FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD I — FROM HARVARD TO ENRON PART ONE
by Linda Minor
“…I was friends at that time with Catherine Austin Fitts, whom I met as members of a social media forum back in the day before Facebook or Twitter existed. “CIA Drugs,” as the forum was called was an e-mail based list run by Kris Millegan. Daniel Hopsicker and Michael Ruppert, among many others, were also members.
Catherine had recently suffered the failure of her business enterprise (Hamilton Securities Group), as she later described in a book published online called “Dillon, Read & Co., Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits.”
Catherine, with her knowledge of corporate capitalism, introduced me to a new aspect of history. She motivated me to find out what I could about one man she believed was at the core of the “conspiracy” which had destroyed the company she had built.
I saw my mission as being not unlike Dorothy’s objective in “The Wizard of Oz,” to retrace the steps from her farmland home in Kansas to the foreign territory of Oz. As she set out to find her way back home, everyone she encountered along the way told her, simply, “Follow the yellow brick road. These well-marked bricks will take you to the wizard, and the wizard has the power to get you back home.”
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Each “brick” of the research I compiled led me back to a piece of history I wouldn’t otherwise have learned. Catherine visited me numerous times at my little Texas lake hideaway to which my husband and I moved to care for elderly parents. She taught me about “the pop,” which is how corporate money is made on the stock market by opening branches of a public company. What I did not fully realize at the time is that what she described was Moneylaundering 101.
Catherine wanted me to help her learn who Pug Winokur was and why he had been used to destroy Hamilton Securities, which she created after leaving the George H.W. Bush White House, serving in the Department headed by Jack Kemp. I obliged, working naively by instinct as I stepped from one brick to another, using the tools I’d acquired by that time.
Pug Winokur and his Father
Enron’s board of directors had all resigned during 2001 and 2002 with one very notable exception–Herbert Simon “Pug” Winokur, Jr., about whom very little was known at the time.
We set out to learn his background and how he–and seemingly nobody else–survived Enron’s collapse…”
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Of the numerous books written about American activities in that area during the war, including that of the Office of Strategic Services, the best one, in my opinion, was the book written by Alfred W. McCoy, first published as The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia in 1972, which was updated in 2003 as The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. McCoy wrote:
“During the early 1950s the CIA had backed the formation of a Nationalist Chinese guerrilla army in Burma, which still controls almost a third of the world’s illicit opium supply, and in Laos the CIA created a Meo mercenary army whose commander manufactured heroin for sale to American GIs in South Vietnam. The State Department provided unconditional support for corrupt governments openly engaged in the drug traffic.
“In late 1969 new heroin laboratories sprang up in the tri-border area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge, and unprecedented quantities of heroin started flooding into the United States. Fueled by these seemingly limitless supplies of heroin, America’s total number of addicts skyrocketed.
“Unlike some national intelligence agencies, the CIA did not dabble in the drug traffic to finance its clandestine operations. Nor was its culpability the work of a few corrupt agents, eager to share in the enormous profits. The CIA’s role in the heroin traffic was simply an inadvertent but inevitable consequence of its cold war tactics.”
The blurb for the new edition states “Maintaining a global perspective, this groundbreaking study details the mechanics of drug trafficking in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South and Central America. New chapters detail U.S. involvement in the narcotics trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after the fall of the Taliban, and how U.S. drug policy in Central America and Colombia has increased the global supply of illicit drugs.”
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These work relationships ended in 1974, followed by his short association with George S. May International, a business consultancy originally formed to promote golf. Also in 1974 H.S. Winokur Associates began operating a firm called Commercial Utility Consultants, to “advise corporate clients on matters of electrical and telephone usage.” In many ways this business became a a model for what Enron did with natural gas.
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Traveling around the world, orchestrating his vast air armada, Doole kept his airplanes busy. Under the cover of legitimate freight and charter services, Doole’s airlines supplied a 30,000-man secret army in the mountains of Laos for a ten-year war against the Pathet Lao, dropped scores of agents into Red China, and helped stage an unsuccessful revolt in Indonesia. Not surprisingly, all this flying about aroused curiosity. In 1970 a New York Times reporter asked Doole if Air America had any connection with the CIA. “If ‘someone out there’ is behind all this,” Doole airily replied, “we don’t know about it.”
Doole’s pilots, who flew in and out of tiny jungle fields in abysmal weather and sometimes under enemy fire, were a raffish lot. They referred to the CIA as “the customer,” the ammunition they dropped as “hard rice” and being under heavy fire as “sporty.” Brushes with death were described as “fascinating.” To be “absolutely fascinated” meant scared witless.
Doole would appear from time to time at CIA bases from Vientiane to Panama City, but he stayed aloof from the pilots, many of whom regarded him as a bit of a snob. “I never saw the man without a tie on,” scoffs one. Doole played bridge, flew airplanes and did business deals the same way: slowly and deliberately. “The Chinese liked to negotiate with him,” recalls a former CIA official. “He was polite; he never showed any excitement. But he was tough.”
When the extent of the CIA’s covert operations was revealed by newspaper exposes and congressional hearings in the early ’70s, the agency was forced to dismantle Doole’s huge aerial empire and sell off the various planes and airfields. It was done at a profit; the agency turned over $20 million to the U.S. Treasury. Doole also did well by himself. Though he earned a government salary as a CIA employee, he augmented his income by investing, shrewdly, in the stock market. His estate when he died was worth “several million dollars,” according to a sister.
In 1971 Doole retired from the CIA. Formally, that is. He kept his hand in the aviation business as a director of Evergreen International Aviation, a company that refits and charters airplanes. Though Evergreen bought Intermountain Aviation, one of Doole’s CIA “proprietaries,” in 1975, the company insists that it has had nothing further to do with the agency. Perhaps. But when the dying Shah of Iran wanted to fly from Panama to Egypt in 1980, he flew on a chartered Evergreen DC-8. Doole arranged the charter…”