Isaiah 1:4 Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters:
Cynthia Chung - Through A Glass Darkly
The following is an except from Paul L. William’s book “Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia”:
When the US military occupation of Afghanistan became precarious, the CIA worked with the Mexican drug cartels to develop poppy fields throughout the mountains of Mexico’s west coast. By 2013, heroin and cocaine from Mexico - with a street value of $3 billion - flooded Chicago. The drugs arrived by land, rail, and air, including 747 jetliners. When Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, a member of the Sinaloa cartel, was collared by Chicago police officials, he claimed to be a CIA operative under government protection. His trial was halted by federal prosecutors on the basis of the “Classified Information Procedures Act.” The prosecutors claimed that Niebla’s testimony would constitute a threat to national security.
By 2018, Mexico’s southwestern Guerrero state became the top source of heroin for the US drug epidemic, which resulted in more than sixty-four thousand deaths in 2016. The Drug Enforcement Agency says that 93 percent of heroin in America now comes from Mexico, more than double the amount from five years before. Guerrero emerged as a heroin hub because its mountains are inaccessible and catch the warm, humid air from the Pacific.
The Sinaloa cartel controls the flow. Its only rival is the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which arose from infighting after the arrest of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in January 2016. The strength of the Sinaloas stems from the support in the form of arms and immunity that the cartel has received from the CIA. Commenting on this support, Robert Farago and Ralph Dixon maintain the following in a 2011 article for the Washington Times: “The CIA’s motive is clear. The US government is afraid that the Los Zetas cartel will mount a successful coup against the government of [Mexican President] Felipe Calderon.
But the motive isn’t clear since the CIA purportedly has controlled and abetted Los Zeta by proving military training for members of this criminal syndicate at Fort Bragg and other military installations throughout the United States.
What is clear is the possibility that the Gladio strategy of tension is at work south of the border so that new fields of poppies may be cultivated to perpetuate the CIA’s covert operations - operations that will safeguard not the American people but rather the holdings of an elite group of bankers and businessmen.
“The only thing that is constant is change,” so said Heraclitus 2,500 years ago. Gladio provides proof of this adage. Gladio began as a covert operation to thwart the spread of communism and evolved into an effort to advance the economic hegemony of an Anglo-American money cartel. It no longer sought to amke the world safe for democracy but rather to subject humankind to the designs of a synarchy. Its activities were no longer confined to the borders of Western Europe but extended throughout Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and Central Asia.
From the time of its inception, Gladio was fueled by heroin.
This reliance produced a plague that has spread throughout the civilized world. The illicit gains fof the CIA from trafficking were originally washed in the Holy See.
But the Vatican Bank became capable of handling the flood of revenue that poured into the Bastion of Nicholas V. New financial institutions were established to serve as laundries, including the Castle Bank and Trust in Miami, the Nugan Hand Bank [co-founded by Michael Hand a Green Beret] in Sydney, and the Bank of Commerce and Credit in Karachi.
But even these banks proved insufficient to handle the billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains, and so the dirty money began to flow through major American banks, including Citibank, American Express of Beverly Hills, Manufacturers Banks, the Great American Bank, Chemical Bank, and Chase Manhattan.
The CIA’s reliance on La Cosa Nostra also changed and the agency, by creating Gladio II, became compelled to forge new alliances with the Latin American cartels, the babas and Grey Wolves of Turkey, street gangs within America’s inner cities, and the Albanian Mafia who emerged almost overnight as “the leading crime outfit in the United States.”
And so Gladio goes on to advance the interests of an Anglo-American money cartel. It will persist on the winds of war as long as the affairs of men are governed by covetousness and greed. It matters not that a handful of people might draw back the curtain to reveal figures with bloody swords.
On January 27, 1980, two Australian policemen, driving along the Great Western Highway near the port of Sydney, came upon a 1977 Mercedes Benz parked along the side of the road. Inside the car, slumped across the front seat, was the body of a burly, middle-aged man. Searching his pockets, the policemen found the business card of William Colby, former director of the CIA. On the back of the card was Colby’s itinerary for his trip to Hong Kong and Singapore. The dead man’s hand was wrapped around the barrel of a new .30-caliber rifle. Next to the body was a Bible with a meat-pie wrapper as a book mark. On the wrapper were scrawled the names of Colby and California Congressman Bob Wilson, then the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. [Saints, William Colby was a staunch Roman Catholic. He was often referred to as "the warrior-priest."]
The dead man was identified as Frank Nugan, co-owner of the Nugan Hand Bank and one of the most prominent lawyers in Australia. His death was ruled as a suicide despite the fact that Nugan’s fingerprints were not on the rifle, and only a contortionist could have shot himself in the head from the position in which he was found in the vehicle.
When Nugan’s partner, Michael Hand, a former Green Beret who had served in Vietnam, learned of the death, he rushed back to Sydney from a business trip in London and began shredding enough of the bank’s documents to fill a small cottage. The next day, Hand held a meetings of Nugan Hand Bank directors in which he warned them that they must follow his instructions in destroying all records of transactions, otherwise they would “finish up with concrete shoes” or find their wives being delivered to them “in pieces.” By June 1980, Nugan Hand Ltd was in liquidation. It owed about $50 million to creditors. Hand fled to the United States, never to be seen or heard from again.
The Nugan Hand Bank had been established in 1973 by Nugan and Hand. Shortly after setting up headquarters in Sydney, the bank blossomed into twenty-two branches. One branch was set up in Chiang Mai, the heart of Thailand’s opium industry, in the same suite as the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The DEA receptionist answered the bank’s phone and took messages when the representatives were out. Neil Evans, the former head of the Chiang Mai branch, told investigators that he had seen millions pass through his office, claiming that the bank operated solely “for the disbursement of funds, anywhere in the world, on behalf of the CIA, and also for the taking of money on behalf of the CIA.”
The money taken from the bank by the CIA was used to purchase weapons from international arms dealer Edwin Wilson for guerilla forces in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil, and the white Rhodesian government of Ian Smith. Wilson was a former CIA operative who was later convicted of selling arms and explosives to the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi. Funds were also shelled out to undermine the liberal government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who had pulled Australian troops out of Vietnam and condemned the bombing of Hanoi. These actions were orchestrated by Theodore Shackley, the CIA’s deputy director of operations. After Whitlam was removed from office by John Kerr, Australia’s governor-general, in 1975, the black ops money flowed to Italy and the IOR, for support of the Christian Democrats.
