DOPE, INC.the levant company
The Book That Drove Henry Kissinger Crazy
[international drug trafficking, money-laundering, and state power] Executive Intelligence Review, 1992, paperback (original 1986)

Part 1 excerpted from the book

pxi
The international drug-traffic enters the history books with the rise of the Sufi mystics, Syrian Hashishins (the "Assassins") of Shaykh al-Jabal, in the time of the Assassins' Templar allies. It was spread throughout the Asian by Arab slave traders. It was taken over from the slave-traders, by the Venetian slave-traders of the Levant Company.  When the Levant Company moved into England and the Netherlands, the Levant Company assumed the new name of the "East India Company" of England and the Netherlands.

 Adam Smith's employers, of the British East India Company, established world-monopoly in the opium-traffic during the eighteenth century, and Britain ran the international drug-traffic, until Yuri Andropov's Soviet KGB entered the traffic, and launched present-day international narco-terrorism against the West during the 1967-1969 interval.

What are, today, the leading financial families of New England and New York, bridge the transition from British to Soviet control of the international drug-traffic. The Perkins Syndicate of Salem, Massachusetts, were the American drug trafficking partners of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: establishing the drug-traffickers' fortunes which are the foundation of the wealth of the so-called "Eastern Liberal Establishment," the New York Council on Foreign Relations, of today. Not accidentally, these same families of Britain and the United States, typified by McGeorge Bundy's circles, are the leading accomplices of the Soviet dictatorship, both in their connections to the drug-money-laundering banking institutions, and in demanding that the United States appease Soviet strategic demands, today. It is no accident, therefore, that David Rockefeller, the founder of the pro-Soviet Trilateral Commission, entered into a partnership with the late, drug-trafficking Meyer Lansky, to turn the Mary Carter Paint Company, into the mob-linked Resorts International and Intertel. In both Britain and the United States, the "families" which built up their fortunes in the proceeds from the nineteenth-century opium traffic, are at the center of an organization known to insiders as the "Trust," the main channel of present-day Soviet KGB policy-shaping influence into policy-making circles of Western Europe and the Americas. It is no accident, that Boston-based U.S. Attorney William Weld, of the White Weld interests, interceded to cover up the money-laundering organization created under present White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, among Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, and White Weld, prior to Regan's becoming U.S. Treasury Secretary. It is no accident that Donald Regan has become a leading ally of Secretary of State George Shultz, and of Shultz's Bohemian Grove crony, Henry Kissinger, in supporting operations strategically decisive for Moscow, and contrary to the most vital strategic interests of the United States.

pxiii
Americans, and others, are increasingly fearful of international terrorism. Few, unfortunately, understand that terrorism is so tightly integrated with the international drug-traffic that the two can not be separated from one another.
p3
The kingpins of the U.S. branch of the drug cartel [are] led by Henry Kissinger and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith.
p8
Although [Henry] Kissinger has been historically a close ally of the most rabid factions inside Israel and within the Zionist establishment in the United States, his primary allegiance through-out his political career has been to the British Crown and its intelligence and financial tentacles.
On May 10, 1982, addressing a celebration at the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House in London, Kissinger boasted that throughout his career in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he had always been closer to the British Foreign Office than to his American colleagues, and had taken all his major policy leads from London. Kissinger set up the international "consulting firm" Kissinger Associates, in partnership with Britain's Peter Lord Carrington, shortly after he delivered that Chatham House lecture.

Chatham House is a successor to the old British East India Company, and serves as the think-tank and foreign intelligence arm of the British Crown. The roots of Chatham House are to be found in Britain's nineteenth-century Opium War policy.

