FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker (Nugan-Hand partner)
Holy smokes.
IN PLAIN SIGHT
FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker
How Michael Jon Hand, who founded an Australian bank with ties to American military and intelligence officials that defrauded depositors and investors, was tracked to Idaho.
By Raymond Bonner, Special to ProPublica, 11.10.151:00 AM ET
EXCERPT...
Amid a swirl of allegations and rumors that the Nugan Hand Bank was involved in arms smuggling, drug-running, and covert operations for the CIA, the institution’s American founder vanished from Australia. Thirty-five years later, that man, Michael Jon Hand, was tracked to a small town in Idaho where he has been living under the name of Michael Jon Fuller.
Hand was found by an Australian writer, Peter Butt, whose just-released book, Merchants of Menace, discloses Hand’s whereabouts after decades of mystery.
If finding Hand, now 73, solves one mystery, it raises another. How could he have lived in the United States so long without being detected? He changed his name only slightly, from Hand to Fuller, and did not get a new Social Security number, according to Butt.
Hand’s company, G.M.I. Manufacturing, is registered with the Idaho secretary of state. The company “now manufactures tactical weapons for US Special Forces, special operations groups and hunters,’’ Butt writes. Has Hand/Fuller been brazen, foolish, or, as Butt asks, does he belong “to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind?”
SNIP...
Suspicions about the bank’s links to the CIA arose almost immediately after Nugan was found dead. His wallet contained the business card of William E. Colby, who had been director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/10/found-after-35-years-cia-s-fugitive-banker.html
"Hand told colleagues that it was his ambition that the bank 'become a banker for the CIA.'"
= new reply since forum marked as read
The guy busted open this story in his WSJ coverage and book.
Then, he got a fast cancer and died.
A crime reporter unravels tale of Nugan Hand Bank scandals
By Leonard Bushkoff
Christian Science Monitor, SEPTEMBER 18, 1987
The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, by Jonathan Kwitny. New York: W.W. Norton. 424 pp. $19.95. January 1980: The body of the 37-year-old Frank Nugan is found in his car - a presumed suicide - some distance from Sydney, Australia. Nugan and Michael Hand, a 39-year-old American (and highly decorated Green Beret in Vietnam), are the co-owners of the Nugan Hand Bank. It rose from nowhere in the mid-1970s to become an aggressive, well-publicized investing and money market enterprise, with its Sydney headquarters directing affiliates throughout Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
This empire quickly collapses with Nugan's death, as rumors spread of narcotics and arms dealing, currency laundering and smuggling, outright embezzlement - and close CIA involvement. Many small investors, attracted by promises of big returns, lose everything; the insiders, sales staff, and others do not. As several investigations begin in Australia, the international financial and political personages, and the retired American generals and admirals whose reputation and contacts had helped the bank enormously, all run for cover; Michael Hand disappears and still remains a fugitive from justice.
Jonathan Kwitny, a veteran investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal, tells this story with dash, much detail - often scattered, not always relevant - and angry condemnation of the Central Intelligence Agency and anyone close to it. This is full-blooded muckraking, and certainly Kwitny relates some good horror stories.
A Nugan Hand branch in the Thai opium-producing country, for example, abutted the office of the American Drug Enforcement Administration - and even shared a receptionist with it. Important American companies in Saudi Arabia backed Nugan Hand's aggressive sales there to American workers; big investment money was raked in, sometimes being carried away in plastic garbage bags, much of it disappearing forever. In 1979, Nugan Hand hoped to gain United Nations money to settle Indochinese refugees in the Turks and Caicos Islands, seen as ideal Caribbean transshipment points on the narcotics routes from South America.
The official investigations after 1980 (which Kwitny uses heavily, but without offering page or even title citations) provide evidence, according to Kwitny, that the Nugan Hand hard core - none of whom have been prosecuted - were in effect pirates wielding briefcases rather than cutlasses and exploiting the incredible negligence and foolishness of both clients and businessmen.