The bank also imported heroin into Australia from the Golden Triangle. This dirty work was done by Australian police officers in service to the CIA, according to the Commonwealth-New South Wales Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking. In 1976, one such officer, Murray Riley, organized five shipments of heroin into Australia, mostly in false-bottom suitcases. For each shipment the branches of the Nugan Hand were used to transfer the purchase money from Sydney to Hong Kong. Over one hundred pounds of heroin was involved in each importation, and much of this was eventually shipped from Hong Kong to the United States. Riley was also involved in two heroin importations in July and September 1977.
Dr. Guy Parker
- an expert from the RAND Corporation
Major General Richard Secord
- director of the Defense Security Assistance Agency,
who worked closely with Ted Shackley in smuggling heroin money out of Vietnam…
Walter McDonald
- retired CIA deputy director and head of the Annapolis branch
Dale Holmgreen
- former chairman of the CIA’s Civil Air Transport and manager of the Taiwan
branch
Theodore Shackley
- former CIA deputy director for clandestine operations
Richard L. Armitage
- special consultant to the Pentagon in Thailand who oversaw the transfer of
heroin profits from Indonesia to Shackley’s account in Tehran, Iran
Patry Loomis
- former CIA advisor to the Provincial Reconnaissance
Unit in Vietnam
Robert “Red” Jansen
- former CIA station chief in Bangkok, who represented Nugan Hand in Thailand
[The following were excerpts from Paul L. Williams book “Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia”]
[Saints, as a side note the
current
Director of the CIA is John Ratcliffe
and suprise
he also happens to be Roman Catholic
who
graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1987.
And you wonder why the CIA is known as the
Catholic Intelligence Agency.
See this puff piece on why Catholics dominate in the CIA -
Why Catholics Thrive In The Cia
- From the agency’s founding in 1947, to present day, most of the CIA’s top
leaders have been devout Catholics–starting with Allen Dulles, who was the
agency’s first director. Over the years, many famous CIA directors have been
Catholic, including William Casey and Robert Gates. The latest director, CIA
chief Michael Hayden, is also a Catholic.
This Catholic influence has made an enormous impact on the CIA’s culture. As of
2017, an estimated 40 percent of all employees working for the CIA are Catholic,
second only to those with no religious affiliation.
The Catholic Church has a long history of foreign policy engagement. This has
made the Church an invaluable resource for the CIA when it comes to addressing
international issues. The Church’s ability to provide insight and
moral guidance has enabled the CIA to better analyze and interpret the
political, social and economic dynamics of various societies around the world.]
Deuteronomy 32:5 They have corrupted themselves, their spot is not the spot of his children: they are a perverse and crooked generation.
In 1973 Frank Nugan, an Australian lawyer, and Michael Hand, a former CIA contract operative, established the Nugan Hand Bank. Another key figure in this venture was Bernie Houghton, who was closely connected to CIA officials, Ted Shackley and Thomas G. Clines.
Nugan ran operations in Sydney whereas Hand established a branch in Hong Kong. This enabled Australian depositors to access a money-laundering facility for illegal transfers of Australian money to Hong Kong. According to Alfred W. McCoy, the "Hand-Houghton partnership led the bank's international division into new fields - drug finance, arms trading, and support work for CIA covert operations." Hand told friends "it was his ambition that Nugan Hand became banker for the CIA."
In 1974 the Nugan Hand Bank got involved in helping the CIA to take part in covert arms deals with contacts within Angola. It was at this time that Edwin Wilson became involved with the bank. Two CIA agents based in Indonesia, James Hawes and Robert Moore, called on Wilson at his World Marine offices to discuss "an African arms deal". Later, Bernie Houghton arrived from Sydney to place an order for 10 million rounds of ammunition and 3,000 weapons including machine guns. The following year Houghton asked Wilson to arrange for World Marine to purchase a high-technology spy ship. This ship was then sold to Iran.
By 1976 the Nugan-Hand Bank appeared to have become a CIA-fronted company. This is reflected in the type of people recruited to hold senior positions in the bank. For example, Rear-Admiral Earl P. Yates, the former Chief of Staff for Policy and Plans of the U.S. Pacific Command and a counter-insurgency specialist, became president of the company. Other appointments included William Colby, retired director of the CIA, General Leroy J. Manor, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Pacific Command and deputy director for counterinsurgency and special activities, General Edwin F. Black, former commander of U.S. forces in Thailand, Walter J. McDonald, retired CIA deputy director for economic research, Dale C. Holmgren, former chairman of the CIA's Civil Air Transport and Guy J. Pauker, senior Republican foreign policy adviser.
One of those that Earl P. Yates brought in to help the Nugan Hand Bank was Mitchell WerBell. Yates later told the Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking he recruited WerBell as a consultant because he "had extensive experience in Central America". Former CIA agent, Kevin P. Mulcahy later told the National Times newspaper "about the Agency's use of Nugan Hand for shifting money for various covert operations around the globe."
Paul Helliwell meeting Michael Hand and Frank Nugan
The investigative journalist, Jonathan Kwitny, became convinced that the Nugan Hand Bank had replaced the Castle Bank and Trust Company in Nassau, as the CIA's covert banker. The bank, run by Paul Helliwell, was forced to close after the Internal Revenue Service discovered that he Castle Bank was laundering CIA funds and drug profits.
On 27th November 1979 Michael Hand wrote to Ted Shackley. It concerned a meeting the two men had recently attended in Washington: "The opportunity of meeting you again on different terms was very enjoyable and I sincerely trust that something worthwhile businesswise may surface and be profitable for both of us."
In the winter of 1979, Edwin Wilson had a meeting with Bernie Houghton and Thomas G. Clines in Switzerland in an attempt to help him out of his difficulties. This included a non-delivery of 5,000 M16 automatic rifles. The three men discussed ways of using the Nugan Hand Bank to float a $22 million loan to finance the delivery. Hand was obviously concerned that if Wilson was arrested he might begin talking about his dealings with Nugan Hand.
On 7th January 1980, Robert Wilson (House of Representatives Armed Services Committee) and Richard Ichord (chairman of the Research and Development Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee) had dinner with Bernie Houghton at the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar and Restaurant in Sydney.
On 27th January, 1980, Frank Nugan was found shot dead in his Mercedes Benz. With his body was a Bible that included a piece of paper. On it were written the names "Bob Wilson" and "Bill Colby". Robert Wilson was a senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and William Colby was a former director of the CIA.
Bernie Houghton was in Switzerland at the time and he immediately rang his branch office in Saudi Arabia and ordered the staff to leave the country. Houghton also visited Edwin Wilson's office in Geneva and left a briefcase with bank documents for safekeeping. Soon afterwards, a witness saw Thomas G. Clines going through the briefcase at Wilson's office and remove papers that referred to him and General Richard Secord.