Kissinger is no stranger to the world of international dope-trafficking. The 1978 edition of Dope, Inc. told how Kissinger played a pivotal role in covering up the involvement of the People's Republic of China in the Southeast Asia Golden Triangle heroin trade in the early 1970s when he was shuttling between Washington and Beijing playing the "China card." Tens of thousands of American GIs who became addicted to drugs in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War should hold Kissinger at least partially responsible for their habits. Later, during the 1980s, through Kissinger Associates, Henry became a business partner of some of the same Chinese opium lords he protected from American drug enforcement for over a decade.
p11
[The] National Endowment for Democracy (NED), [was] a covert operations funding agency housed in the State Department's U.S. Information Agency. The NED was at the center of the secret support for the Contras [Nicaragua].
p15
Oliver North was in the middle of a major international arms-for-drugs trafficking operation which was run out of his National Security Council office at the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House.
Colonel North was the day-to-day operations officer for the Contra resupply program. But it was Vice President George Bush, the former CIA director, who was formally in charge of the entire Reagan administration Central America covert operations program. Under National Security Decision Directive 3, signed by Ronald Reagan in May 1982, Bush was placed in charge of two little-known White House secret committees: the Special Situation Group (SSG) and the Crisis Pre-Planning Group (CPPG). Oliver North was the secretary of the CPPG, and it was in this capacity that he ran the Central America spook show-under George Bush.
North's personal notebooks, which catalogued most of his meetings, telephone calls, and personal observations during his White House days, betray the fact that he was well aware that the Contras were being heavily financed by Miami-based cocaine traffickers.
p18
The use of Middle Eastern dope-smuggling networks was as pervasive a feature of the Reagan-Bush era Iran-Contra misdeeds as was the hiring of Colombian cocaine cartel pilots and money launderers to supply the Contras.
p21
For the past 20 years, a large and growing component of Dope, Inc. has been the combined machinery of gangster Meyer Lansky and the Israeli Mossad.
p30
The single, integrated, multinational cartel which runs [the international drug] trade is properly referred to as "Dope, Inc.".
p30
In 1986, EIR [Executive Intelligence Research] researchers concluded that the U.S. drug trade grossed a minimum of $250 billion per year, and that if non-U.S. drug-trafficking and other aspects of the "black economy" (such as the illegal weapons and gold trade) were taken into account, the total figure would be in the range of $500 billion per year... In 1986, world drug trafficking was close to $400 billion. By 1989, the last year for which figures are available, that total had leapt to $558 billion. This is much larger than the annual world consumption of oil.
p31
Dope, Inc.'s annual revenues from street sales of drugs rose from $175 billion back in 1977, to about $400 billion in 1987, to $558 billion in 1989. It has been growing by an average of about 18% per year over the last few years-more rapidly than any productive economy on the face of the Earth. At this rate, Dope, Inc.'s size doubles every five years! Its main components are cocaine, marijuana and hashish, opium and heroin, and other synthetic chemical drugs such as amphetamines, LSD, and so on.
p31
The large international banks that finance the drug trade get it and launder it, using it to prop up their bankrupt international financial system... over the past 12 years, the total cumulative revenue that banks have received from just the Ibero-American portion of the drug trade is almost $2 trillion.
p31
The so-called "War on Drugs" of the Bush administration is a cruel joke. Its official purpose is, at best, to reduce the drug trade by 50% over a 10-year period. In practice, this means Washington is picking and choosing which drug mafias will survive and flourish, and which will be driven out of business-all the while confessing that the best solution of all would be to legalize the entire trade. Throughout, the financial controllers of Dope, Inc. are protected from all prosecution.
p32
Cocaine is the one drug that is produced almost 100% in Ibero-America. The coca leaves are grown here, and the processing laboratories which produce the basic paste of cocaine, and then the refined cocaine, are located here.
In 1989 the continent as a whole produced 703 tons of cocaine hydrochloride, measured in terms of maximum potential cocaine production if all known coca leaf harvested were refined into cocaine. (This is the standard international unit for measuring cocaine.) As the map shows, by 1989 Peru had assumed the lion's share of coca production (373 tons), followed by Bolivia and Colombia. However, the bulk of refining of coca paste or base into pure cocaine occurs in Colombia, followed secondarily by Bolivia and Peru, which refine only a small portion of their coca base. Therefore, the figures should not be misunderstood to imply a lesser role for Colombia in the cocaine trade: They simply indicate that its local production of coca leaves is less than that of Peru and Bolivia.
A critical input to the transformation of coca leaves into cocaine, are certain chemicals, such as ether and acetone. Although these are legal chemicals that have valid industrial uses, they are obtained illegally by the drug runners in large quantities, principally from the United States, Western Europe, and also Brazil.
p33
Historically, the vast majority of Ibero-American cocaine h1 been shipped to the United States from laboratories in Colombia and the trinational triangle in the jungle area where Peru, Brazil, and Colombia meet. Up until a few years ago, the principal route was to the Miami area, by both air and sea. But increased surveillance and interdiction along this route have forced the mafia to develop a second major route through Central America and Mexico, before entering the western United States.
p39
The international drug trade today has amassed such power, wealth, and military might that it almost constitutes a government unto itself, stronger and better supplied than the legitimate governments of many nations.
... Dope, Inc.'s vulnerable flank is the international network of banks and other financial institutions that "launder" the cartel's $558 billion per year in gross revenue. This is the most serious logistical problem faced by the drug trade, where it is most vulnerable. Action by governments against the drug bankers could rapidly shut down Dope, Inc.
... Under U.S. law, banks must report all cash deposits of $10,000 or more. Traffickers have turned to high cash-turnover businesses -such as hotels, casinos, restaurants, and sports events-to launder their money. Since banks don't have to report deposits made by these businesses, drug profits are simply mixed in with legal cash flows.
Cash is also frequently shipped out of the United States. Often planes which fly cocaine into the U.S., fly back loaded with $20, $50, and $100 bills. The bills can then either be deposited directly in offshore banking centers-where no questions are asked-or in remote bank branches in the drug-producing countries. These funds are then wire-transferred out to the offshore banks, into secret accounts where there is no government supervision.
Only a tiny portion (at most 10%) of the drug revenues ever stay in the producer countries-and virtually none of that benefits those nations' productive economies. It is simply a lie to say that the drug trade is a "bonanza" for Ibero-America.

