Honorable Senator Jon Kyl
Dear Sirs:
I am addressing this letter to you for various reasons. The United States intelligence system is in disarray and you have both recognized this fact and urged changes. I am proposing some changes and hereby request your kind consideration of them.
I am a former Military Intelligence Officer who served in a Special Operations Program in Vietnam named Phoenix. My friend, John J. McCarthy Jr., served in another Special Operations Program that was rogue, unauthorized, and highly illegal. The current CIA administration is, as this is being written, condoning this operation and hiding its existence from court and government scrutiny. The Operation, Codename Cherry, was not authorized by the President, was unknown to the President, and was used to send a Special Forces soldier, CPT McCarthy, to jail for life. Former Congressman John J. Rhodes called the whole operation The American Dreyfus Affair. It is so important to the Agency that they sent John Anast, at the behest of William Colby, to offer McCarthy a half million dollars plus the Congressional Medal of Honor, to cease and desist in his efforts to clear his name. McCarthy refused.
Two situations today, the 9/11 failure and Operation Cherry, are tied together as follows. The Central Intelligence Agency, through its compartmentalization of intelligence and because of the lack of oversight over its activities, can defy a President, miss numerous warnings about coming disaster, and hide illegal operations. The following is intended to show you how this has happened in the past.
In 1963, President Kennedy adopted a policy of reconciliation with Cambodia and its mercurial leader, Norodom Sihanouk, which was reiterated in a Presidential Decision by Lyndon Johnson as one of his first orders. That policy, enunciated in letters to the Saigon Government, was in terms of no contact with or cooperation with the anti-Sihanouk forces of the Khmer Serei. However, in 1965, the CIA chose to defy those orders and Cherry was born. It was eventually buried in a legitimate Special Operations Program called B-57, run by Special Forces.
On June 26, 1966, President Johnson, needing to control Special Forces operations into Cambodia, which he knew were being run, issued an order to the CIA, to the State Department, and to the JCS that, while operations could be run across the border, there was to be no contact with Khmer Serei forces, no hiring of Khmer Serei forces, and no cooperation with Khmer Serei forces. Those Khmer Serei forces were currently inside the Republic of Vietnam and Cherry, through the CIA, was cooperating with them. Despite the fact that the Joint Chiefs immediately issued implementing orders, the CIA continued Cherry in defiance. One of the missions of Cherry was to overthrow Sihanouk and facilitate his murder using Khmer Serei forces. Another was to foment instability in Cambodia using black (deniable) terror with the blame attributable to North Vietnam.
Some clarification is in order regarding McCarthy’s relationship with Special Forces (SF), Special Operations Group (SOG), and Cherry. Project Cherry was not an SF mission. The Commanding Officer of the 5th SFG in Vietnam did not know the mission of Project Cherry. The Pentagon was persuaded to order the second in command for SF in Vietnam, the XO or Executive Officer, to be filled by an Intelligence Branch Colonel (COL) or Lieutenant Colonel (LTC). He would take his orders from the Military Intelligence (MI) establishment, NOT the SF Chain of Command!
That began in 1966. All of the Greek Designated Projects (Sigma, Delta, Omega and B-57 (Gamma)) were run by the Intelligence Community. While McCarthy was the S3, Operations Officer of Project Omega, he briefed GEN William Rossen, who was, in fact, full-time CIA in an Army uniform. He did not brief Nha Trang (Headquarters location for 5th SFG) and the 5th SFG. Project Cherry was subordinate to B-57, an intelligence detachment subordinate to the 5th SFG in Nha Trang but only reporting to the XO of the 5th SFG, not the CO. In addition, B-57, staffed by MI Officers posing as Green Berets were meeting daily, in civilian clothes, at the US Embassy and with the CIA for directives on given activities. This cut-out system was used to prevent chains of evidence from linking rogue operations back to the military, SF, the Embassy, the CIA, or the State Department.
This all happened outside the knowledge and against the directive of the President of the United States. Because of the above, no one in SF knew of these activities.
Bear in mind, SOG and others were assigned to the 5th SFG, not the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV). No orders were cut to connect any members with the Greek detachments. Quite a CYA program for those responsible for the end results! This, I hope, provides some relevant background.