Two days after Nugan died, Michael Hand held a meeting of Nugan Hand Bank directors. He warned them that unless they did as they were told they could "finish up with concrete shoes" and would be "liable to find their wives being delivered to them in pieces".
Michael Hand, Patricia Swan, Bernie Houghton and his lawyer, Mike Moloney, spent the next few days removing files from Nugan's office. They also began paying back selected clients. One estimate is that over $1.3 million was paid out in this way.
Frank Nugan's inquest took place in April, 1980. Testimony from Michael Hand revealed that Nugan Hand was insolvent, owing at least $50 million. Hand then promptly fled Australia under a false identity on a flight to Fiji in June 1980. Bernie Houghton also disappeared at this time and it is believed both men eventually reached the United States.
According to one witness, Thomas G. Clines helped Bernie Houghton escape. Michael Hand also left the country accompanied by James Oswald Spencer, a man who served with Ted Shackley in Laos. The two men traveled to America via Fiji and Vancouver. One report published in November, 1980, suggested that Michael Hand was living in South America. It claimed that he had managed to escape with the help of "former CIA employees".
An investigation by the Australia/New South Wales Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking discovered that the clients of the Nugan Hand Bank included several people who had criminal convictions relating to drug offences including Murray Stewart Riley, Donald William McKenzie, James Lewis Williams, Malcolm Craig Lord, Charles Robertson Beveridge, Barry Graeme Chittem, Murray Don Newman, Bruce Alan Smithers, James Sweetman, James Blacker, Colin Courtney, Stephen Demos, John Brooking and John Ceruto. According to the records the bank was making $100,000 a year from tax advice. In reality, it was receiving it for money laundering.
One right-wing organization called Accuracy in Media defended the Nugan-Hand Bank claiming it was really an honest but hard-luck banking organization that had been maligned by an anti-military press.
The Australian government asked the Royal Commissioner D. G. Stewart to investigate the Nugan-Hand Bank scandal. The Stewart Royal Commission was published in June, 1985. It stated that the "Nugan Hand Ltd. was at all times insolvent... and flouted the provisions of the legislation as it then stood in that large volumes of currency were moved in and out of Australia".
Stewart went on to blame the dead Frank Nugan and the missing Michael Hand for the illegal activities of the bank. Rear-Admiral Earl P. Yates, William Colby, General Leroy J. Manor, General Edwin F. Black, Walter J. McDonald, Dale C. Holmgren, Guy J. Pauker and Bernie Houghton were considered blameless. Despite the evidence, Hand and Patricia Swan, Nugan's secretary, were accused of being the only ones "responsible for the shredding of documents". The Crimes of Patriots
Hosea 9:9 They have deeply corrupted themselves,
The Nugan Hand Bank Scandal:
Drugs, Guns, Fraud, Murder, and the CIA
The Nugan Hand scandal is largely unknown today and was largely ignored by the press in the United States at the time. The honorable exception being Jonathan Kwitney who later wrote the definitive book on the bank “The Crimes of Patriots.” In Australia it was headline news, leading to a series of investigations that ended in cover-up. The story exploded and the bank collapsed when its co-founder Frank Nugan Australian tax attorney turned merchant banker was found dead on an isolated highway, an apparent suicide. He had shot himself with a rifle and on his corpse were found a bible, a list of 21 suspected drug smugglers, former CIA director William Colby’s business card was in his wallet and Colby’s name was also scrawled on a piece of paper along with the head of the House Armed services committee Bob Wilson. Frank Nugan’s partner was Michael Hand a veteran of the US Special Forces in Vietnam and Laos who had been recruited into the CIA. Hand would become one of the world’s most wanted men when he escaped Australia six months later. That didn’t stop the CIA from sending him to Honduras to train the elite 5th Puma Battalion that helped the Contras terrorize Nicaragua.
Iran Contra Scandal Cocaine, Contras & Crack Epidemic
This was not so surprising since many of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal had been involved in the Nugan Hand scandal, including Richard Secord, Thomas Clines, and Theodore Shackley along with their former partner Ed Wilson. Wilson would later be framed as a rogue CIA agent so that his partners could gain control of his CIA front companies. A number of “former” CIA officers worked for the bank like William Colby, the bank’s Washington, DC lawyer. The bank also employed enough Admirals and Generals to launch a war including Admiral Earl Yates, General Edwin F. Black, General Leroy Manor, and more key masterminds of the bloodbath carried out by the US in South East Asia. With such well-respected war criminals as executives, Nugan Hand found it easy to swindle American civilians and servicemen worldwide. In 2015 true crime writer Peter Butt managed to track Michael Hand down living under a new CIA supplied identity in Idaho while Butt was working on his book “Merchants of Menace.” It was briefly front-page news but Hand remained untouchable for the authorities.
https://alchetron.com/Michael-Jon-Hand
Nugan Hand was one of the more notorious examples of a
CIA bank and all that entailed. As Nugan Hand was on the rise its infamous
predecessor Paul Helliwell’s Castle Bank was finally being shut down after
decades of impunity serving the mafia and corrupt politicians like Richard
Nixon. It also served the CIA in a money laundering drug network reaching from
South East Asia to Latin America as well as playing a major role in covert wars
in Vietnam and against Cuba. BCCI the next major CIA banking scandal (except for
the S&L debacle in the 1980s, also CIA and drug fueled) was founded the year
before Nugan Hand. Eventually BCCI was used to fund the birth of Al Qaeda,
launder money for drug syndicates and terrorists worldwide and support what
became the Iran/Contra scandal. Of course the more well-known supposedly
respectable banks, corporate banks, also do the CIA dirty work while laundering
billions in drug money. Nor did the CIA invent the game. One of the world’s
largest banks, Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), was founded by
the British in the 19th century, using the massive profits from the opium trade.
Hong Kong, then a British crown colony, remained a major hub in the global
heroin traffic. 100 years later and Nugan Hand opened one of itsmore important
branches there. In taking control of the South East Asianheroin networks the CIA
was merely following in the footsteps of France.
Nugan Hand was a typical CIA bank. Money laundering
for drug syndicates, bribery of politicians and police, arms dealing, coups,
covert warfare, massive embezzlement, fraud, tax evasion, murder, spying,
terrorism comprised the range of utility to the CIA. What made it unusual was
that it was not really a bank at all and until 1979 none of its executives had
any banking experience. It had helped topple Australian Prime Minister Gough
Whitlam’s government in a soft coup in 1975. Founded in 1973 in a few short
years it expanded worldwide with branches in Australia, the Philippines, the US,
Thailand, Burma, Hong Kong, Panama, the Cayman Islands and more. In Thailand its
office was in Chiang Mai,then the heroin capital of the world, opened solely to
help launder drug money and finance drug deals. Nugan Hand shared its Chiang Mai
office with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It supplied weapons for
apartheid South Africa and its CIA backed allies in Angola; armed apartheid
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and sold arms to Indonesia as it waged a genocidal war
in East Timor. It helped Marcos in the Philippines, and the Shah of Iran move
their money offshore. At its height it appeared to be moving a billion dollars a
year yet after its collapse it seemed to have been bankrupt all along. Honest
depositors lost their life savings, while drug syndicates received partial
re-payment, and Nugan Hand executives managed to steal a fortune. To this day no
one knows where all the money went.