Kwitny's real target, however, is not Nugan Hand but the CIA and an alleged military-intelligence-big business cabal that he sees as a virtual secret government, fueled by anticommunism, personal greed, and lust for power as it manipulates American policy in the third world. Kwitny first advanced this populist and conspiratorial interpretation in ``Endless Enemies'' (1986), an impassioned, black-and-white account of CIA operations. Having begun as a crime reporter writing about the Mafia and other conspiracies, Kwitny remains a crime reporter at heart. His concern is not with long-term forces, let alone ideas and attitudes, but with illegal business relations, associations, ``connections,'' as crucial to politics. Who said, ``Behind every great fortune stands a crime''? Kwitny doubtless would agree.
CONTINUED...
http://www.csmonitor.com/1987/0918/dbcrim.html
Like other reviews of Kwitny's "Crimes of Patriots," the reviewer goes to lengths to diminish the book's veracity by pointing out its failings due to lack of total documentation. That, unfortunately, is the way things in are when the parties being investigated have access to industrial strength shredders and allies hidden within the bowels of the secret government.
difficult and unlikely. Protect human sources who require it, but otherwise fully footnote and identify sources. It simply advances the research to be transparent and share one's own sources.
As for Mr. Hand and CIA money, one hand washes the other. 
It is to laugh.
What a small world. Koch Brothers funded PBS big time and until recently enjoyed a pass on it.
Speaking of FARC:
When it comes to making money, Columbia is wicked awesome!
Ask Richard Grasso (left, photo below), then-head of the New York Stock Exchange, as he gives a nice warm hug to Raul Reyes, (photo, right) then-living FARC #2.
The Real Deal: The Ultimate New Business Cold Call
NYSE's Richard Grasso and the Ultimate New Business "Cold Call"
Monday, 18 February 2002, 10:13 am
Column: Catherine Austin Fitts
Lest you think that my comment about the New York Stock Exchange is too strong, let's look at one event that occurred before our "war on drugs" went into high gear through Plan Colombia, banging heads over narco dollar market share in Latin America.
In late June 1999, numerous news services, including Associated Press, reported that Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange flew to Colombia to meet with a spokesperson for Raul Reyes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the supposed "narco terrorists" with whom we are now at war.
The purpose of the trip was "to bring a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services" and to discuss foreign investment and the future role of U.S. businesses in Colombia.
Some reading in between the lines said to me that Grasso's mission related to the continued circulation of cocaine capital through the US financial system. FARC, the Colombian rebels, were circulating their profits back into local development without the assistance of the American banking and investment system. Worse yet for the outlook for the US stock market's strength from $500 billion - $1 trillion in annual money laundering - FARC was calling for the decriminalization of cocaine.
To understand the threat of decriminalization of the drug trade, just go back to your Sam and Dave estimate and recalculate the numbers given what decriminalization does to drive BIG PERCENT back to SLIM PERCENT and what that means to Wall Street and Washington's cash flows. No narco dollars, no reinvestment into the stock markets, no campaign contributions.
It was only a few days after Grasso's trip that BBC News reported a General Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress as saying: "Colombia's cocaine and heroin production is set to rise by as much as 50 percent as the U.S. backed drug war flounders, due largely to the growing strength of Marxist rebels"
CONTINUED...
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0202/S00069.htm
Har har. Secret government.
PS: Thank you for the heads-up on Kwitny, MinM. Remember the Federal Witness Removal Program.
"What S&L crisis? Is that like the Wall Street bailout thing?"
Banking CIA-Style : How the Money Moves Under The Table to Fund Covert Operations.
August 04, 1991|Burton Hersh | Burton Hersh's new book, "The Old Boys," about the origins of the CIA, will be published next year by Scribner's
BRADFORD, N.H. — The worldwide dredging operation on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International has carried with it to the surface the Central Intelligence Agency. This is an old story by now. Sink any hook deep enough, haul on it hard enough and up comes the CIA, again.
Perhaps this is inevitable--the consequence of climbing into bed for almost half a century with talent that ranged from the Mafia (repeatedly) to drug lords of every odor from Canarsie, N.J., to the palaces of Bangkok, Thailand. The CIA has always promoted itself as an equal-opportunity employer.
Created by the National Security Act of 1947 to counter by any imaginable means--preferably foul--the postwar depredations of International Communism, the CIA was expected to immerse itself at society's tangled depths. What it was not to do was join the heavies.
SNIP...