In September 1967, McCarthy inherited Cherry, ignorant of its rogue nature. He was not to find out, in reality that Cherry was rogue until October 2000 when the files on Cambodia for this period were declassified, although noticeably missing from those State Department files was any actual mention of Cherry. Included were references to and description of code-name operations Daniel Boone and other Cambodian cross border operations, which were then Top Secret. Those operations were, of course, authorized by - and known to - the President and the State Department. The only agency objecting to the declassification of these State Department records was the CIA.
Soon after inheriting Cherry, McCarthy received orders to disband the operation, with the Agency citing budgetary constraints. He sought employment for his Cambodian operatives, the Khmer Serei forces. All were hired with one exception: Inchin Lam, aka Jimmie. McCarthy was told no one would touch Jimmie, who worked for Sihanouk, the KGB, and the CIA. At that time, McCarthy was known as John McAlister, civilian, reporting to the Agency, and had strict orders not to associate with other Special Forces personnel. He was to find out later that the Agency was attempting to double Jimmie back on the KGB. Jimmie was also the third most important person in the Khmer Serei, all of whom knew of his affiliations with Sihanouk and the KGB.
In November 1967, McCarthy picked Jimmie up for questioning and possible firing from employment by the Agency. On the way to the location where the questioning was to take place, one shot rang out. The windshield of the vehicle in which Jimmie and McCarthy were being driven was broken, and Jimmie was dead. McCarthy was arrested for murder.
In the Court Martial, which was held in camera, top secret, and rapid, McCarthy was found guilty of the murder of Inchin Lam. The trial was unusual for several reasons. The pathologist who testified for the prosecution, managed to convince the jury that a .22 pistol had been used. The record shows that such a pistol was never issued to McCarthy or to any person in the unit. McCarthy was issued and was holding a .38 pistol seen by every witness on that night. It had been fired, but the evidence showed it had been fired after the windshield had been broken and was pointed away from the victim. The pathologist was allowed to listen to the rest of the trial after his discharge as a witness, and months later recanted his testimony by stating that the weapon killing Jimmie must have been a .38 since that was the only weapon available.
Further, the pathologist testified that Jimmie was killed by a contact shot, even though the wound lacked characteristic powder burns around it. No ballistics evidence or report was entered at the trial. A ballistics report that was issued over the signature of J. Edgar Hoover, several days after the conviction, was lost in registered mail and never arrived in Vietnam. It was found in records at the Pentagon in 1970. Neither the recantation nor the ballistics report were given to the defense counsel until their discovery in the Pentagon. The ballistics report showed that a fragment from a bullet of undetermined size, extracted from the victim, had a fragment of quartz attached, consistent with having passed through the windshield.
McCarthy was found guilty. His sentence was unusual: life imprisonment with no reduction in rank, no reduction in pay, and no separation from service. He had previously turned down a plea agreement for no more than 10 years assuming the Agency did not control the trial. He knew that he had not been responsible for the death of Inchin Lam.
McCarthy appealed. It took the military 229 days to vet his civilian attorney for the national security case. While the attorney was working on the case, the Washington Post ran an article, Feb 8, 1970, entitled Terminated Agent May Haunt U.S., by Murray Marder. It said in part:
- While comparatively obscure, the McCarthy case carries a larger potential for international complications than the celebrated Green Beret case. -
Marder was referring to the Rheault case from 1969, in which Special Forces soldiers were charged with murdering a double agent. President Nixon chose not to try the men because the CIA had refused to testify in the trial. However, CIA master Ted Shackley said publicly he was not afraid to testify in the Rheault case because the CIA had already testified in the McCarthy case. In truth, trial records show that all persons who testified in McCarthy’s case swore they were military. The Rheault case was very public, whereas the McCarthy case was very secret. The mission of Cherry, the overthrow of Sihanouk - including his possible demise - was disclosed in camera, still secret. Cambodia had not yet been invaded. In 1969, a new President was in office. However, the policy towards Sihanouk had changed, with increased bombing allowed and apparent operational contact with Khmer Serei officials, including Son Ngoc Thanh and Lon Nol, encouraged.
McCarthy rotted in jail. On September 29, 1969, all charges against Rheault et al. were dismissed. In the New York Times, Henry B. Rothblatt, attorney for Rheault et al., said that Nixon had made the decision. Rothblatt authored a semi-fictional book with Robin Moore, Court Martial, about the Rheault case. In the opening pages, B-57 was tied in with the CIA and cross-border Cambodian operations. The paperback version was published in 1971.