Although no precise figures are available, a leading antidrug prosecutor in Switzerland, Paolo Bernasconi, told Italy's La Stampa newspaper in January 1990 that the leading money-laundering centers include the United States (Miami and Wall Street), Canada, Great Britain, and, of course, Switzerland.

Today many Ibero-American governments, including Venezuela and Mexico, are rushing to change their banking laws so that they can capture some of these "hot money" flows. They foolishly view this as a way to help pay their foreign debt, and solve their financial crises.
The world financial system is now as addicted to drug monies as a junkie is to heroin. Without the regular flow of those monies, the system would collapse.
As the London Economist wrote proudly in 1989: "It is obvious ... that drug dealers use banks.... The business ... has become part of the financial system.... If you had morals or ethics in this business, you would not be in it."
U.S. finances are so dominated by money-laundering that Treasury officials cannot locate 80% of all the dollar bills printed by the U.S. Treasury. Cocaine plays such a predominant role in the U.S. financial system that a significant majority of all $20 bills show physical traces of cocaine dust on them!
Yet no government has ever touched the system which allowed this to occur. At best, a few accounts here and there have been seized. To this day, money-laundering is not even a criminal offense in 8 out of the 15 industrialized nations. In the United States, the center of the problem, government action is a joke: No top management has ever been charged or prosecuted for criminal money-laundering activity.
The banks didn't just take advantage of the drug trade profits; they have promoted their "right" to make use of them. As one banker stated in an off-the-record discussion in London "is the biggest source of new financial business in the world today .... I know banks which will literally kill to secure a chunk of this action."
The banker worked for one of Wall Street's biggest investment houses, Merrill Lynch. The chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch for 12 years was Donald Regan, who served as treasury secretary and chief of staff of the White House for seven years of the Reagan presidency.
The bankers have also sponsored the campaign to legalize drugs. "Cocaine is indeed clearly the most profitable article of trade in the world," the Economist wrote in August 1989. "Vast untaxed profits amass in the conspirators' hands." The time has come to legalize the dope trade, the magazine argued.
p41
A working alliance has been created between the U.S. government and the Cali Cartel, against the MedellIn Cartel of Pablo Escobar and José Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. The result has been, as now admitted in such organs of the liberal Establishment such as the Washington Post, that the Cali Cartel has become dominant among the different Colombian groups.
p63
[There is a] single worldwide underground economy servicing the illegal arms and drug trade.
p64
The idea that some of the world's leading private financial institutions were deeply implicated in the witting laundering of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in illegal dope money was seen as the single most shocking fact brought to light with the first release of Dope, Inc. We demonstrated that dope was the largest commodity in international trade, with the exception of petroleum, and that the annual revenues of the narcotics traffic exceeded the national product of most of the world's nations, and the revenues of the largest multinational companies.
The American weekly magazine Saturday Review described our view as "a truly apocalyptic vision." The intervening years and their unbroken string of revelations have shown that the apocalypse is here. After the November 1984 publication of the report on money laundering of the President's Commission on Organized Crime, the March 1983 report of the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate, and countless congressional hearings on the subject of banks and money-laundering, the core contents of Dope, Inc.'s first edition have been restated by official sources.
p65
In 1978, we asked, "How is it possible that $200 billion and up in dirty money, crisscrossing international borders, can remain outside the control of the law? Again, only one possible answer.. can be admitted: a huge chunk of international banking and related financial operations have been created solely to manage ' dirty money. More than that, this chunk of international banking enjoys the sovereign protection of more than a few governments."
Half a decade ago, the charge seemed adventurous to many. Measure it against the conclusions of the study entitled, "Crime and Secrecy: The Use of Offshore Banks and Companies" issued, by the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate (SPIS) in 1983 after two years of investigations. The investigators estimated the illegal economy of the United States at up to 10% of reported Gross National Product, or over $300 billion. The study reported that London is the leading center worldwide for the concealment of funds, a charge first made in Dope, Inc.; that two-fifths of all foreign banking activities conducted out of Switzerland are performed with other offshore centers, Switzerland being the center for the practice of "layering" secret financial accounts so that beneficial ownership is impossible to determine.