Nugan Hand was named after its two founders. Frank
Nugan’s parentswere both German Jewish refugees who met in Spain during the
civil war after fleeing the Nazis. They married in Palestine and then moved to
Australia preferring to tell people they were Spanish and concealing their
Jewish origins. They became fruit growers in Griffith Australia. Their sons
Frank and Ken Nugan would later run their Nugan Fruit Group, which by the 1960’s
was entangled with the Calabrian Mafia who had turned Griffith into a major
marijuana growing hotspot. The Nugan Hand bank would owe its downfall to an
investigation of the Nugan Fruit Group’s fraud, intimidation, and ties to the
murderers of an anti-drug politician who had been targeting local marijuana
growers. Frank Nugan was an egomaniac from an early age constantly wanting to be
the center of attention, loving to push people over the edge by antagonizing
them until they lost control. He lied and manipulated people like a textbook
sociopath but suffered severe mood swings. He could be a charmer or an arrogant
bully, brilliant or a complete fool. He went to Law school in Australia then
studied law getting arcane degrees in the US at UC Berkley and studying in
Canada although failing to get his PHD. He returned to Australia and conned
people into believing that he had helped rewrite the Canadian corporate tax
code. He got a job at a major law firm but soon quit because he saw little
chance of advancement since he wasn’t from one of Australia’s more elite
families. He set up a mining company that went nowhere which soon was
interlocked with Michael Hand’s land speculation scheme that also seemingly went
nowhere. The two had met through the actual mastermind of the Nugan Hand scandal
Bernie Houghton. At first glance Houghton was merely an American bar owner in
the heart of Sydney Australia’s vice district King’s Cross, a mecca for drugs,
gambling, and prostitution. Houghton was in reality a CIA officer equally at
home and well connected in the underworld, politics, intelligence and the
military and seemed to be Michael Hand’s case officer.
Michael Hand was born in the Bronx, New York on 8
December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. His mother died mysteriously when he
was a child falling out of a 10-story window in an apparent suicide. This left
him extremely driven. He studied for a year to be a park ranger, and thenmanaged
a sports school before enlisting in the military in 1963. He was quickly
selected for the Special Forces and trained at Fort Bragg befriending fellow
recruit Douglas Sapper who would later be recruited into Nugan Hand providing
muscle for couriers. In February 1965 both were sent to Vietnam. Hand was
stationed at Dong Xoia, a Montagnard (Vietnamese hill tribes selected by the CIA
as proxies and trained by special forces) camp built along the Ho Chi Minh Trail
(the road troops and supplies traveled from North Vietnam into South Vietnam.)
It was typical ruthless cynicism to locate the camp of only 400 Montagnard
troops and 19 American Special Forces advisers and Seabees engineers where it
was certain to be attacked and overrun. After a couple months the inevitable
occurred 1,500 NLF attacked and overran the camp. Michael Hand went into a
berserker rage killing until his ammo ran out then gutting a man with his knife
and ripping his head off with his bare hands. He also managed to rescue a few
injured Americans and became an instant war hero in the press. He won the
Distinguished Service Cross. Soon he was recruited into the CIA and sent to Laos
to train the Hmong tribesmen who like the Montagnards had been selected by the
CIA as proxies and trained by Special Forces operating under USAID cover. The US
had agreed to leave Laos neutral and remove any US military presence. Promises
it broke,leading to the CIA’s secret war in Laos. The Hmong had traditionally
grown opium and the CIA had installed its man Vang Pao as their leader, helping
him build a heroin factory to process the opium and flying the heroin out for
him on their Air America flights even giving him his own airline. The Laotian
military and Laotian politicians were equally involved in the heroin trade. A
series of coups in Laos had just as much to do with transferring control of the
drug trade as they did with the CIA goal to push the country into civil war by
overthrowing neutralist governments and ultimately provoking the left Pathet Lao
forces to fight back. Michael Hand was soon at home in the world of the deep
politics of the global drug trade advising the Hmong and also working closely
with the Air America pilots. He met Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines who both
served tours as Chief of Station in Laos. Clines taking over for Shackley when
Shackley became Chief of Station in Vietnam. Hand and Houghton would both be
spotted with C-47’s full of heroin in various Southeast Asian locales long after
they had supposedly retired. It was while in Southeast Asia that Hand was
recruited into an Australian real estate scheme eventually known as Ocean
Shores, one of whose backers was the singer Pat Boone. For my younger readers in
the early days of Rock & Roll white radio stations refused to play black groups
so Pat Boone would re-record their songs in his soulless manner epitomizing
uncoolness for a generation. Boone was also a frequent guest on Christian
television. Thus it is amusing to discover him involved in Michael Hand’s shady
land deals that were a cover for heroin smuggling. Michael Hand returned to
America then mysteriously decided to move to Australia telling them he planned
to become a simple farmer. Most likely it was merely his latest assignment for
the CIA and he was being assigned to assist Bernie Houghton.
A former military man and tough talking Texan Houghton
was a CIA man operating under civilian cover although this has never been
officially confirmed. After serving in the military he made his money in Korea
and Vietnam selling war surplus and running bars and sex traffic for American
troops. He was sent in advance to Australia to set up 3 bars and restaurants in
Sydney Australia. He was already in on the secret decision to use Australia as a
place to send troops on R&R (Rest & Relaxation.) Upon arriving in Australia he
was instantly hired by one of the most wealthy and powerful men in Australia Sir
Paul Strasser, a real estate tycoon. Sir Paul Strasser was part of the same
social circle as Rupert Murdoch. Another of this same circle Sir Peter Abeles,
the wealthy shipping tycoon, would later act as one of Michael Hand’s patrons.
Apparently it was a matter of national security that
the troops would party with proper supervision that the CIA or military would
control the prostitutes because their was no telling what horrific or
embarrassing secrets they might reveal whether about the industrial scale mass
murder, the massive Phoenix program, the secret wars in Laos, Cambodia and
Thailand or the massive drug trade that interconnected it all. Thus before the
troops even arrived in Australia Houghton would arrive introduced by the
commanding officers and the troops would be told to head for Houghton’s Bourbon
and Beefsteak. Once they were at the bar they could obtain anything from illegal
drugs to prostitutes or sent to one of Houghton’s friend’s illegal casinos.
