Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (33 page)

It is always clear in Indio and with the clarity of the warbler in the cottonwood grove, John Philip Nichols knew that he could bring his box office charity and all his earthly possessions into the reservation of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians.

With no more than two dozen Indians and nearly 2,000 acres of desert solitaire, cactus and cotton grove, the Cabazon Reservation was a suitable home for gambling, dope, dirty money and gun running and all the fugitive visions that line the edge of oppression.

John Philip Nichols didn’t howl under 12 full moons before the gambling was underway and, in the desert night, people flocked from all over to Indio Bingo and the poker casino at the fork of Highway 10 and Highway 86.

Under a major corporation’s umbrella subsidiary, later to be named Cabazon Arms, the gun runners and the money traders soon arrived, the weapon makers and the generals from Babylon, Contra resuppliers, cover operatives from both the East and West and, in what one source calls “a marriage of necessity,” the dope dealers, the mobsters and the murderers.

Whatever John Philip Nichols saw in the dark cathedral of those desert nights in silence and certainty cracked and became unglued. After a number of still unresolved execution-style murders and a solicitation-for-murder charge for which he was jailed, the dark vision of John Philip Nichols eroded. Although he’s been released from a short stint in prison, he’s a one-eyed Jack now since only Indio Bingo gambling — managed by his sons, the Las Vegas-managed poker casino, the Indians and the most formidable creatures of the desert remain.

Several of the Cabazon Arms associates during the 1980s are coming out of the shadows to take top billing for the actual participation in the multi-million dollar laundered payment to the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages, in shutting down the dope and dirty money schemes of Nugan Hand and resurfacing its activities, in assisting Gerald Bull in the refinements and distribution of his weapons arsenal including his Super Gun, and in the development of the Fuel Air Explosive technologies — thought to be responsible for the Beirut bomb which killed 241 U.S. servicemen.

While rumors of the hostage release delay circulated for years after the election of Ronald Reagan, it wasn’t until 1988 that testimony was offered by two covert operatives in two different courts regarding their knowledge and participation in a hostage-release stall managed by then Reagan campaign chief William Casey. But now, two more covert operatives have emerged from that desert reservation in the journey of this story effort to confirm that previous testimony and provide richer details regarding the laundered payment by the Saudis and other particularities in order to prevent what Casey feared the most, a surprise release of the hostages before the election, almost guaranteeing windfall votes for President Jimmy Carter. The alleged reward to another Reagan insider for that mission to Iran in the summer of 1980 has been almost wholly responsible for the leaks leading to this odyssey. For it was in that reward in the form of a multi-million dollar government contract that technologies were found to have been stolen by the government from another company. In that other company’s recovery from bankruptcy, its CEO has been the real life star and gumshoe in this drama that continues to unfold each day.

In 1982, the body of 30-year-old Paul Morasca was found hog-tied and fatally strangled in his condominium on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill. Morasca, who had been working among the Cabazon Arms confidantes, reportedly had the access codes for offshore accounts containing hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money ostensibly for covert operations. Morasca’s partner, who is one of the key sources for this story, claims to have scuttled Nugan Hand’s operations and assumed control over all the funds. Two years earlier, about 90 miles from Sydney, Frank Nugan’s body was found slumped over in his Mercedes sedan. His partner, Michael Hand, has been missing since the investigation widened several months after Nugan’s death. Two sources in this story report knowledge of Michael Hand’s whereabouts.

The drug trafficking, the contract murders, the spies and the investment frauds revealed in the Nugan Hand inquiries bear sinister, mirror-like qualities to the gang on that isolated desert reservation in Southern California.

A little more than six months ago, on a quiet spring evening in Brussels, a guns-to-Babylon mission splintered into pieces which were later found in the UK’s Teesport and in Turkey. Gerald Vincent Bull ambled down the hallway leading to his apartment when an assassin fired two 7.6 millimeter rounds at point blank range into the back of his skull. The shadowy movements of his Super Gun dream took hold and gathered momentum in the Indio desert.

Six years ago on a balmy Sunday morning in Beirut, a Lebanese boy later nicknamed “Smiling Death” raced a Mercedes truck toward a building full of sleeping US soldiers. A few seconds later, 241 Americans and 56 Frenchmen were dead in what the FBI called the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion since World War II. Nicknamed “Smiling Death” because of the chilling expression that the sentry recalled on the suicide driver’s face, the bomb and the driver were traced to a Lebanese Shia Muslim extremist group, the Islamic Jihad, and to the most dangerous terrorist at large today, Imad Mugniyah. Mugniyah’s followers had used what investigators called a “trademark,” using gas to enhance a powerful explosive. Investigators determined that the device was equivalent to nine tons of dynamite, made of sophisticated explosive enhanced by gas, and only the size of an unfolded card table. Its name: The Fuel Air Explosive.

Possession of a secret is no guarantee of its truth, and while these allegations by a handful of people are indeed remarkable, they are also wrought with undocumentable details — at least thus far, and veils of deniability masking the necessary spine for a traditional journalistic effort. It is for this reason that
Behold, A Pale Horse
is subtitled
A True Crime Narrative.

The first three chapters of the manuscript should be finished within three months of an initial advance and each subsequent chapter will be delivered every month. the completed book should be ready for publication by the summer of 1991.