... The SPIS report concluded that illegal financial operations are now so closely meshed with the offshore banking system in general that the movement of illegal funds may constitute a threat to the security of the world banking system as a whole.
p67
By October 1984, the role of some of Boston and New York's most prestigious commercial banks and investment houses in washing drug money had become such a public scandal that the Reagan administration drafted model legislation allowing for criminal prosecution of bank corporate executives. And the President's Commission on Organized Crime, a blue ribbon panel established by Ronald Reagan by Executive Order 12435 on July 23, 1983, devoted the entirety of its first published report to "The Cash Connection: Organized Crime, Financial Institutions, and Money Laundering." Among the big league financial houses cited in the commission's report for washing hot money were Chemical Bank, Merrill Lynch, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Deak-Perrera.
When the President's Commission on Organized Crime released its report, the bag of tricks of the narcotics traffic was put on display, at least the best known of them: the use of casinos to launder drug money, the corruption and virtual takeover of banks , the participation of such august firms as E.F. Hutton.
p69
The international network we called Dope, Incorporated has not merely flourished; it has risen to commanding heights in the world economy. The International Monetary Fund shamelessly does its bidding among the debtor nations of the developing sector.
p90
The international drug traffic works like a single multinational firm, not unlike the Swiss-based pharmaceuticals cartels-controlling production, supply, distribution, stockpiling, and financing through a single, integrated management.
... Through global control of the means of exchanging dirty money for clean money, through control over the supply of narcotics, through a dominant position in the international markets for precious metals and gemstones, and, above all, through its ability to bring a multi-hundred billion dollar annual cash flow to bear upon the corruption of the legal organs of sovereign national states, Dope, Inc. exercises a unique sort of political control.
... Beyond the specifics of this or that business deal or political arrangement, is a shared world outlook of a sort that has been around since at least the days of the Chaldean-Babylonian empire. It is an oligarchical outlook that views man as essentially a "talking beast," a creature of appetites to be governed through the manipulation of a priesthood whose business it is to apply pleasure and pain to achieve desired results. Narcotics have always played a central role for oligarchs.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the same oligarchy that controls the filthiest elements of the financial underworld today, dominates, and bends to the same purposes, the leading institutions of international finance: the International Monetary Find and the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements.
... Henry Kissinger, together with his international political directorate known as Kissinger Associates, is the individual who stands at the intersection point of every one of these networks: the back-channel with the Soviet Union, the drug and terror networks from Italy to Ibero-America, and the highest levels of finance, including his directorship in American Express, the entity into which has merged a major portion of Dope, command structure.
This command structure contains the following main groups:
* The British combination that controls offshore banking and precious metals trading, i.e., the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the Oppenheimer gold interests, top British financial institutions such as Eagle Star Insurance and Barclay's Bank, and their Canadian cousins such as Bank of Montreal and Bank of Nova Scotia;
* The major Swiss banks;
* The continuity of Venetian-Genoese financial manipulations in the personage of the late Roberto Calvi of Banco Ambrosiano, and the shadowy Edmund Safra of American Express;
* The combined offspring of the Swiss bankers and the old European fondi, the international grain cartel of Cargill, Continental (Fribourg family), Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus;
* The Boston Brahmin families and the big American financial institutions associated with Henry Kissinger, including Citibank, Chase Manhattan Bank, and American Express.
p93
We identify a tightly closed financial network whose origins lie in the Dutch and British East India Companies and the modern origins of the narcotics traffic in the British Opium Wars of the 1840s. The paradigm for this network is the London Committee, or British-based directors, of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the central bank for Dope, Incorporated. It ties in directly and immediately to the five big London clearing banks, the five London "gold pool" dealers, and the big Canadian international banks.