Working with the civilian attorney for McCarthy (Charles Morgan Jr., attorney for, among others, Anthony Herbert, Muhammad Ali, and Howard Levy), was his military attorney Stewart Davis. Morgan came along as an attorney for McCarthy partly as a ploy by Levy to gain access for Morgan to his low-level security files (Outlined in Morgan’s book One Man, One Voice, Henry Holt & Co., Inc. June, 1979).
Davis had previously met with Dr. Pierre Finck, Chief Army Pathologist (who participated in the autopsy on President Kennedy), who told him there was nothing new on the McCarthy case. In 1970, however, an attorney for DOD met with Davis in the Pentagon and asked Davis to accompany him to Finck’s office. There, in files not relating to McCarthy, were the recantation of the pathologist plus the ballistics results of the FBI. Davis was allowed to copy these files, which led to an appeal similar to a civilian appeals court. The appeal was based upon newly found evidence and fraud upon the court. McCarthy had been released from incarceration under new UCMJ rules, pending the outcome of the appeal, and was assigned to Ft. Huachuca, AZ. The command he was assigned to was the Combat Surveillance and Electronic Warfare School. Assignment there usually required a Top Secret clearance. McCarthy had no clearance.
In the meantime, Cambodia had been invaded, the secret out, and there was no need to further incarcerate McCarthy. Furthermore, he was a convicted felon with no credibility. McCarthy’s appeal was ruled on October 29, 1970, and his conviction overturned. One judge, concurring with the reversal, further urged no new trial, arguing that McCarthy’s duties as an officer, involving numerous activities in sensitive operations in Nationalist China, the Philippines, and Vietnam, had been performed in a well disciplined manner that were sensitive to the ramifications of all his actions, not only towards the security of the United States but with an eye towards diplomatic relations with other political entities whose interests were similarly involved. The facts of Cherry were never revealed to the court. They knew only that it involved national security.
On 22 March, 1971, General Court Martial Orders 32 were cut and signed acknowledging the reversal of the charge of murder, setting aside the finding of guilty and the accompanying sentence, and granting of a new trial. W.B. Latta, Commanding General of Ft. Huachuca, AZ, after examining McCarthy’s file, decided that a new trial was not warranted and the charge was dismissed. Further, all rights, privileges, and property of which McCarthy had been deprived by virtue of the previous findings and sentence were to be restored. That order was signed by GEN William C. Westmoreland, Chief of Staff of the Army.
In August 1971, McCarthy left the service, expressing his feelings that he no longer had the desire to be an officer. However, the Agency was not through with him. His DD-214 (Discharge papers), despite his eleven years of honorable service and voluntarily resigning his commission, reads, -separation from service by request,- and the SPN (separation code used by employers in those days for judging an employee candidate) says 524, Resignation, unqualified other miscellaneous reasons. (Employers had access to the SPN codes and soldiers did not. The SPN definition was not on the DD-214.) These designations indicate that he left the service as an unqualified officer at the request of the military. McCarthy was unaware of the significance of these codes until November 2002.
After Huachuca, McCarthy landed a job with the Sheriff’s Department, Dade County FL. After being elected as president of his training class, at an interview he was presented with another problem. His NCIC (National Criminal computerized background check) report for the academy showed that officially he was still incarcerated in Ft. Leavenworth, a convicted felon. It took a letter from Ft. Huachuca to inform the personnel officer, and a copy was sent to the FBI. Since then, the following have happened:
- He was the victim of released material to a newspaper in Florida that he is a war criminal. The newspaper cited official documents, quoting from trial records still sealed under secrecy rules, not from appellate records, argued in open court. He did not see these papers until 10 years after the fact.
- Through legislators and congressmen he has submitted FOIA requests to see files and to clear his record, only to be told the records were clear or there were no records, and -FERES- (see below) prevented any relief to him.
- Unknown agency personnel leaked documents to authors indicating that McCarthy is a cold-blooded killer. He did not find this out until a few months ago. Libelous books are in print worldwide.
- In 1998, he was forced into a plea agreement on a charge in California based on the three strikes rule. The first strike showing on his record was a 4/10/68 entry of conviction, with 24 years in Fort Leavenworth, for premeditated murder. In fact, other than the supposed conviction, he had never been arrested. Only a government agency can play with the NCIC like this.
