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Raw Blame History

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Maury Island and the Crisman File

On August 6, 1947, the FBI field office in Seattle teletyped the Director that Army Air Forces intelligence officers at McChord Field attributed the August 1 crash of a B-25 at Kelso, Washington, to a burned-out exhaust stack and not to sabotage. The same teletype stated that the two officers killed, Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown of the Fourth Air Force, had flown to Tacoma to interview Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman about flying discs reported over Maury Island, and that they carried some of the disc fragments on the flight. Kenneth Arnold and the United Airlines pilot Emil Smith were interviewed with them at the Winthrop Hotel on July 31. The teletype also reported anonymous telephone calls on July 31 and August 1 to a Tacoma Times reporter and a United Press wireman asserting that the B-25 had been sabotaged or shot down, and that the story had possibly been begun by Dahl and Crisman to promote the sale of slag from a gravel pit.¹

A later Hoover teletype in the same file noted from the interrogation of Smith that Dahl had admitted on the night of August 2 that the story was a hoax, and observed that Dahl and Crisman evidently had not told the Army officers, who otherwise would probably not have taken the fragments aboard. It stated that when the point was clarified "no further investigation" was necessary.¹

The Bureau's file on Crisman continued for three decades. A House Select Committee on Assassinations outside-contact report of May 18, 1978, indexes the FBI's Crisman volumes: a 1947 applicant investigation under the Atomic Energy Act, Seattle reports of September 13, 1947, a 1966 informant report about Crisman and a business partner who operated an organization called the National Institute of Criminology and who described Crisman as carrying $100,000 in cash for the Democratic Central Committee to California, a CIA-to-FBI communication about Crisman dated April 20, 1970, and an anonymous letter about Crisman's background as an alleged CIA agent. The index also lists 1974 stock-certificate inquiries and "JFK References" serials.²

The Hottel Memorandum

An FBI memorandum dated March 22, 1950, from the Washington Field Office, begins: "An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico." It describes the objects as circular with raised centers, about 50 feet in diameter, each occupied by three bodies of human shape three feet tall in metallic cloth. The memorandum attributes the location to a high-powered radar installation in the area that was believed to interfere with the saucers' control mechanism. The name of the informant is blacked out. The copy circulates under the cover sheet "Guy Hottel (3-22-1950)," after the special agent in charge of the field office.³

Grill Flame and the Army Human Use Panel

A Department of the Army memorandum of record dated April 30, 1979, titled "FBI Support of GRILL FLAME," records that on April 17 the Army General Counsel directed that one member of the Surgeon General's Human Use Test Committee be unaffiliated with the Department of Defense. An accompanying memorandum, signed by E. R. Thompson of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence and addressed through the Director of the FBI to the Assistant Director of the Training Division at the FBI Academy, asked for the nomination of an FBI member for an ad hoc panel of behavioral scientists and medical doctors to meet at the Pentagon two or three times a year. The action officer, Major Bill Stoner, had been told by the Training Division, which the memorandum says "owns" the Bureau's behavioral scientists, that a particular candidate (name withheld) had the background. The addendum states: "So far no one in FBI has been briefed on GF and the project nickname is not even mentioned in basic correspondence," and that Dr. LaBerge was "particularly sensitive about widening the group of people having access to GF."⁴

Jim Schnabel wrote in 1997 that the FBI knew of the Grill Flame program and occasionally sought help from its remote viewers in counterintelligence matters. Schnabel's account is that an FBI official asked Norm Everheart for help with a Soviet embassy official seen using a fishing pole, and that a session by Joe McMoneagle indicated the pole was retrieving a dead-drop package, which Schnabel says helped the FBI break a case. The vault has found no FBI-side record of the episode; this account rests on Schnabel alone.⁵

Lister, Front Door and the Los Angeles Cases

The Justice Department Inspector General's 1997 review found five FBI files on Ronald Lister. In September 1983 his company, Pyramid International Security Consultants, was the subject of a neutrality investigation involving arms sales to El Salvador and a Saudi loan to the Salvadoran government, and "no further information was ever developed." In 1984 the FBI investigated an offer by Lister of services to a foreign government and closed the case after concluding he was "an ordinary con man" who could not supply what he offered.⁶

On December 12, 1986, the Los Angeles FBI office teletyped headquarters that it saw no connection between Lister and "Front Door," the Bureau's investigation of alleged neutrality violations in the covert arms sales to Iran, which the Independent Counsel later took over. Headquarters asked that Lister be questioned about Richard Secord, Albert Hakim and Stanford Technology, and on December 22, 1986, Lister denied knowing them. On December 23 the Bureau suspended Front Door inquiries pending the appointment of Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh. On February 3, 1987, an informant reported that Lister had told a neighbor over drinks that he worked for Oliver North and Secord and had sent arms shipments to the Contras. Assistant U.S. Attorney Crossan Andersen reported this to Public Integrity Section attorney William Hendricks III, who advised that the drug investigation could continue so long as it did not conflict with Front Door, and Andersen asked that Lister and the neighbor not be interviewed, citing the effect on the drug case.⁶

Gary Webb wrote that FBI agent Douglas Aukland was assigned to Operation Front Door in November 1986 and investigated connections between Lister and North's arms ring, and that the Los Angeles office declared "no connection." Webb is the sole source for the November 1986 assignment date.⁷