Dulles had long served--with certain ill-disguised misgivings--as general counsel and board member of the New York affiliate of J. Henry Schroder. Almost as his dowry, Dulles laid before the U.S. intelligence community the international amenities of the Schroder group once he became involved with the agency in the late '40s. Schroder retained its long-standing ties throughout South and Central America, as well as durable associations with senior German industrial and intelligence personalities--including many former Nazis. It was this network that became the flywheel of innumerable CIA projects in Europe--especially after Dulles himself moved up to director in 1953.
Even then, the question arose who was using whom. By 1980, when the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia collapsed shortly after the apparent suicide of its founder, Frank Nugan, another incident of massive CIA involvement in a profoundly corrupt banking empire slowly reached public awareness. Like BCCI, the Nugan Hand Bank amounted to a global Ponzi scheme. After recruiting a reputable-appearing assortment of retired senior U.S. military and ex-CIA personnel, the Nugan Hand entrepreneurs scoured U.S. military installations worldwide for deposits. They pledged to pay double-digit interest--offshore and tax free. They used this stake to underwrite rogue enterprises throughout the planet.
The renegade ex-CIA arms merchant, Edwin Wilson, financed his catastrophic weaponry empire through Nugan Hand, including, by the end, the transfer of tons of plastique to Moammar Kadafi. According to a galvanizing 1982 series in the Wall Street Journal by Jonathan Kwitny, the bank not only financed, but arranged for the trans-shipment of, millions of dollars worth of heroin--often by the contract pilots who flew for Air America, the CIA's huge proprietary fleet. "Air America was a Vietnam War-era airline," Kwitny wrote, "with close connections with the CIA. U.S. drug enforcement officials now acknowledge that the airline also occasionally ran heroin out of Southeast Asia's famed 'Golden Triangle' poppy-growing areas." A Joint Task Force study by Australian officials confirmed the extensive use of the Nugan Hand Bank as a blind depository by CIA leaders. The fast-moving co-founder of the bank, ex-Green Beret Michael Hand, bragged regularly about his intimacy with CIA operatives before he disappeared. By then the bank itself had collapsed.
With Nugan Hand down, the rise of the BCCI was more than providential. Had not a coalition of Pakistani and Saudi sharpshooters set it up, the agency would probably have contrived to reinvent it. U.S. diplomacy of recent decades has depended more on whom we can pay off quietly than whom we can talk around. It remains much cheaper to bribe than invade, as our intelligence mentors, the British, always insisted. Yet still they object, because BCCI payments went out at CIA request to winkle out the unpublished details of English arm sales and overseas contracts.
CONTINUED...
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-04/opinion/op-453_1_nugan-hand-bank
People were surprised to learn about Operation PHOENIX. Some if not most of what Mr. Colby told Congress about that was in Executive Session. He never got the opportunity to bring up his side of events for the record with his untimely demise. One army officer who knew him...
...another wrote about his investigation into the circumstances around Mr. Colby's death. Nothing to see here, apart what he found.
WHO MURDERED THE CIA CHIEF?
William E. Colby: A Highly Suspicious Death
By Zalin Grant
This was Saturday, April 27, 1996. William Colby, a former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, was alone at his weekend house across from Cobb Island, Maryland, 60 miles south of Washington, D.C. Colby, who was 76 years old, had worked all day on his sailboat at a nearby marina, putting it in shape for the coming summer.
After he got home from the marina, Colby called his wife, Sally Shelton, a high-ranking State Department official who was in Houston, Texas, visiting her mother. He told her that he had worked hard all day and was tired. He said he was going to steam some clams, take a shower, and go to bed.
Colby made the call at 7 p.m. He was seen a few minutes later by two sets of witnesses in his yard watering a willow tree. One of the witnesses was his gardener who dropped by to introduce his visiting sister. His two next-door neighbors saw him at the same time from their window. After he finished watering his trees, he went inside and had dinner.
The witnesses saw him at 7:15 p.m. The sun set at 7:57—42 minutes later.
When he was found dead in the water nine days later, it was said that he had gone out paddling his canoe at nightfall and drowned. I was in Paris when I read the story in the International Herald Tribune. I knew William Colby. And I didn’t believe that for one second.
CONTINUED...
http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/colby.htm
The poor guy never got the chance to tell his side of the story.
All can be forgiven, as long as it's done in the name of fighting communism, except for talking and Colby was a patriot who told the truth when asked by Congress.