-He sued in Federal District Court to clear his record, citing conspiracy to obstruct justice. This was the option shown him by government offices when he appealed to President Clinton. Attorney General Janet Reno, the same person McCarthy had problems with in Florida when a newspaper there called him a war criminal, cited FERES as precluding getting justice. In addition, the attorneys said his record was clear and amended, thus ending the case which was dismissed by the judge. The same attorneys also knew, unbeknown to John until very recently, that other cases they had defended were overturned in appellate court, throwing out the government defenses that had been raised in McCarthy’s case. These appellate cases were decided while they were arguing in District Court in McCarthy’s case. They did not notify John, nor the court, that their arguments against his position had been overturned on appeal in these other cases. McCarthy, who had to argue in pro per, as he has no money for an attorney, also did not have access to law libraries or staffs as did the government attorneys.
- In November 2000, after McCarthy and I talked over an open phone about my discovery of the smoking gun documents in the State Department, McCarthy was in his vehicle traveling 70 miles an hour on a California Interstate. The left rear wheel fell off his SUV. The wheel had locking lug nuts. The master mechanic inspecting the vehicle after the accident wrote the wheel had been tampered with. -
Take this with the following factors for consideration. Ted Shackley showed up unannounced at McCarthy's trial in 1968. Shackley was based in Laos, not Saigon. Inchin Lam was the Agency's best and only chance to double back on the KGB. The Agency did not notify McCarthy, who had the clearance and need to know that Lam was a triple agent, about Lam until the trial. Only the Agency stood to benefit from an expanded war in Cambodia against the wishes of their superior, the President. Only the Agency could make the expanded war happen. Shackley once boasted that only the Agency had breached COSVN (Central Office For South Vietnam, the highest Viet Cong agency under Hanoi) with an agent. The codename of that operation was HACKLE - add ShackleY - and what do you have? During the war, there were unexplained Operational Security breaches on some of our most secret cross border operations. By this, I mean the names of the cross border operators were known to Hanoi shortly after the operations were planned and before the operators took off on their operations. While the Walker ring could explain part of this, a well placed mole at the Embassy or Agency, compartmented away from normal security findings could have been in place. Did we have Venona or son of Venona holdovers unfound? Are they still there to plague Presidents when they want a policy outcome different from the President?
- His DD-214 has not been changed, despite government assertions in court to the contrary. The government argued that he was responsible for changing his NCIC report, although this was supposed to have been cleared up in 1972. In response to an FOIA request by me, the CIA asserted that Cherry and related files are still classified. I appealed through the office of Senator Kyl last year, since the mail made it almost impossible to submit my appeal in time. For over a year (it took them 2 years to respond to my FOIA request in the first place), they failed to respond, although I cited the fact that Cherry was unauthorized and secrecy rules do not pertain to unauthorized activities. Thus, McCarthy was denied access to files to defend his case as a result of citation of secrecy rules, a position that was defended by the Department of Justice.
What relevance does this Arizona-based case (McCarthy) have to today’s problems? This, I believe: The Agency has a record of abusing authority. In my case, in Operation Phoenix, they created an information-sharing program designed to collate information on the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI). Our classified orders were that we were to achieve rapid evaluation and dissemination of infrastructure intelligence and form quick reaction operations targeted at disrupting, harassing, capturing, and eliminating local VCI. On the latter point, eliminating, the Agency cut and ran when critics charged assassination. Yet, they knew, as they did in the case of McCarthy, that the military had no orders allowing assassination.
In Phoenix our orders were specific. We were told in many formats, each year, that Phoenix advisers had the same legal status as other US military personnel. We were under the same restraints of international law, military law, and regulations as other US military personnel. Our advice to our counterparts was to act within those legal restraints. Participation in actions contrary to law was expressly prohibited. All violations of law were to be reported to our superiors. Yet the Agency left us high and dry and we were prohibited from defending ourselves from assassination charges while on active duty. Documents outlining our case have been difficult to obtain over the years. This, despite the fact Phoenix was declassified years ago. It is noteworthy that Cherry is still classified. (Note: Assassination charges by critics were part of their effort to dismantle Operation Phoenix. Today, our brave men looking for the Bagdad 55 and top level Al Qaeda infrastructure are plagued with the same assassination and hit men headlines. Those charges against McCarthy, Operation Phoenix, and Special Operations personnel today are bogus. Military ambushes are not what is commonly known in civilian circles as assassination. Targeting and killing Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Butcher of Prague in an ambush, or targeting and killing Admiral Yamamoto in an airplane, are examples of what Operation Phoenix was about. CIA rules for Cherry, which McCarthy was part of, were different from military directives.)