There was a ping ball sex show upstairs. The food on the other hand was
terrible. Houghton was gay and ran a network of young spies former lovers and
ex-roommates. He had ties with politicians in Australia, the US and around the
world. His bar was also a favorite hang out of Australian gangsters, crooked
cops and American mafia-linked figures forced to flee the US. Mob lawyer Harry
Wainwright was one of Houghton’s cronies. Wainwright had been granted Australian
citizenship despite the fact that the FBI was about to arrest him. His request
was approved by the same immigration official who admitted Michael Hand.
Houghton was a middleman, a fixer embodying the interconnections between,
business, crime and intelligence. He was the bridge between the worlds of
corrupt businessman Frank Nugan and drug world spy Michael Hand. Houghton had
also been granted a security clearance by the ASIO, the Australian version of
MI5 or the FBI and was allowed to make secret trips without a visa to various
Southeast Asianlocales.
Once in Australia, Michael Hand began working on his
land scheme selling worthless plots of land to his military buddies, Air America
pilots and Australian customs officials. When Nugan Hand was at its height the
legend was it was funded from the profits from Hand’s real estate schemes and
Frank Nugan’s Mining scheme. Yet Hand’s Ocean Shores was mostly worthless, as
the land was never developed. The plots were sold for around ten thousand a
piece then later bought back at a fraction of the cost and resold in Panama.
Overtly it was small time but at least one of the buyers, Michael Hand’s friend
Kermit “Bud” King, built an airstrip that his Thai housekeeper informed police
was used to smuggle heroin. Ironically it was King who brought Hand in on the
Ocean Shores scheme to begin with. After coming to the attention of the crooked
drug cops King quickly wound up dead. By then Nugan Hand had been founded and
four days later Michael Hand “resigned” from Nugan Hand claiming he was going to
become a turkey farmer. In reality it was a cover for a year long mission to
sell arms to South Africa and Rhodesia for the CIA’s covert wars in Angola,
Namibia, Mozambique, and its propping up of apartheid in violation of US arms
embargoes and later of the Clark amendment. King and Hand had been part of a
drug ring and King was probably murdered when word leaked that the FBN was onto
him. Hand was out of the country when King died however just as he was when
Nugan later died.
It was via Ocean Shores, which repeatedly changed its
name like most of the Nugan Hand Shell Companies, that Nugan and Hand became
intertwined. Nugan’s secretary was on the board of directors. Soon Ocean shores
loaned Frank Nugan money in exchange for shares in his mining company. These are
some of the basic ingredients in white-collar crime, the creation of multiple
shell companies, the transfer of worthless stock, the issuing of loans that are
canceled and never repaid. Worthless assets are traded from shell company to
shell company creating the illusion of valuable assets, which are used as
collateral for loans that are never repaid. A complex web of transactions boils
down to a sort of shell game or three card monty. The whole thing is so
complicated and boring that it is nearly impossible for the Press to explain it
to the public or for a prosecutor to explain to a jury. So the game goes on.
Bank crash follows bank crash, real estate bubble follows real estate bubble and
people think it is all as natural as the change in seasons.
Nugan Hand was founded in July 1973. The lawyer and
the Green Beret may have been selected in part to form the bank because their
names gave the bank an Asian sound. Neither had any banking experience but Frank
Nugan was a brilliant financial conman. He claimed that his knowledge of money
markets allowed the bank to offer an extra 2% of interest to depositors. Nugan
was also able to convince the gullible that his tax evasion schemes were all
perfectly legal. In reality the bank operated on two levels and depositors funds
were used as a slush fund to enable the bank to carry out its real work of
illegally moving money overseas for drug syndicates and tax evaders. Frank Nugan
had created a simple strategy he called “The Contra”. A drug dealer would make a
deposit in Nugan Hand Sydney and then Nugan would call ahead to one of the Asian
branches and tell them to give the client an equal amount of money when he
arrived in a couple days, minus the commission of up to 22%. The second
transaction was off the record so it would appear no money had been moved. The
dealer would use the cash to buy drugs and then smuggle them back to Australia
perhaps for shipment on to the US or elsewhere. The same system was later used
to fund assassinations or to bribe politicians. There were of course more
complex schemes involving fake loans and shell companies. In the 1970s most
countries including Australia had strict foreign exchange rules forbidding
export of capital overseas. Nugan came up with a number of schemes to both move
money overseas and to create tax shelters to cheat on taxes. The CIA was very
interested in controlling the flow of this offshore wealth since it would
provide them with leverage over Nugan Hand clients which eventually included
Thai generals, Laotian princes, dictators like the Shah of Iran and Ferdinand
Marcos in the Philippines as well as Saudi Princes.
On 11 November 1975, a soft coup toppled Prime
Minister Gough Whitlam. For decades the CIA had worked with the ASIO that it had
helped set up to manipulate the Australian political scene. They funded the
Liberal-Country Coalition. The CIA also manipulated the unions. Whitlam had
dared to complain about CIA ties to his political opponents. He had already
angered the US by opposing the war in Vietnam and withdrawing Australian troops.
In March1973 Whitlam had taken the extraordinary step of having the Attorney
General Lionel Murphy lead a raid on ASIO headquarters. The CIA was outraged
that its secrets had been exposed in the process. Even more important to the CIA
and the US national security state was the huge listening post it had built at
Pine Gap. It was used to monitor electronic communications across the entire
region, receive spysatellite signals, and relay orders to the US atomic
submarine fleet. It had been built under the false cover story that it was part
of the space program. Whitlam worried that it could make Australia a target in a
atomicwar and was outraged to discover his own intelligence agencies had lied to
him and told him its head Michael Stallings was with the Department of Defense
and not the CIA. Worse Stallings was renting a house from the right wing head of
the Country Party Doug Anthony. Whitlam requested a list of all CIA agents
operating in Australia but his own intelligence agencies were more interested in
maintaining friendly relations with the CIA than in obeying the head of
Government.
Early in 1975 Whitlam further alienated both
Australian and US intelligence when he fired to head of Overseas Intelligence
for lying about Australia’s role in the genocidal war on East Timor, which would
eventually claim hundreds of thousands of lives. In December 1975 the Pine Gap
treaty was up for renegotiation. Whitlam had to be removed before he could
interfere further in the CIA’s schemes. The exact role of the Nugan Hand bank in
the coup is unclear but Houghton was almost certainly involved. The ASIO and the
CIA chief of station, John Walker, had granted him a security clearance. In
Australia, John Walker, who transferred to Israel shortly before the coup, and
the new CIA chief of station, Milton Corley Wonus spent long hours at his bar,
the Bourbon and Beefsteak. Houghton also had close ties to people at the Union
Bank of Switzerland (UBS) that helped frame members of the Whitlam government.