This network provides the offshore banking, precious metals, and related capabilities to cause several hundred billion dollars per year to disappear from the streets of New York, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong, and reappear as apparently legitimate assets wherever convenient. We showed further that Anglo-Chinese collaboration in the Asian opiates traffic was a matter of official policy on the part of the People's Republic of China, and "business arrangements" of the British elite dating back to the first corruption of the Imperial Chinese bureaucracy by the British East India Company.
p94
The Oppenheimer mining group, heirs to the empire of Cecil Rhodes, is the dominant force-in collaboration with HongShang and its Mideast subsidiaries-in the illegal traffic in gold and diamonds through which so much dirty money is turned into untraceable, portable assets. Through its diamond monopoly, De Beers, its mining corporations, Anglo-American Mining and Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa, through its commodity trading organization, Phibro, the Oppenheimer group has expanded its tentacles across the world and, most of all, in the United States.
p95
The old United Fruit Company, renamed United Brands in the 1960s, has been the center of American organized crime since the turn of this century ... United Fruit's banana boats coming into Baltimore harbor have been the freest vehicle for the physical passage of contraband into the United States. In its successive corporate reorganizations, United Brands has since wound up in the hands of Cincinnati, Ohio insurance financier Carl Lindner, the principal business partner through the last three decades of Michigan organized crime heir Max Fisher. And through an entanglement of financial interests that might have been invented by a gaudy but unimaginative mystery novelist, the fate of United Brands has been intertwined with that of American Express, the world's most efficient silent money-mover, and the prince of Levantine money-laundering, Syrian-Swiss financier Edmund Safra. American Express, the monster that devoured half the old great houses of Wall Street, ties together the United Brands crime and smuggling capability, the financial networks who created and funded the Argentine Monteneros and other terrorist organizations, as well as the Swiss-based interests who have acted, for a generation, as the private couriers of the Soviet Union in the international gold markets.
p97
Investment banking in the United States is now almost wholly controlled by the ancient European fondi, that is, family trust funds whose pedigree goes back to the financing of the Crusades by Genoa and Venice.
From 1971 to 1981, in the decade after then-Treasury Undersecretary Paul Volcker removed its gold backing, the U.S. dollar fell to a mere 60% of its pre-devaluation level, while the combined effects of inflation and lower stock prices devalued American equity to about 30% of its 1971 level in terms of gold. From the standpoint of the old oligarchical fondi, secured through gold, American equity could be had for a fifth of its pre-1971 price during the late 1970s.
A similar collapse of the dollar and equity values occurred during the years 1929-1933. With stock prices at a fraction of their previous values, and the economy in ruins, President Franklin Roosevelt was persuaded by the American friends of John Maynard Keynes to force a devaluation of the dollar in 1932, giving the old fondi-particularly the fortunes of the Franco-Swiss-Italian "gold bloc"-the chance to buy into American equity at distress prices comparable to those available during the late 1970s.
Among modern financial institutions, the Assicurazioni Generali of Venice, the heir to the old Venetian fortunes, provides the most clues to the operations of the fondi. The "Generali," as an insurance organization, is a clearing house for the operations of numerous fondi, each one represented by its frontman, one of the principal European investment banks. Its board of directors consists of the principal banking fortunes of Western Europe.
p99
Assicurazioni Generali and the Bank for International Settlements of Basel (the "central bank for central banks"), are the world's only financial institutions to keep their books in the old pre-war Swiss gold franc, the "hard currency" which the fondi employed to buy American equities at a dime on the dollar during the first fumbling years of the Roosevelt administration.
They waited long to avenge themselves against the upstart United States. Their chance came with the break of the dollar from its gold backing in 1971.
... One by one ... major Wall Street houses fell under the control of the old European fondi. The dominant mergers and acquisitions operation on Wall Street, Lazard Frères, had never been an American house in any event; it was always dominated by the French-Jewish David-Weill family, and only managed for the interim by its then chairman, André Meyer, when no suitable family member was available.
Drexel Burnham Lambert, the sixth-largest house, sold out its entire capital to the Lambert family of Brussels, the Belgian cousins of the Rothschild family.
A.G. Becker, an old-line Chicago brokerage firm, merged into a ménage-à-trois with S.G. Warburg, the supposedly independent branch of the Warburg banking family, and the ancient French-Ottoman Empire firm, the Banque de Paris et des PaysBas (Paribas), to create Warburg-Becker-Paribas (subsequently merged into Merrill Lynch during 1984).
WITH VIRTUALLY NO EXCEPTIONS, WALL STREET'S MAJOR HOUSES SOLD OUT TO THE FONDI.

