‘The Men Who Are Dying To Win’, in Sanity February 1984. A very good article with much valuable information on the American connection which neatly dovetails with the article in Lobster 3.
More on Francis Leonard Holihan. He was linked to the Heritage Foundation and, it is claimed, misappropriated funds from them intended for the Coalition For Peace Through Security, transferring them into his own Washington Bank account.
When not dropping names – Ed Meese, Michael Deaver – Holihan would use the offices of The Heritage Foundation and Fairness Committee, running up large bills which went unpaid.
In 1983 he schemed with right-wing Oklahoma lawyer R. Marc Nuttle (‘National Field Consultant’ to the Committee For The Survival of a Free Congress) to lure Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to a luncheon for the Private Enterprises Foundation. It is claimed that Holihan’s share of the proceeds was to be nothing less than $50,000. Unfortunately for Holihan the June 1983 election intervened and Thatcher cut short her US visit following the Williamsburg summit meeting.
ANON.
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The New York Times obtained transcripts of conversations between Charles Z. Wick, Director of the US Information Agency, and James A. Baker, White House Chief of Staff. (International Herald Tribune 5th January 1984).
Wicks asked Baker to arrange for President Reagan to meet a group of businessmen he had put together under the banner ‘Project Democracy’, a propaganda effort to ‘support democratic institutions abroad’. They were to contribute $300,000, and the group included Sir James Goldsmith, Rupert Murdoch and a representative of Axel Springer – all international publishers.
A meeting on the project took place on March 21st 1983. Among those present were: Joachim Maitre (‘Axel Springer’s man’), Goldsmith, George Gallup (the pollster), Peter H. Dailey, the US Ambassador to Ireland and John W. Kluge, Chairman and President of Metromedia lnc.
Ingrams
At the end of last year the Ulster Volunteer Force, the illegal wing of the Ulster Defence Association, issued pictures of new Ingram submachine guns it had acquired. (Sunday Times 6th November 1983)
They were produced as evidence that the UVF is “well prepared to deal with any undemocratic enforced initiatives”. UVF sources said politicians who attempted to compromise the constitutional position of Ulster would be their prime targets. The Ingram is not a very democratic weapon.
The Ingram is something special, a perfect killing machine; and to acquire one legally you need the permission of the U.S. State Department.
The M10/11, hand-held, almost recoilless weapon was designed by Gordon Ingram and Mitch Werbell II, a mysterious White Russian, OSS-China veteran small arms manufacturer and occasional US intelligence operative. Werbell has been termed a ‘creative genius’ by weapons historians for his designs of noise suppressors for automatic weapons and for his other ‘silent kill’ devices. He has been called the ‘principal supplier of the CIA’s most sophisticated weapons’ (in ‘Ken Burnstine’ by Gaeton Fonzi, in Gold Coast May 1982).
Werbell’s firm, Studies in the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter Subversion (Sonics), produced the M10/11 silenced machine pistol. The sales company was Parabellum, a Miami-based arms sales firm set up by ‘soldier of fortune’ Gary Patrick Hemming, and headed by Cuban exile Anselmo Alliergro IV, who dealt with Latin American sales.
In 1974 Werbell was involved in a “conspiracy among the CIA, Robert Vesco (international fugitive and Nixon campaign contributor) and various corporations to finance clandestine guerilla activities in South America. Vesco wanted to purchase Werbell’s stock of 2000 silenced M10 pistols. When Werbell failed to secure an export licence, he devised a plan to smuggle the weapons to Vesco.” (Henrik Kruger,The Great Heroin Coup, Black Rose, Montreal, 1980)
In 1976-77 large batches of the Ingram ended up in the hands of European fascist terrorists. In Italy in the hands of Ordine Nuovo; in Spain, through a purchase by Spanish Intelligence agency OGS, in the hands of the Guerillas of Christ the King, linked to Albert Spaggliari.
In 1980 Gerald Cunningham led FBI agents to a warehouse where he had 1000 M10s hidden. He told the agents his company Weapons International Engineering and Research, had bought the weapons from Werbell. He didn’t tell them that he was Werbell’s partner in Defense Weapons International, or that Werbell and international drugs smuggler Ken Burnstine had manufactured hundreds of Ingrams without serial numbers for shipment to Chile when the CIA was providing aid to the military junta.
If the UVF have more than merely pictures of the Ingram, where did they get them from? Without the serial numbers its hard to say, but it is known that the UVF “tried to rearm itself with sophisticated weapons and trips to buy arms were made to Belgium, the Netherlands and the US”. (Guardian 12th April 1983)
In April 1982 Joseph Bennett, a ‘supergrass’, gave evidence about a conspiracy to import arms for the UVF in 1980. It involved negotiations with the neo-Nazi VMO (Flemish Military Order). The deal between Bennett and John Irvine of the UVF and Albert Eriksson, a leader of the VMO, was simple: the VMO would supply £50,000 worth of guns but would supply explosives free if the UVF began a campaign of bomb attacks against Jewish targets on the British mainland. This was refused but the following Christmas two VMO representatives travelled to Belfast for further talks. Eventually VMO activists did train in bomb making and explosives handling.
In the meantime the UVF had successfully brought a consignment of weapons from the US. (Searchlight May 1983)
The VMO, now illegal in Belgium, has extensive links with the European neo-fascist movement, particularly France’s FANE, and Britain’s League of St. George.
SD