The Whitlam Government was destabilized in a way eerily similar to the recent
coup in Brazil. The CIA and ASIO leaked information to the press including a
forged telex that implicated the Labour government in the “Loans Scandal” that
brought down first the treasury head and then the energy minister. Whitlam began
to slide in the opinion polls and the opposition decided to force an early
election by refusing to pass the budget. However Whitlam was able to mobilize
opinion against this attempt to paralyze the government and it no longer
appeared certain he would lose in an early election. Drastic measures were
needed. On 8 November 1975, Theodore Shackley, by then CIA assistant deputy
director for operations sent an ultimatum to ASIO on Whitlam claiming that he
was endangering the CIA by daring to expose their activities in public. In CIA
parlance Whitlam was exposing sources and methods and was a dangerous threat to
national security and if he weren’t dealt with the CIA would cut ties to
Australian intelligence. Shackley was backed in this ultimatum by Henry
Kissinger himself. Only three days later on 11 November 1975, John Kerr the
Australian Governor General (the representative of the British crown), untilthen
a largely ceremonial post, removed Whitlam from office due to an obscure power
that had never been used before. Kerr had close ties to the OSS, the predecessor
to the CIA, and had spent decades working for various CIA fronts like the
Australian Association for Cultural Freedom. His work had also been subsidized
by the CIA. Kerr appointed Liberal Party leader Malcolm Fraser as the new
temporary Prime minister. Ironically Whitlam had appointed Kerr the year before
the soft coup as a concession to his right wing critics. When Nugan Hand
collapsed Shackley’s right hand man Thomas Clines would show up to help Bernie
Houghton escape to Mexico by way of the Philippines.
1975, the year of the soft coup against Whitlam, was
the same year Michael Hand had announced his sudden “retirement” from the bank
fourdays after the death of his friend, Air America pilot Bud King. He claimed
he was going to become a turkey farmer. Instead he was heading to Africa along
with hundreds of CIA men and mercenaries hired through CIA contractors. Hand had
pretended to resign to distance himself from Nugan Hand’s American branch in
Hawaii because he was going into the illegal arms business. Fascist Portugal had
desperately hung onto its African colonies of Angola, Guinea Bissau, and
Mozambique battling African revolutionaries intent on liberating their
countries. However Portugal’s government had recently been overthrown by a left
wing coup and the new government decided to end the costly African wars and
grant the new countries independence. The American empire and the CIA which had
backed NATO member Portugal’s wars to keep African’s subjugated now faced the
emergence of left leaning African governments in Angola and Mozambique. The US
and the CIA decided to ally with apartheid South Africa and Mobutu in Zaire to
try to install its proxies in Angola and Mozambique or at least to wage bloody
dirty wars to destabilize the new governments. In Angola Cuba decided to send
troops to counter a US backed South African invasion. Eventually not only would
Cuba successfully defend Angola’s independence but its victory would lead to the
liberation of South Africa and Namibia. Hand spent the year traveling from
Angola to apartheid Rhodesia and South Africa setting up arms deals. The exact
details are unknown but it is believed that Hand managed to carry out a major
arms deal with the notorious Ed Wilson who ran profitable CIA arms dealing and
consulting fronts. Wilson had known Bernie Houghton since before he supposedly
resigned from the CIA in 1971. Wilson would later hire Houghton and Nugan Hand
to help him with his Libyan arms deals and construction schemes and after Nugan
Hand’s collapse Houghton would go to work for Wilson’s EATSCO in which his
partners were Thomas Clines, Richard Secord, and Theodore Shackley. Houghton’s
stolen Nugan Hand files would be stored in Ed Wilson’s Geneva Switzerland
office. Even after Hand’s return from Africa to Australia in 1976 Nugan Hand
would continue to supply arms illegally to South Africa and many other places
including Indonesia, Burma, and Thailand.
On his way back to Australia in 1976 Michael Hand
opened a Nugan hand branch in Panama, another money laundering and drug
smuggling hub. Then he arrived in Australia and was immediately reinstated at
Nugan Hand. In 1977 Hand would travel to Hong Kong to open a Nugan Hand office
and would send Neil Evans to open the Chiang Mai branch in Thailand to help drug
dealing Thai Generals and warlords move their money overseas. Within two years
Nugan Hand would have more than a dozen branches around the world, Chile,
Argentina, the Philippines, Singapore, West Germany, London, and the Cayman
Islands.
It was during this global expansion that Nugan Hand
recruited a half dozen American generals and admirals through Bernie Houghton.
Hand was now bragging privately about the banks CIA backing. Admiral Earl
“Buddy” Yates (Ret.) was recruited as the bank’s president. Admiral Yates was
the former Commander of the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier and chief of
staff for plans and policy for Pacific Command. Pacific Command had
responsibility for all of Asia, including of course the wars in Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia.
General Edwin Black had been in the OSS serving under
Allen Dulles and above Richard Helms, both of whom went on to become infamous
CIA directors. After serving Eisenhower’s Psychological Strategy Board as
military assistant to the deputy he served on the military staff of the National
Security Council. He was in charge of US Forces in Vietnam when it was still a
covert war. He then headed US Forces in Thailand before becoming an assistant
division commander in Vietnam and Assistant Army Chief of Staff for Pacific
Command. He also headed the Freedom Foundation.
General Leroy Manor was a fighter pilot in World War
2, Korea, and Vietnam. He commanded air bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay in
the Philippines. He had been Chief of Staff for Pacific Command and had
negotiated a USD 500 million military aid package for the Philippines and spent
seven months with President Marcos renegotiating the leases for US bases in the
Philippines. He was an expert on counter-Insurgency. He was recruited to run the
Nugan Hand branch in the Philippines, sharing his office with the Marcos’
brother in law Ludwig Rocka.
General Earle Cocke was a specialist in moving “black
money” for various government agencies. He was very close to President Carter.
During World War Two he had survived an execution by a German firing squad. He
went on to work at various shadowy jobs at the Department of Defense, was a
former executive at Delta Airlines and former National Commander of the American
Legion. Nugan Hand’s Washington DC branch was run by Cocke out of the offices of
his Cocke and Philips International Consulting Firm.