Finally, in 1981, Wall Street's most powerful investment bank (with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger's employer Goldman Sachs), Salomon Brothers, merged with Phibro, the trading arm of the Oppenheimer interests.
p102
About $100 billion in banking assets in the Bahamas alone, as well as substantial operations in the British Virgin Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Cayman Islands, and other Caribbean banking centers, move the money that disappears from the world's balance sheet in the form of the $200 billion "statistical discrepancy". Chief investment banker to the region is the International' Trust Corporation, or Itco, created by Anglo-American in consortium with Barclays Bank of the U.K., the Royal Bank of Canada, and N.M. Rothschild of London - Itco creates banks, investment companies, commodities firms, tax shelters, trust funds, and insurance and reinsurance outlets throughout the Caribbean, smoothing contacts with local bank regulators and backstopping the legal position of the offshore market operators with which it deals. Itco is, in effect, the offshore-banking sister subsidiary of Phibro.
p103
David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank... In 1966, a memo circulated in Chase's international division argued explicitly that the bank should seek illicit international funds as new sources of deposits. In Chase's international department, this became referred to as "looking for mafia money."
p106
When Henry Kissinger was elected to the board of directors of American Express. In March 1984, a circle was completed which had begun with the wave of foreign takeovers of American securities houses during the 1960s and 1970s. George Ball's old firm, Lehman Brothers, had long since been absorbed by its great rival among the old-line German-Jewish Wall Street houses, Kuhn Loeb, to form Lehman Brothers-Kuhn Loeb. Shearson Hayden Stone, the second retail broker after Merrill Lynch, had repeated Merrill Lynch's march into investment banking by absorbing the third of the old-line Gennan-Jewish firms, Loeb Rhoades. Now American Express, in turn, swallowed up Shearson-Loeb Rhoades and Lehman-Kuhn Loeb, bringing under a single umbrella a large part of ... as the supposedly respectable interests behind organized crime and the drug traffic.
... Shearson Lehman American Express, as the ultimate Wall Street merger calls itself, is the phoenix which has arisen from the ashes of the offshore money markets. The new entity is effectively controlled, in turn, by two of the world's shadiest financiers, Edmund Safra and Carl Lindner, each of whom owns about 4% of the stock. Lindner, as noted earlier, owns the old United Fruit dope-pushing apparatus.
p107
Henry Kissinger, who serves as vice chairman of the International Advisory Board of' Chase Manhattan Bank (he was chairman until David Rockefeller retired from the bank and moved to its International Advisory Board); adviser to Goldman Sachs; and a consultant to dozens of leading corporation financial institutions through Kissinger Associates.
The members of Kissinger Associates represent a de facto board of directors for the entity we call Dope, Incorporated.
p108
Britain's Lord Carrington, the cofounder of Kissinger Associates until his move to NATO headquarters in Brussels... Lord Carrington was replaced on the Kissinger Associates board in mid-1984 by the chairman of the London merchant bank S.G. Warburg, Lord Eric Roll of Ipsden. Lord Roll had just completed a reorganization of London Warburg interests under the umbrella of the Warburg holding company Mercury Securities.
... The staff of Kissinger Associates is headed by Lawrence Eagleburger, the former highest-ranking member of U.S. foreign service, and a Kissinger protégé since the Nixon days. In a 1984 series on Jamaica's marijuana economy, the New York Times ridiculed Eagleburger's claims that, in supporting the Edward Seaga regime in Jamaica, he had no idea that Seaga had intentionally made marijuana the country's principal cash crop. Seaga had announced his intention to the Washington Post and on the U.S. network television program "Face the Nation."
The intertwining of interests represented in Kissinger Associates is not new. On the contrary, these are representatives of the ancient fondi who have collaborated for centuries. What is new and ominous is that the men who perform the dirty work of the fondi have moved out of shadows of Caribbean offshore banking and Hong Kong smuggling, and into the board rooms of the most powerful American financial institutions, and close to the councils of the United States government itself. It is even more ominous that the major conduit for the political influence of the Soviet Empire in American politics has now become the point of interchange of the constituent parts of Dope, Inc., doubly so in the context of the Soviet move into the financial underworld.

