(Edited from a Skepticfile article)
Nugan Hand participated in two U.S. government covert operations; the sale of an electronic spy ship to Iran and weapons shipments to southern Africa, probably to U.S.-backed forces in Angola. That's according to Australia's Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking report put to the two parliaments in 1983. The report named five CIA operatives (Shackley, Secord, Clines, Quintero, and Wilson) as persons relevant to an understanding of Nugan Hand activities in arms and drug deals.
The Task Force was helped by Douglas Schlachter, Wilson's former assistant, who did a plea bargain about illegal arms supply that put Wilson in US federal prison from 1893. Wilson got 52-years for supplying tons of plastic explosives, assassination gear, high-tech weapons, and trained personnel to Libya.
Schlachter told the Task Force about meeting Secord's friend Bernie Houghton in Wilson's Washington office with two career CIA officers around the time of the spy ship sale. Schlachter said the Iranian and African operations involved Edwin Wilson, a career CIA officer, purportedly retired, who was then working as a civilian on the staff of a super secret Navy intelligence operation called Task Force 157.
Bernie Houghton met repeatedly with Edwin Wilson. About the time of Frank Nugan's death in January 1980, Thomas Clines and Chi Chi Quintero dropped by Wilson's Geneva office. There they found a travel bag full of documents left by Bernie Houghton. According to task force witnesses, Richard Secord's name was mentioned as they searched the bag and removed one document. "We've got to keep Dick's name out of this," said Clines.
Australian immigration records
show Houghton traveled to Iran in March 1975, apparently for the
only time in his life. According to
the Task Force report, he was accompanied by "a senior serving member of
the U.S. Armed Forces." The records further show that Wilson traveled to Iran twice in subsequent months, once
stopping over first in Sydney.
At the time of the spy ship sale,
in 1975, the U.S. military program in Iran was being run by Maj. Gen. Richard Secord. Then in U.S. military sales for the Pentagon
worldwide, Secord was later in the crowd around Edwin Wilson at the time of Frank Nugan's
death in 1980. Secord told Australian
investigators he had met Bernie Houghton in 1972 at the home of Colonel
Prim. The task force reported that they
saw each other occasionally and socially in Washington, D.C., Saudi Arabia, and the Netherlands throughout the middle and late
1970s. Secord was the man who
ran the operation for the White House when all five named men resurfaced in the
Iran-contra mission, with Thomas Clines as his chief aide.
Ted Shackley was consultant to a company that used to fund the contras and Chi Chi Quintero supervised arms distribution to the contras. He was deputy chief of the CIA's clandestine services division until his ties to Edwin Wilson led to his resignation. Earlier he was author of the infamous cable of 8 Nov 1975 sent three days before Australian PM Gough Whitlam was dismissed. After Shackley retired from the CIA and went into private business, he began meeting with Michael Hand. Surviving correspondence between the two indicates that their relationship was well established and friendly.
Thomas Clines was a high-ranking CIA official who went on to run a business founded with Wilson money. Clines was introduced to Houghton (by Secord) in 1979. The two men then met repeatedly with Ted Shackley in Washington, which eventually led to a deal to sell Philippine jeeps to Egypt. About a year later, in June, 1980 when criminal investigations into Nugan Hand were getting under way in Australia, Thomas Clines traveled all the way to Sydney to accompany Bernie Houghton on his hasty flight out of Australia.
Rafael ("Chi Chi") Quintero was a Bay of Pigs veteran who was hired by Wilson in 1976 for an aborted plot to assassinate a political opponent of Col. Muammar Qaddafi. (Quintero says he backed out when he found out the assassinations were not authorized by the CIA.)
Top Home