Nugan Hand also recruited a number of CIA men. Former
CIA director William Colby and his law firm Reid & Priest were hired as lawyers
representing Nugan. Colby had helped set up Gladio in Scandinavian countries,
serving as CIA chief of station in Vietnam during the formation of the Phoenix
assassination program. Walter McDonald had headed the CIA’s economic division
for 25 years and was no mere analyst. When Admiral Yates introduced him he noted
that while many were unaware of the role of the CIA’s economic division it was
“acknowledged in this world of grass politics, drug events and battles and it
starts generally in the area Walt is heading.” McDonald was given the unenviable
task of babysitting the drunk and out of control Frank Nugan. There was also Guy
Pauker a CIA man under Rand cover he had arrived in Indonesia in 1958 during the
CIA’s failed plot to overthrow Sukarno using a military uprising. He joked that
by 1965 the friends he had made back in 1958 were now running the country. The
CIA had successfully overthrown Sukarno and was helping Pauker’s “Friends” carry
out one of the bloodiest massacres of the cold war with one million suspected
communists and ethnic Chinese slaughtered by death squads. Pauker was still a
fierce defender of the Indonesian junta, which had unleashed another blood bath
after invading East Timor in 1975. Pauker was an adviser to both Henry Kissinger
and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Nugan Hand Taiwan was run by former Civil Air Transport
executive CIA Dale Holmgren. Air America, the CIA’s drug smuggling airline, had
grown out of the CIA/Taiwan airline CAT Civil Air Transport that had been
smuggling heroin since the early days of the cold war. Michael Hand and Admiral
Yates recruited another infamous CIA figure Mitch Werbell III the expert on
silencers and the inventor of the Mac-10 machine gun. WerBell ran a mercenary
training camp in Georgia and was recruited by Hand as a consultant on his
project to resettle the Hmong and Montagnards in the Caribbean where they could
be used as a proxy army to menace Cuba. The scheme fell through but they were
eventually used as proxies in Reagan’s Central American wars.
This array of admirals, generals, and CIA officers
were executives at a bank that was deeply involved with the Mr Asia syndicate
and its series of murders. Four Mr Asia couriers were arrested in separate
incidents and they all talked to police. Three of the four ended up dead and the
fourth was beaten unconscious with baseball bats. They had talked and the cops
were on Mr Asia’s payroll via Nugan Hand’s Australian law firm run by John Aston
and Brian Alexander. The firm represented a number of drug dealers including the
Mr Asia syndicate. Alexander ran a network of corrupt cops that extended through
every level of Australian drug law enforcement. They immediately informed
Alexander any time someone ratted out the Mr Asia syndicate. Their bribes were
paid in some cases through opening accounts for them in Nugan Hand. When Nugan
Hand first came under suspicion for its role in the drug trade the FBN (Federal
Bureau of Narcotics) investigators discovered that Frank Nugan knew every detail
about their investigation within hours of it occurring thanks to Alexander. In
fact Frank Nugan boldly arrived at FBN headquarters on 14 February 1978
protesting his complete innocence and boasting of his political connections.
Within weeks higher ups in the FBN had killed the investigation into Nugan Hand.
Aston’s law firm was used as a drop point by Nugan Hand clients Frank Nugan had
helped launder $300,000 from a bank robbery for Mr Asia to finance these murders
and Hand had personally managed the Asian end of the operation. Finally the
number 2 man in Mr Asia, Terry Clark, planned the murder of Mr Asia syndicate’s
head Christopher Martin Johnson who was getting too much press attention. His
dismembered corpse was buried in four separate countries. Again the money trail
led through Nugan Hand. A year and a half after Nugan Hand’s collapse lawyer
Brian Alexander “disappeared ” after having his feet tied to an antique stove
before being tossed overboard from a police boat.
Another murderous disappearance would cause trouble
for the Nugan Fruit Group. Donald Mackay was the Griffith Branch president of
the Liberal Party who had launched an anti-drug crusade against the Calabrian
marijuana growers. On 15 July 1977, he disappeared. Police found bloodstains in
his van and shell casings at the scene so he was presumed murdered. Records
showed that the Nugan Fruit Group had paid the gangster’s who were the main
suspects in the killing Antonio Sergi and Robert Trimbole. Trimbole was also
part of the Mr Asia syndicate. After Mackay’s death a Royal Commission was
appointed to investigate his murder and the Griffith drug scene. Back in 1973
Ken Nugan had sold a 40% share in the Nugan Fruit Group to an insurance company
and they were demanding an audit to discover why payment had been sent to
gangsters and because they realized Ken Nugan was embezzling money. Ken called
in his brother Frank for help and in the fall of 1977 they carried out a sort of
“corporate coup.” First they hired corrupt cops infamous as strong-arm men and
hired killers to terrorize the auditors. When that didn’t work the cops hired a
bunch of thugs and unemployed drunks to become Nugan Fruit Group stockholders
and at a stockholder’s meeting managed via threats to force the Insurance
company off the board and fire the auditors. This led to a corporate affairs
commission investigation of the Nugan Brothers. Frank Nugan stole one million
from Nugan Hand to pay the mounting legal costs. The scandal eventually began to
damage Nugan Hand’s credibility although Admiral Yates and General Black both
continued to publicly defend Frank Nugan in the press. In addition to
intelligence backers Nugan Hand had been vouched for by top banks in Australia,
Hong Kong and the US. In the Cayman Islands Nugan Hand’s books had been vouched
for by Price Waterhouse & Company. By 1979 they were no longer willing to
continue endorsing the company as it became increasingly clear that the Nugan
brothers would be convicted of fraud. The whole house of cards was on the verge
of collapse.
As the pressure mounted on Frank Nugan he began to
drink heavily with an open bottle of whisky on his desk every morning. He also
stole millions to buy expensive mansions and cars for himself. The more he stole
to finance his expensive lifestyle the more respectable and trustworthy he
appeared to the potential clients. He went around bragging that he was the
richest man in Sydney. He tried to frame his political opponents for corruption
and even put a bounty on their heads. Doug Sapper (Hand’s old special forces
buddy) was set up in Nepal for smuggling watches after he’d turned down
Houghton’s attempt to recruit him to assassinate Nugan’s enemies. Michael Hand
increasingly began to cut Nugan out of the loop. Six months before his death
Frank Nugan quit drinking and found religion apparently in the hopes that his
business would be miraculously saved. His wife left him and headed back to
America. He was also demanding that Nugan Hand stop laundering money for drug
dealers and get out of the arms trade. Hand and the generals merely ignored him
and tried to isolate him. By fall of 1979 Hand and Houghton were already
planning their escapes. At the same time they held a seemingly triumphant
conference in October 1979 that all the admirals, generals, and CIA men flew in
to attend to welcome Miami banker Donald Beazley as the bank’s new president.
