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salary, DEA pilots received additional money or perks. "Abbott received $60,000 and 50 pounds of pot for this one week of flying to the Miskito Indians..." "Abbott told me about a flight to Panama with DEA agent George Phillips [Phillips was a CIA contract agent assigned to the DEA]. While stopped for fuel at Belize, Phillips opened an alu- minum suitcase that held rolls of tapes and disks marked 'Inslaw’. Phillips told Abbott that the tapes were money records of a fake company used by a group of drug dealers. This software, called ‘PROMIS', was initially stolen from the Inslaw company by Justice Department officials who then sold the computer program to foreign governments and drug cartels... "Abbott described his frequent contacts with the DEA's Central America Bureau Chief, Sante Bario, and how the DEA silenced Bario to keep the CIA and DEA drug smuggling operations from the public... DEA and Justice Department attorneys charged Bario with federal drug offenses, causing his imprisonment... When brought before US District Judge Shannon in San Antonio, Bario tried to describe his DEA duties and the DEA and CIA drug trafficking, but Justice Department attorneys and the judge blocked him from proceeding. After being returned to his jail cell, a prison guard gave Bario a strychnine-laced peanut butter sandwich, causing immediate painful convulsions and subsequent death. The official autopsy report covered up for this murder, reporting that Bario died of asphyxiation." UNINDICTED CRIMINALS IN HIGH PLACES Stich names lots of big names in his book: public officials and well-known politicians, participants in serious criminal offences. These of course include celebrity-status politicians like the hereto- fore unindicted Bill Clinton, George Bush, William Barr and Oliver North. It makes you wonder whether Stich has ever been sued or threatened by anyone for libellous content or for anything in his books that was untrue. "No, I never have," said Stich. "Something interesting did hap- pen a few months ago. There was one drug enforcement agent, Michael Hurley, who was agent in charge at Mena, Arkansas." Mena, by the way, was the site of a small rural airport in Arkansas, the staging area for drug shipments into the United States during the late 1980s. "His name originally came up in the Inslaw matter," continued Stich. "Michael Riconosciuto was involved in altering the Inslaw software which was stolen by the Justice Department people from the Inslaw company. So when Congress wanted Riconosciuto to testify to these matters, he was called by a Justice Department official and told: ‘If you testify, we'll get you.' He goes and testi- fies, and, a week later, Michael Hurley who was a DEA agent in Nicosia was transferred to the state of Washington and was then involved in filing what I feel are false drug charges against him." So Hurley was the one who initially set up Riconosciuto? "Hurley was chief agent for the DEA in Mena and was well aware of the smuggling in early 1980s." And this is the crossroads where different crimes and cover-ups intersect—what the late journalist Danny Casolaro called "the Octopus", a global cabal of dirty tricksters involved in deals around the world. According to Casolaro, the Octopus was a loosely knit international network of former CIA operatives, mili- tary men, organised crime figures and other "Beltway bandits" (former government officials) who worked together on various projects including arms manufacturing, money laundering, pro- curement fraud and kickbacks. "Meanwhile," Stich added, "Lester Coleman, author of The 24 - NEXUS Trail of the Octopus, was working out of Beirut and Nicosia as an agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA]. He was instructed to spy on the DEA while he was working under the cover of the Christian Broadcast Network." And why didn't the DIA trust the DEA? "My understanding is that DIA felt that the DEA was heavily involved in drug trafficking," said Stich. "They just wanted to know what was going on. Coleman was an operative in Nicosia. The DIA was using [Pat Robertson's] Christian Broadcast Network as a cover. While Coleman is working in Nicosia, he finds out that Michael Hurley and the DEA are involved in a drug pipeline that involves the CIA, the DEA, the Syrian drug traffick- ers and Lebanese drug traffickers, and that they were using Pan Am aircraft for smuggling the drugs. It was this drug pipeline— the way it was being operated—that permitted the terrorists to put the bomb on board Pan Am 103. This is where Michael Hurley comes in. Coleman says that the DEA and Hurley were aware of and were involved in this drug pipeline. "Michael Hurley sent me a fax four months ago," Stich added. "He said that he heard me referring to him on the Internet and he would sue me if it were untrue. So I faxed him back and said: ‘Frankly, I haven't mentioned you at all on the Internet. However, since we're in contact, I want you to confirm to me that you were the DEA agent in Arkansas in the early '80s.' He never answered. But I talked with Lester Coleman, and he confirmed that, yes, it was true." Just another unindicted criminal? "As far as unindicted criminals are concerned," Stich noted, "you'd have a good part of the US Justice Department. But who's going to prosecute?" INSTITUTIONAL CORRUPTION So what's Stich's sense of this institutional corruption which has gone on through several administrations for at least 30 years? "As far as Justice Department corruption is concerned, I was able to document it for the last 30 years while I was a federal investigator," replied Stich. "In fact, while I was a federal investi- gator with the FAA in the 1960s, I even accused, in writing, J. Edgar Hoover of criminal cover-up and obstruction of justice. You know, a federal employee can not get away with that. And there's some particular federal directive that makes that a very serious offence if you do that [accuse a public official] without having evidence. Now I had plenty of evidence. It was about 1965. I had been in contact with him for some time, bringing to his attention the criminal activities that I'd discovered in the FAA and also while I was acting as an independent prosecutor. "I was able to document other criminal activities, not only in the FAA-related series of air disasters. I was so incensed by what was going on and the constant accidents. Every six months there would be another fatal crash. So what I did was I forced a four- month hearing upon the FAA, during which I acted as an indepen- dent prosecutor. During this time I conducted the hearing and brought testimony and hard evidence into a 4,000-page transcript. During this hearing I had FAA management engaging in perjury, subornation of perjury and fraud that I was able to document. "People don't realise the significance of this, which I describe in Unfriendly Skies. This has never happened in the FAA, and prob- ably never will again, where a key FAA investigator forces a hearing on the FAA, during which it is turned into an adversary hearing. I'm getting witnesses to testify and I'm introducing docu- ments and there are some really unusual events going on. Plus, Continued on page 85 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 1998