You are now investigating the intelligence failure of 9/11. It has its roots in failure to defend and implement Phoenix information-sharing. Had it been implemented at CIA, as I believe former Ambassador and later CIA Director William Colby, its father, intended, 9/11 may not have occurred. However, the Agency does not want accountability. It brags in its own literature about its ability to operate without accountability. Cherry proves that they seek and defend the lack of accountability, even to a President. Let me outline how lack of information sharing rendered our country vulnerable, using open pre-9/11 sources.
In December, 1998, Osama Bin Laden targeted New York City and Washington, DC, specifically naming the World Trade Center Towers, according to intelligence sources cited in the New York Post, citing Time magazine. This targeting was in retaliation for the August 1998 strikes on the aspirin factory in the Sudan and the untended terrorist camps in Afghanistan. No one, except for Rick Rescoria, the late security director for Morgan Stanley, who died on 9/11 implementing a security program he started after the first WTC bombing, took seriously those threats of Bin Laden.
Also there was Bojinka in the Philippines. This was the operation thought up by the WTC bomber, Ramzi Yousef, to simultaneously take out many airplanes over the Pacific. Another part was to fly a small commercial plane into the Pentagon. The Agency did not take it seriously. Yet, Tom Clancy, FBI agents Kenneth Williams in Phoenix, AZ, and another in Minnesota separately shared their concerns about the possibility of potential terrorists flying planes into buildings. They were predated by concerns written in books on Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden published in 1999. In addition, the still-classified study Terror 2000 accurately predicted virtually every move made by the 9/11 terrorists. Of course, one of the analysts, former KGB agent Oleg Kalugin, as a member of the KGB, taught the terrorists their skills. (Former GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev further explained a Soviet connection. He wrote in 1998 that the bombers of the World Trade Center in 1993, while they may never have attended a GRU training school - the KGB delegated operational training responsibility to the GRU while doing the financing - the GRU was responsible for the formation of the terrorist group they belonged to. In other words, those people were not the independents the CIA and FBI made them out to be.)
Terror 2000 also predicted an air assault based upon known habits predating 9/11. Written in 1993, the study predated even Bojinka. Of course, Terror 2000 was not released because President Clinton and Attorney General Reno did not want to panic the populace with what terrorists could do in the United States.
Rex Hudson, Library of Congress analyst, and Stephen Gale, a terrorism expert at the University of Pennsylvania, were both cited by former CIA Chief Jim Woolsey as foreseeing the aerial assaults that the CIA could not bring itself to address. Yet, in June 2001, an alert went out to airlines that a hijacking might occur because Americans were high-priority targets for terrorists. The warning specifically cited Bojinka as a reason for the hijacking alert. An Arabic satellite TV station was cited as saying a big surprise was due within two weeks of the 23 June 2001 warning. A severe blow was expected against US and Israeli interests worldwide. They continued that it was a race who would strike first, Bin Laden or the United States.
Correctly, the people writing the warning focused on an anniversary, the fifth of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, as a possible date for the hijacking. Unfortunately, no one focused in on September 12, 2001, a trial date, I believe, of some terrorists. These terrorists use such dates to plan attacks as expressions of support to those on trial. ((We just had such a warning from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s top lieutenant against the United States and such an attack in Jakarta, Indonesia against American and allied interests in support of a key terrorist about to be sentenced only 48 hours after the attack occurred. It is also noteworthy that the al-Zawahiri warning was less than 72 hours before the Jakarta attack. In it, he said,
The terrorists likewise sent an after the fact message saying - This is a message for ... all our enemies that, if they execute any of our Muslim brothers, we will continue this campaign of terror in Indonesia ...-))
The June 2001 warning stated that the airlines were at risk, citing Bob Monetti, President of the Victims of Flight 103, who lost his son Rick over Lockerbie. Monetti ended the warning by citing the need for the airlines to take all appropriate measures and counter measures to ensure the safety of their passengers. No one listened.