The banks Beazley worked for would be implicated in drug money laundering
scandals after he had left them. While the bank was unraveling in 1979, Houghton
was sent to the KSA where he managed to collect USD 5-10 million dollars in
deposits from American oil workers and military men while also engaging in all
sorts of mysterious meetings with Arab princes. Given the timing Houghton may
have been involved in efforts to escalate the covert war in Afghanistan. This is
also when Houghton began doing business with Richard Secord, Thomas Clines, and
Ed Wilson.
Frank Nugan’s death remains a mystery although
apparently he actually did kill himself. Michael Hand claimed it was murder but
he had taken out million dollar insurance police for Nugan and himself that
wouldn’t pay. In any case the day after Bernie Houghton had visited Frank Nugan
at the office Nugan had decided to kill himself. Nugan had underlined words in
his bible that hinted that his family had been threatened with death if he
didn’t kill himself. Frank Nugan’s body was found on January 27th at 4:20 AM
with a rifle, a bible, and a list of drug smugglers for whom he had laundered
money. Perhaps he wanted to take Nugan Hand down with his death. The police
notified his brother Ken Nugan and gave him the keys to the office. It was later
discovered that Brian Alexander had already been purging evidence at Frank
Nugan’s home. Ken Nugan arrived at the office to start shredding documents. Hand
was in London when he learned of Nugan’s death. He complained that Nugan had
left him to clean up the mess. He then flew back to Australia by way of the US.
He arrived with Admiral Yates on 29 January 1980 to take charge of the file
shredding. Soon Houghton and his lawyer Michael Maloney were put in charge of
the cover up. Nugan Hand employees were warned to keep quiet on what they knew
or their wives would be chopped into little pieces and mailed to them in
parcels. Doubtless because of Nugan Hand’s political connections and
intelligence ties the authorities were extremely slow to take action. When Hand
testified at the coroner’s inquest the authorities were completely in the dark
about his intelligence ties and trusted his lying explanations of his role in
the bank. While the bank was collapsing financial advisers were still telling
their clients to deposit their money in Nugan Hand. The ordinary depositors
would lose everything. Meanwhile Nugan Hand was trying to pay off its more
dangerous clients. By the time the CAC finally arrived at Nugan Hand’s Sydney
office all the records had either been shredded or moved to a butcher shop owned
by Bob Gehring,an ex-marine and possible CIA agent. Gehring would later help
Hand and Houghton escape the country. Amazingly Australian authorities allowed
Gehring to physically push them around and bully them in order to block access
to the files. No one at Nugan Hand was arrested. Early in June 1980 ex-CIA man
Thomas Clines arrived to help Houghton escape to the Philippines from which he
headed to a luxurious exile in Acapulco, Mexico. Ex-CIA man James Oswald
Spencer, who was a TV actor appearing on Star Trek and Gilligan’s Isle arrived
to provide Hand with a ludicrous disguise. Hand escaped two weeks later probably
with the help of Australian intelligence. Hand had been staying with Gehring who
provided Hand with one of his employee’s passports. Hand left behind $70 dollars
and his lawyer managed to convince the press briefly that Hand may have been
murdered and disappeared. The bank collapsed taking at least $50 million dollars
of depositors’ money with it. The real figure was probably much higher since
many Nugan Hand clients didn’t want to reveal their losses in laundered drug
money or tax evasion schemes. Houghton had a courier bring Michael Hand 1
million dollars in his American exile. As the bank was collapsing Nugan Hand
executives gave themselves huge bonuses.
In 1982 ASIO learned from the CIA or another American
Intelligence agency that Michael Hand was stationed in Honduras training the
elite 5th Puma Battalion along side American Special Forces. The ASIO refused to
try and bring him to justice. It also emerged that the ASIO had been recording
all Frank Nugan’s telephone calls in the two years prior to his death while
telling Australian law enforcement it knew nothing about the bank or its
clients. In 1991 an Australian journalist tracked down Hand’s Australian wife
Helene in France and discovered Michael Hand’s address in the US but a rival
paper exposed the story and Hand disappeared again. In the late 1990s Hand had
changed his name to Michael Jon Fuller and was running a paramilitary training
camp with four other ex-military officers. It trained Special Forces, SWAT
teams, and police from around the world. The strange paradox of one of the most
wanted men in the world training police from around the world is only
conceivable only with CIA protection. Next Hand started a prosperous knife
making business TOPS knives. It sold knives to militaries around the globe. The
elderly Hand was still running the company when journalist Peter Butt managed to
track him down by scouring corporate records of people named Michael Jon. He
spotted a familiar signature, found a photo of Michael Jon Fuller, and hired a
private detective to track him down, then giving the story to 60 minutes
Australia. When confronted Hand refused to say a word to the Press, resigning
and disappearing yet again. Australian authorities refused to pursue his
extradition not wishing to anger the US government or the CIA or to revive the
scandal and the story of the soft coup against Whitlam. On 8
November 2020 Michael Hand died a free man. After his escape,
Bernie Houghton only had to wait a year for the heat to cool off. He returned to
Sydney seemingly completely untouchable and remained a legendary figure in
King’s Cross until his death in the year 2000. Two years later King’s Cross
built a statue in his memory. Ken Nugan served a short prison sentence but the
Nugan Fruit Group survives to this day. General Edwin Black went to work for
another CIA bank Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham, and Wong that collapsed in
1983 when it’s founder Richard Rewald attempted suicide. By 1980 when Nugan Hand
collapsed the global heroin routes were shifting from Southeast Asian Golden
Triangle to the new Golden Crescent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The CIA would
use the Saudi/Pakistani bank BCCI to move this massive flow of cash around,
giving birth to al Qaeda and laundering money for Colombian cocaine cartels.
When the big US banks collapsed in 2008 it was discovered that drug money was
the only thing keeping the whole financial system afloat. Nugan Hand was merely
another chapter in the long interconnected history of corporations, intelligence
and organized crime.
Sources
Jonathan Kwitny’s The Crimes of Patriot’s: A True tale
of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA Is still the definitive book on the Nugan Hand
scandal going into the bank’s history in minute detail. Kwitny was equally
skilled in investigating the world’s of financial crime and intelligence.
Peter Butt’s Merchants of Menace: The True Story of
the Nugan Hand Scandal is also great containing details on Hand’s life in exile
and being a lighter more entertaining read.
Peter Butt also released a 4 part podcast called
“Merchants of Menace” you can subscribe through a podcast player or download the
episodes here. It contains a very entertaining version of events from Michael
Hand’s old special forces buddy Douglas Sapper.
https://www.merchantsofmenace.net/podcast
60 minutes Australia did an episode on the discovery
of Michael Hand
https://youtu.be/yDhsDU_Z2m8 (Saints, for
some reason YouTube has age restricted so you have to sign in to view the 60 minutes Australia story?
I have posted the 60 minutes Australia story from Bitchute without any
restrictions.)