Funeral services for Joseph Daniel Casolaro, the Washington-based writer who died in West Virginia while working on an investigative story, will be at 10 a.m. today at St. Ann’s Church in Arlington.

Mr. Casolaro, a 44-year-old Fairfax County resident, was investigating the Bank of Credit and Commerce International when he was found with his arms slashed Saturday in a bathtub in a Martinsburg, W.Va., hotel. A police investigation is continuing.

A lifetime resident of Northern Virginia, he was a veteran journalist and author of several published fiction works. His most recent novel, “The Ice King,” was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1985.

Before his 18-month free-lance investigation of various banking and government scandals that he believed were intertwined, Mr. Casolaro was a writer and editor at Computer Age Publications, a newsletter group based in Springfield. He had worked for other publications covering the criminal justice system and had been a correspondent and columnist for newspapers and magazines based on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Casolaro began his reporting. career with Globe Newspapers, a string of weeklies serving Northern Virginia. He attended St. Leo’s College and Providence College, and he spent a year in Paris at the Sorbonne.

He is survived by two sons from a previous marriage, Joseph Casolaro III of Leadville, Colo., and Colby Henson of Herndon; his mother, Frances Casolaro of Falls Church; a brother, Dr. M. Anthony Casolaro of Dunn Loring; and two sisters, Mari-Ellen Slakey of McLean and Linda Oels of Toms River, N. J.

The Branch Davidian conflagration, in which nearly a hundred so-called “cult members” burned to death, seemed to temporarily satisfy the TV audience’s post-Gulf War adrenaline fix, and signal an escalation in the New World Order’s taste for “shoot now, explain later” mini-wars within domestic borders. If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wanted to arrest David Koresh they had ample opportunity on his frequent trips to downtown Waco prior to the initial siege. As Ken Fawcett’s following affidavit confirms, the first assault on the Mount Carmel complex was done for the benefit of news cameras, probably to justify the ATF budget, which expanded ten-fold during the 1980s. Independent reseachers have revealed that two of four ATF officers killed in the initial “surprise raid” were most likely killed by friendly fire and concussion grenades hurled by fellow storm troopers. In addition, Mr. Fawcett claims the official time of the first raid was misstated by two hours to allow the ATF to edit the tapes for official use by the news media. In June, 1993, recordings released by Waco-area 911 lines, amply demonstrate the sect’s desire for cease-fire during the initial raid.

The cover-up tones of the Waco conflagration was confirmed by use of FBI subcontractors as so-called “independent arson investigators” and the hiring of Mark Richard as a top advisor to Attorney General Janet Reno. According to Daniel Sheehan of the Christic Institute, “When the investigation of the [Edwin] Wilson affair [selling arms to the Libyans] started to lead into revealing information showing that the criminal activities were being directly authorized by CIA leadership under George Bush, it was Mark Richard who moved in out of the Justice Department to shut down that entire investigation. They allowed Tom Cline and Richard Secord … to enter a simple plea; [they] ended up paying just a few thousand dollars fine in being released from any further criminal investigation. It’s what’s known in the business as a ‘fix.’ That fix was put in by Mark Richard.”

Waco also afforded police agencies the opportunity try out sophisticated microwave weaponry (see “Remote Mind Control Technology” by Anna Keeler) and fool around with interesting new psych-war devices including incredibly bright spotlights and incessant ear-splitting recordings of whining, taunting voices, dentist drills, and rabbits being slaughtered, among other aural monstrosities.

The “mild” tear gas that was pumped inside the Branch Davidian compound for eight hours was of the CS variety, a physically disabling poison which is usually mixed with kerosene for transmittal, is highly flammable. CS gas killed many children during the Vietnam War. It has now been confirmed that the Waco Fire Department was deliberately held back from responding to the fire, and, contrary to the federal position, the Texas coroner has maintained that none of the Waco inferno victims had been shot. [Introduction by Adam Parfrey.]

I am the individual who started the communication process to the besieged individuals inside Mt. Carmel [the Branch Davidian complex]. With help from Ron Engleman of radio station KGBS, we employed a method involving the use of a satellite dish on top of the Mt. Carmel Complex, i.e., moving it back and forth to signify an affirmative answer to on-air questions. Integral to the process is my personal satellite downlink equipment (three TURO dishes, 2 C-band, and 1 combination C and Ku band (12.7-12.9 Ghz.) The Ku band system is still somewhat new to the civilian and non-media public and are relatively rare (about 5,000 nationwide.)

I became involved in the situation last Monday after observing numerous contradictions between what was actually occurring on the scene and what was being reported by the off-air media. In addition, beginning Tuesday evening I began monitoring and taping both domestic and foreign correspondent satellite Ku band uplinks or transmissions from the “media checkpoint.” On Wednesday, March 3, after already removing the media twice for “safety concerns,” the FBI imposed restrictions upon the television media as to the use of more than 200x telephoto lenses on live shots, and upon the use of ambient light sensing “night vision” equipment. Bear in mind this type of ambient light equipment cannot in any way interfere with that being used by ATF or FBI. The restriction was as follows: night vision can only be used by the networks on a one-hour delay and restricted to two hours per night. Foreign correspondents, fearing for the safety of the citizens within the complex, maintained all-night vigils, using night vision as well as 400x lenses. Monitoring these foreign transmissions, I was able to observe and videotape the following atrocities.