, his deposition offers no back-up for his more serious allegations regarding Ibex, other than his own credentials as an investigator. Whatever evidence Wheaton has, circumstantial or otherwise, he has convinced no enforcement authority to conduct an official investigation. 
On the other hand, one can imagine how suspicions that emerged from his investigations one decade ago have grown stronger with each year's press revelations on the Wilson affair and, ultimately, the Iran-contra scandal. 

Apparently, according to the deposition, the only one of "those people" associated with Wilson who was personally contacted by Wheaton was Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero — a Cuban-exile veteran of the CIA-sponsored 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. A longtime CIA contract agent, Quintero assumed a key role in the covert supply of arms to the contras, for which he was paid by Hakim's Stanford Technology Corporation (STC). 

According to Wheaton: "My primary interest in Chi Chi was trying to work something out to see if we could get him some sort of immunity for his past sins, particularly in the area of assassinations ... if he would ... tell all... I was interested in the Rockwell assassinations, but I had come up with a list of 20-something people that had ... met untimely deaths after they were either subpoenaed or became whistle-blowers, involved with this inner network since 1971.... 

"I gave him a general briefing on documents I had discovered and witnesses I had uncovered, which led me firmly to believe that the Rockwell managers were murdered because of a skim off the Ibex contract rather than by a typical terrorist attack." 
Quintero, according to Wheaton, refused to comment on any murders.

Besides Quintero, Secord, and Hakim, in his deposition Wheaton named as "those people" Thomas Dines, Theodore Shackley, and Eric Von Marbod. The first two were high-standing CIA officers and the third a similarly ranked Pentagon official. Each resigned in the late '70s in the wake of press reports of the escapades of former CIA agent Wilson. Wilson is serving half a century in prison for, among other things, shipping explosives to Libya. 

According to Wilson, and associates of his interviewed by author Peter Maas for his book Manhunt, Wilson, Shackley, Von Marbod, and Richard Secord were silent partners of Clines in EATSCO (Egyptian American Transport Services Company), a company founded in 1979 while Von Marbod and Secord were still Pentagon officials. The Justice Department later determined that EATSCO overcharged the Pentagon $8 million on a contract to ship arms to Egypt — a contract that had been awarded by Von Marbod. 

Shackley, Clines, Secord, and Von Marbod have all denied Wilson's allegation. Whereas the first three names appeared regularly as the press delved into the Iran-contra affair, Von Marbod's remained obscure. However, Von Marbod was already a controversial figure in Iran by the time of the 1976 Rockwell murders. 

Back in the mid '70s, Von Marbod headed the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Iran. Secord headed the MAAG group's Air Force mission. One of MAAG's assign-ments was to authorize and coordinate Iranian purchases of arms from US contractors, of whom the shah was only too willing a customer. But eager as the shah was to buy, he grew wary of MAAG's motives. Ul-timately he concluded that some members of MAAG were in bed with the arms merchants. 

According to a 1977 Washing-ton Post article by Bob Woodward, by early 1976 the shah had cut off meaningful relations with top Pentagon officials in Iran and asked that Von Marbod in particular be fired. 

Richard Helms sounded a warning

Von Marbod had already been reprimanded in 1975 by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger for staying at a hunting lodge owned by the Northrop Corporation — a major defense contractor. In a February 1976 letter to Schles-nger's successor, Donald Rumsfeld, the shah charged MAAG officials with "malfeasance" and "crude deception" in covering up deficiencies in a Westinghouse-built radar system. But Rumsfeld let Von Marbod keep his post. 
The US ambassador to Iran, former CIA director Richard Helms, told one visitor, according to the Post article, that he had never seen ... so many people out of control in the Pentagon." In July 1976 Helms sent George Bush, then CIA director, a hand-written note asking Bush to send top CIA officials to Iran so they could hear the corruption allegations firsthand. 

Helms wrote to Bush one month before the murder of the three Rockwell officials connected with Ibex — a project Woodward described as a "case study in the kind of intrigue and under the table dealing which characterized the U.S. arms merchandising program." 

Richard Secord's and Albert Hakim's exact roles in the Ibex project are unclear — and Wheaton's deposition offers no concrete evidence to support their involvement in it. A 1981 Computerworld article did report that Hakim had sold mobile-communications intercept equipment deployed in the project. 

Notably, Hakim's Stanford Technology Corporation had employed former CIA agent Frank Terpil for eight months in 1976, according to a former STC official cited in that same Computerworld article. It was Terpil who introduced Wilson to Libyan officials, a move that put Wilson on the path to solitary confinement in the Marion, Illinois, federal pen. 
Terpil is currently a fugitive. In 1979 he was sentenced in New York in absentia to 50 years in prison. The charges included the attempted sale of 10,000 machine guns to undercover policemen posing as Latin American revolutionaries.