An intelligence failure was predicted by many sources. I personally wrote in the book I published in 2000 that an intelligence failure was bound to occur on the scale of Pearl Harbor because of the failure to share information and have objective information analysis. Russ Travers, a DIA analyst, wrote in 1997 about The Coming Intelligence Failure in the professional publication, Studies in Intelligence, an unclassified CIA document available in the intelligence circles. He predicted that a state-sponsored terrorist attack would come as a complete surprise or we would not provide sufficient warning of a surprise attack against one of our allies or interests. His four-page analysis succinctly outlined, in 1997, the problems that remain unresolved in the intelligence community.
The problem lies in the bureaucracy of CIA and their desire to abrogate analysis and play soldiers. Their legacy lies in Cherry and other similar programs designed to interfere in foreign policy rather than collate intelligence. We have our DOD and the Special Operations Command to take on the sensitive missions that require soldiers. Their efforts can successfully be supplemented by non-Special Operations personnel to do intelligence work, as Phoenix proved in Vietnam. I remind you that Phoenix was successful in neutralizing through arrests, defections, and operational kills, over 85,000 VCI and was run, to a large degree, by newly minted second lieutenants who also operated in the field besides behind the intelligence desk.
A CIA that will lie to a President, cover it up for 35 years, send a Special Forces Captain to rot in jail, cover it up, and leave Phoenix operatives to suffer for crimes they did not commit, cannot be trusted to reform itself.
There is much more, but it would be repetitive.
The Agency has cited a lack of human intelligence sources with Arabic language skills as a reason for not knowing intentions. Yet, I can tell you that Osama Bin Laden, his associates, and even Saddam Hussein, have all presaged their major moves in Arabic language newspapers, magazines, and by means of mosque preachings. Translations are available and have proven to be accurate predictors of their moves. Prior to the Cole attack, a DIA analyst noted this. I picked up on his writings and several times have accurately predated raising of terror levels in the United States to orange. This was in the form of sending warnings to appropriate government officials that terror attacks could be expected.
On one occasion, I predicted major attacks planned in the United States on a specific date. This was several days prior to the arrest of Bin Laden’s associate in Pakistan. If you remember the news media said we scrambled to upset attacks in the implementation stages within 48 - 72 hours of his arrest. This was the time frame I had predicted days before. The terrorists talk in codes, with meanings known to them, and those who read their religious and political history. A Bin Laden lieutenant even publicly chastised the CIA for misunderstanding statements prior to our attack in Iraq about their using weapons of mass destruction to protect the oil fields. The lieutenant said that we did not have the religious permission to do so. What the CIA missed was the writing of Osama’s second in command, Ayman Al-Zawahri, years ago, that battling superpowers like the United States required the use of suicide attacks. It was the multiple use of suicide attacks by their side that they, in their minds, believed the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction. That is what they promised would await us, suicide attacks, not literal weapons of mass destruction. (I want to distinguish here between WMD being used against us in this context and their existence. I believe WMD are there. The terrorists in their own writings believe they are there.) If the CIA and FBI would study the real intent of Muslim extemists rather than require our agents to attend sensitivity training, we would be further along in understanding their warnings. They have even written that they have given us fair warning about their intentions. It is not their fault if we do not detect and interpret those warnings. (Read again the message of al-Zawahri above. The alerter has fulfilled his obligation. The responsibility lies with the American people and the reality will testify for itself.)
Little has happened in Iraq, including the current guerilla and suicide attacks that the terrorists did not warn about in their writings prior to their implementation. Yet, the CIA says they cannot predict their moves? If they were to read some of the books on Osama and his philosphy, they would find, through analysis, the ability to predict terrorist moves. Also, if they would trust some of our allies, who can read Arabic (and I am not referring to Saudi Arabia) and who provide translations of the warnings in English, they might be ahead of the game. Of course, the CIA rule paraphrased is if we did not find it through our own resources, it is not reliable information.
Even now, the Agency says there is no Al Qaeda-Saddam connection. This ignores their own reports, made public by Yossef Bodansky and Bill Gertz. The Agency still operates under the Clinton dictate: start with the impression you want to create, work backwards to the policy it follows, and create the facts needed to support it. Woolsey stated it, and he should know as former CIA Director. The CIA is working to undercut not only this President and his Iraq policies but also those outside of the Agency who back assessments different from their own. The Cherry precedent shows how brazen they can be. Elements of CIA want a return to Clinton policies.