Dark Alliance:
The Story Behind the Crack Explosion BY Webb

2014 THE CIA AND JOHN KERRY

Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb By Ryan Devereaux Sep 25 2014 
Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” the CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.  
Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.  

The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.  These days, Webb is being cast in a more sympathetic light.  
And documents newly released by the CIA provide fresh context to the “Dark Alliance” saga — information that paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time.  On September 18, the agency released a trove of documents spanning three decades of secret government operations. Culled from the agency’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the materials include a previously unreleased six-page article titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.”
Looking back on the weeks immediately following the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the document offers a unique window into the CIA’s internal reaction to what it called “a genuine public relations crisis” while revealing just how little the agency ultimately had to do to swiftly extinguish the public outcry. Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” the CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.  (Dujmovic’s name was redacted in the released version of the CIA document, but was included in a footnote in a 2010 article in the Journal of Intelligence. Dujmovic confirmed his authorship to The Intercept.)  
Webb’s troubles began in August 1996, when his employer, the San Jose Mercury News, published a groundbreaking, three-part investigation he had worked on for more than a year. Carrying the full title “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion,” Webb’s series reported that in addition to waging a proxy war for the U.S. government against Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s, elements of the CIA-backed Contra rebels were also involved in trafficking cocaine to the U.S. in order to fund their counter-revolutionary campaign. The secret flow of drugs and money, Webb reported, had a direct link to the subsequent explosion of crack cocaine abuse that had devastated California’s most vulnerable African American neighborhoods.  Derided by some as conspiracy theory and heralded by others as investigative reporting at its finest, Webb’s series spread through extensive talk radio coverage and global availability via the internet, which at the time was still a novel way to promote national news.  Though “Dark Alliance” would eventually morph into a personal crisis for Webb, it was initially a PR disaster for the CIA. In “Managing a Nightmare,” Dujmovic minced no words in describing the potentially devastating  effect of the series on the agency’s image:  The charges could hardly be worse. A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA–reminiscent of the 1970s–abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.   Dujmovic acknowledged that Webb “did not state outright that CIA ran the drug trade or even knew about it.” In fact, the agency’s central complaint, according to the document, was over the graphics that accompanied the series, which suggested a link between the CIA and the crack scare, and Webb’s description of the Contras as “the CIA’s army” (despite the fact that the Contras were quite literally an armed, militant group not-so-secretly supported by the U.S., at war with the government of Nicaragua).  Dujmovic complained that Webb’s series “appeared with no warning,” remarking that, for all his journalistic credentials, “he apparently could not come up with a widely available and well-known telephone number for CIA Public Affairs.” This was probably because Webb “was uninterested in anything the Agency might have to say that would diminish the impact of his series,” he wrote. (Webb later said that he did contact the CIA but that the agency would not return his calls; efforts to obtain CIA comment were not mentioned in the “Dark Alliance” series).  Dujmovic also pointed out that much of what was reported in “Dark Alliance” was not new. Indeed, in 1985, more than a decade before the series was published, Associated Press journalists Robert Parry and Brian Barger found that Contra groups had “engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua.” In a move that foreshadowed Webb’s experience, the Reagan White House launched “a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign to besmirch the professionalism of Parry and Barger and to discredit all reporting on the contras and drugs,” according to a 1997 article by Peter Kornbluh for the Columbia Journalism Review. “Whether the campaign was the cause or not, coverage was minimal.”

Neverthess, a special senate subcommittee, chaired by then-senator John Kerry, investigated the AP’s findings and, in 1989, released a 1,166-page report on covert U.S. operations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. It found “considerable evidence” that the Contras were linked to running drugs and guns — and that the U.S. government knew about it. Nicaragua Contras 1983  [snip]

​​Money trail from drugs to Presidential Nomination

Following the Forbes Money Trail​

John Kerry would go to Yale and be inducted into Skull and Bones in the class of 1966. He became a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, running against another member of Skull and Bones, George Walker Bush, class of 1968.