In his sworn deposition, Gene Wheaton reports an intriguing conversation he had with John "I.W." Harper, who had preceded Wheaton as chief of security for the Ibex project. Wheaton says Harper told him, "Frank Terpil was in Teheran the day of the Rockwell assassinations.... I.W. personally met him at Tripoli Airport when he flew into Tripoli, Libya, after coming from Teheran.... Terpil [told] him ... the Rockwell matter had been taken care of." 
There has been no public reaction to Wheaton's shocking allegation — other than Secord's $6 million lawsuit. The Justice Department — which under Ed Meese has been out to lunch on matters such as these — will almost certainly leave the Ibex murder case closed. 

A major source of the back-ground information in this article is The Iran-Contra Connection, by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter (South End Press, Boston, 1987). 

The Secord ‘foreign-policy’ team | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Sunday Globe, June 26, 1988

 

Grade schoolers learn that an informed electorate and the rule of law are the cornerstones of democracy. But when covert operations run afoul of the law, Washington covers up – even when the “national security” rationale is ludicrous. The familiar script is, unfortunately, being followed in Iran-contra’s aftermath.

            When Oliver North turned over the covert Iran-contra operations to retired Maj. Gen. Richard Secord, he knowingly placed US policy in the hands of a notoriously shady network of ex-military officers and intelligence agents. Its leaders – Secord, former deputy assistant CIA director Theodore Shackley and Shackley’s agency sidekick Thomas Clines – had all resigned under suspicion of corrupt association with CIA agent Ed Wilson, who is serving a 52-year sentence for shipping arms to Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy.

            Americans still do not know the full ramifications of North’s decision. The televised congressional investigation tiptoed around the implications of North’s choice of men. And special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh apparently will not address the issue of whether Secord’s network – or “Secret Team” – dreamed up Iran-contra as a profitable way to make the world safe for democracy.

            The truth is likely to remain under wraps. On Thursday, federal Judge James King threw out of court a landmark lawsuit filed two years ago against Secord, Clines and 26 others that promised to expose three decades of gun and drug running, and assassinations ordered by the “Secret Team.” The trial was scheduled to begin tomorrow morning in Miami.

            Damages totaling $24 million were being sought from the 29 alleged members of the “Secret Team” by journalists Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations statute. The journalists had attended a May 1984 press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, called by maverick contra leader Eden Patora [sic] at which a bomb exploded, leaving eight dead and Avirgan among the injured. Avirgan and Honey charge the “Secret Team” with supplying the explosive and hiring the killer.

            Judge King has dismissed the case for lack of evidence. Among other things, he cited the lack of proof that alleged assassin Amac Galil, alias Danish journalist Per Anker Hanse[sic], was even at the scene of the crime. Yet remarkable film footage included in a public television documentary aired this spring shows Galil/Hansen both on his way to and attending the press conference before fleeing prior to the explosion (he has not been seen since).

            A more plausible explanation for the decision of Judge King – a conservative appointed by the Nixon administration – is that the lawsuit was too hot to handle in an election year. Vice President George Bush is not mentioned in the lawsuit. However, the Washington-based Christic Institute, whose attorneys represent Avirgan and Honey, have been deposing Bush’s closest aides on the subject of the vice president’s knowledge of drug trafficking by Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega.

            Furthermore, if the suit had gone to court, the details of the alleged Secord, Shackley and Clines partnership with convicted CIA agent Wilson would have been aired at length. The plaintiffs planned to use Wilson as a witness.

            Another star witness would have been former Army and Air Force criminal investigator Gene Wheaton. According to Wheaton’s sworn deposition, Secord and the “Secret Team” have “a historical record going back into the mid-1970s of skimming off of military projects – taking kickbacks.”

            In the period referred to, Secord represented the Air Force on the US Military Assistance Advisory Group in Iran. MAAG authorized and monitored contracts between US defense contractors and the Shah. Ominously, Wheaton charges that three Americans working for Rockwell International Corp. on a major Iranian contract – code-named IBEX – “were murdered (in August 1976) because of a skim off the IBEX contract.”

             Such sensational allegations – by someone with Wheaton’s credentials – demand exploration on the witness stand under oath.

            With Americans already inured to the corruption and contempt for law endemic in the Reagan administration and the Pentagon, it is vital – to avoid a totally cynical electorate – for law to run its course. Judge King’s 11th-hour panic must not protect the “Secret Team” from the sterilizing rays of the Miami sun.