Senators Kyl and Shelby, I have outlined some serious problems. I have outlined a solution or two. There is more, and both McCarthy and I are available to discuss any or all aspects. The documentation exists to prove every point.
I urge you to contact us. John McCarthy is aware of this letter.
Larry J. O’Daniel former CPT Military Intelligence 928-859-3819
John J. McCarthy Jr. former CPT Special Forces Infantry 310-397-1143
Attorney General John Ashcroft
Department of Justice
Washington, D.C.
Dear Sir:
I am writing this letter to you on a very serious business. I want to make you aware of an attempt by the Director of the CIA, or someone acting in his stead, to keep from public, Presidential, and court awareness of a past rogue operation. The code name was Cherry. The purpose was the illegitimate overthrow of the government of Cambodia and probable killing of the then leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The now king is aware of the details of the mission.
One result of Cherry was the illegitimate jailing and conviction of a Special Forces Captain, John J. McCarthy Jr., by CIA and FBI actions for a murder he did not commit. He was illegally incarcerated for 22 months while Cherry progressed to it’s eventual overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970. McCarthy was eventually exonerated and his conviction overturned. However, the Agency and FBI have continually kept the conviction active on his NCIC file, despite swearing in court they cleared his record. Your DOJ attorneys have been misled in court on this matter. The CIA has illegally kept Cherry records classified as of this date.
The pathologist who falsely testified in McCarthy’s case has been located. The falsity of his statements are now in the hands of officials in his home county. The Army Pathologist who hid crucial records and kept McCarthy incarcerated is on a government pension in Switzerland, the last we knew. His name is Pierre Finck. The President, through the office of Carl Rove is aware of this case. The offices of Senators Jon Kyl and Richard Shelby are also aware of the case.
When I said the operation was rogue, that meant the CIA defied Presidential Orders and carried out an operation in a neutral country to overthrow the government there in the midst of a war. The orders they defied have recently been declassified and are in the public domain. The CIA was the only agency objecting to the declassification of the files. The Code Name of the Operation is not there, because the President, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense did not know it existed.
As near as I can tell, we have in this case
- Conspiracy to commit first degree murder (Prince Sihanouk)
- TITLE 18 PART I CHAPTER 45 Sec. 956. - Conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim, or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country (or its predecessor)
- TITLE 18 PART I CHAPTER 45 Sec. 954. - False statements influencing foreign government (or its predecessor)
- TITLE 18 PART I CHAPTER 45 Sec. 960. - Expedition against friendly nation (or its predecessor)
- Conspiracy to obstruct justice in a capital murder case
- Conspiracy to commit perjury and the actual commission of perjury in a capital murder case
- Conspiracy to defame by libeling of an officer of the United States Military for the past 35 years (I do believe I have tracked down the CIA operative who falsely gave information to a writer whose book is currently being published and distributed worldwide with this false information)
- Conspiracy to deprive an officer of the United States Military of his civil rights for the past 35 years
By the time this case is closely examined, several more serious felonies and misdemeanors will probably be committed by government officials. The documentation is here and as you can see much effort has been made to resolve this case in many different venues. The government has hidden behind the Feres Doctrine to deny McCarthy any recompense for the illegal actions taken against him then and since. The attorneys arguing in court know their Feres defense had been overturned in Appellate Court at the same time they denied McCarthy justice he was seeking, thus misleading the Court as to the nature of their defense.
At this time, the matter is before no court. It is being brought to your attention since research has shown the above laws have been broken, some of the conspirators found, the CIA continues the conspiracy, the FBI continues to manipulate the NCIC record of McCarthy, and criminal conduct exists in the Executive Department. The crimes described happened prior to your becoming Attorney General. The Court action defended by the Department of Justice began under your predecessor and some of the actions described happened under your administration. I think it is time to fully investigate this and bring it to a halt. Feres endangers our all volunteer army. It needs to go. It has been manipulated illegally, especially in this case.
I can be reached at 928-859-3819. John McCarthy at 310-397-1143. We are both former officers in classified programs and have dealt with the Agency. Thank you for taking this up.
Sincerely,
Larry J. O’Daniel
PO BOX 331 Wenden, AZ 85357
To learn more about the Rogue Operation Cherry, press here
To learn about possible CIA felonies committed in wartime, press here
To learn about covert operations and treason commited in wartime, press here