Intelligence agency friends hide corruption
Paul Malone, Canberra Times columnist, Nov. 14, 2015
EXCERPT...
For sceptics who think it must be some wild flight of fantasy to suggest that a small merchant bank set up in Sydney in 1973 could have significant links with the CIA and gun running, let me name a few of the bank's personnel and associates as documented in official sources.
Passing over the bank's founders, let's look at other players as identified by the Commonwealth-NSW Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking published in June 1982.
The first president of Nugan Hand International was US Rear-Admiral Earl P. Yates (retired), formerly head of planning for US Pacific Command who joined the bank in 1977;
US Brigadier General Edwin F. Black was introduced to Nugan Hand by Yates and became the bank's representative in Hawaii;
Dale O. Holgrem was an officer in the US Army stationed in Taiwan, who worked as flight services manager for the CIA airline, Civil Air Transport (later Air America). He joined Nugan Hand in 1978 and became its Taiwan representative;
US Lieutenant-General Leroy J. Manor accepted an offer to become the bank's representative in Manila in February 1979;
Dr Guy Pauker, who has been described as a CIA operative, was a consultant to the bank in 1979-80;
US Admiral Lloyd Vasey appears to have had an "unofficial" role with the bank while US General Earl Cocke was believed to have had an executive position in the bank and provided office space for the group in Washington;
Walter McDonald was employed as an economist for the CIA for 25 years and joined Nugan Hand as a consultant in 1979;
and, to top it all, William Colby, the head of the CIA from 1973 to 1976, was introduced to Nugan and Hand by a "mutual friend" and worked as legal adviser to Nugan Hand International in Washington. A card bearing Colby's name was found on Frank Nugan's body.
The coroner found that Nugan had shot himself with a rifle he had bought two weeks earlier.
In the month following his death many of the Sydney records of the group were destroyed.
The Joint Task Force discovered Hand's means of escape. A former US Special Forces CIA associate of Hand, James Oswald Spencer, arrived in Australia on May 14, 1980, giving a contact as H. Boreland of Sydney. Helen Boreland was Hand's wife.
Spencer left Brisbane aboard an Air Pacific flight for Fiji, accompanied by Hand travelling under the name Alan Glen Winter.
Former CIA Indo-China station chief Theodore (Ted) Shackley told investigative journalist Brian Toohey that Hand had worked for him in clandestine CIA activities in the 1960s. Other sources told Toohey that while in Laos, Hand worked with US-backed mercenary armies drawn from the Meo hill tribes.
CONTINUED...
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/intelligence-agency-friends-hide-corruption-20151113-gkyary.html
It's a safe bet someone has profited from Mr. Colby's demise. Theodore Shackley, the Blond Ghost, was one of Poppy's friends sacked by Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Adm. Stansfield Turner. Shackley would come back to haunt America through the Safari Club, which helped sack Jimmy Carter via the Ayatollah Khomeini, Reagan's arms-for-hostages partner.
SOURCE: https://nuganhand.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/mark-lombardi-an-artists-look-at-nugan-hand/
The New York Times described Mark Lombardi as “an investigative reporter’s conceptual artist. His subject is conspiracy and scandal, his method is to ‘follow the money’.” He died in 2000 after taking his own life (or did he? muse some of his friends). A number of friends like Andy Feehan were mystified by Mark’s death: “When the news of Mark’s death arrived, all of us thought that he was murdered. We assumed that he had made one too many accusations, and that someone made a phone call. We still don’t know what happened. We’d read that the medical examiner ruled Mark’s death a suicide, but we’re unable to understand or accept the idea that Mark would kill himself right when he was at the top of his game.”
Sounds like another famous ‘suicide’ – that of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, who was investigating Nugan Hand as part of an inter-connected global network he called ‘The Octopus’.
Lombardi called his artworks ‘narrative structures’ that were not unlike the sociograms constructed to show complex social networks.
Here’s how he envisioned the Nugan Hand affair (note: the image is low-res and therefore detail minimal) – imagine if he had teamed up with a good investigative reporter!
frank nugan, michael hand and nugan hand ltd. of sydney, australia, c.1972-80 (8th version), 1998
More works by Mark Lombardi: http://www.pierogi2000.com/artists/mark-lombardi/