Meneses, Blandon and the San Francisco Case

Webb wrote that in 1982 the FBI identified Fernando Sanchez and Horacio Pereira as cocaine suppliers to a Contra-linked operation in San Francisco, and that in 1987 the Contra supporter Dennis Ainsworth told the FBI that Norwin Meneses "ran one of the major distributions in the U.S. He was national. And he was totally protected." Webb states the FBI took no apparent action.⁸

The Inspector General found that the San Francisco FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office were surprised in early 1987 to learn that the DEA's Costa Rica office had taken Meneses and a DEA informant to Los Angeles in December 1986 to meet Danilo Blandon; Aukland, the lead FBI agent on the Los Angeles Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force case, was upset not to have interviewed Meneses first. In February 1987 the agencies agreed Meneses could be used as a source if he pleaded guilty to a cocaine charge in San Francisco; the San Francisco FBI opened a case and held it inactive. The Los Angeles case closed in July 1987. In February 1989, shortly before the statute of limitations expired, the San Francisco FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office obtained a sealed indictment of Meneses; the Inspector General found the warrant was entered in the FBI database, contrary to the Mercury News account, and that Meneses was not arrested while working for the DEA. An FBI informant had told Special Agent Donald Hale in October 1987 that Meneses was telling associates he was a CIA informant, which was why he had not been arrested. The Inspector General found no evidence of a CIA connection and attributed the outcome to poor coordination and shifting views on whether Meneses was a target or an informant.⁹

Webb gave a different account of the same February 1987 events: San Francisco FBI agents presented U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello a memo charging Meneses with running a continuing criminal enterprise, and Russoniello's office rejected it within a week, citing a "cooperation agreement" that Justice Department investigators later determined never existed. Webb is the sole source for the passages so cited.¹⁰

Contra Drug Information in FBI Hands

Senate subcommittee staff recorded that the FBI and Customs possessed information on Luis Rodriguez's narcotics and money-laundering involvement when the State Department used his firm Frigorificos de Puntarenas to deliver humanitarian funds to the Contras in late 1985 and 1986.¹¹ The Inspector General reproduced a November 9, 1984, FBI headquarters cable to the Miami field office relaying CIA information, given at a meeting with DEA and FBI personnel, that the trafficker Jorge Morales had agreed to supply the Southern Front group of Eden Pastora with aircraft in exchange for use of its airstrips; the cable directed Miami to check bank accounts and coordinate with the DEA.¹² A later DEA cable said the source "had not furnished actionable information sufficient to predicate initiation of a criminal investigation."¹²

The Tampa Customs Case

The Kerry-Brown report on BCCI concluded that Operation C-Chase "arose as a Treasury Department investigation brought by Customs and IRS agents only, without the involvement of the FBI," and that "the failure to bring the FBI into the case may have contributed to the lack of follow through" on what Customs agent Robert Mazur called "literally hundreds of important leads." The report added that "there does not appear to have been anything sinister" in the Justice Department's pause on the Tampa grand jury.¹³

Epstein, 2006 to 2008

The Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility reported that in early 2006 a West Palm Beach FBI special agent told Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Marie Villafana that the Palm Beach Police had approached the FBI because the state attorney's office was considering not charging the case or allowing a misdemeanor plea. Villafana and two FBI case agents developed a federal case. The FBI planned to arrest Epstein after a May 15, 2007, indictment date and to hold a press conference, and wanted to arrest him in the U.S. Virgin Islands while he judged a beauty pageant. After the U.S. Attorney's Office managers in Miami declined to approve the indictment, the squad supervisor was "not happy," and the case agent recalled the supervisor as "extremely upset." At a meeting with Villafana and her managers the FBI insisted that Epstein register for life as a sex offender. After Epstein rejected the proposal, the squad supervisor "yelled at" First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Sloman. The report found no misconduct by Department attorneys and concluded that U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta exercised poor judgment in resolving the case through a non-prosecution agreement.¹⁴

Footnotes

FBI Seattle teletype to Director, August 6, 1947, and Hoover teletype to Seattle (undated, August 1947), FBI file 62-HQ-83894 ("Unidentified Flying Objects"), Section 2, FBI Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts release, archive.org item "expediente-ovni-65-hs1-834228961-62-hq-83894-section-2-1ecd79," https://archive.org/details/expediente-ovni-65-hs1-834228961-62-hq-83894-section-2-1ecd79 ↩︎
HSCA Outside Contact Report 008624, FBI notes of January 26, 1978, request on "Fred Lee Crisman Vol. 1 of 3," NARA record 180-10085-10264, dated May 18, 1978, https://archive.org/details/crisman_fbifile ; same record at https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=149142 ↩︎
FBI Office Memorandum, March 22, 1950, FBI FOIA cover sheet "Guy Hottel (3-22-1950)," https://archive.org/details/GuyHottel ↩︎
Department of the Army, ACSI (DAMI-ISH) action memorandum "FBI Support of GRILL FLAME," April 30, 1979, and memorandum thru Director FBI for Assistant Director, Training Division, "Nomination of FBI Member to Assist on Army Project," signed E. R. Thompson, CIA-RDP96-00788R001100440022-9, -0023-8 and -0024-7, https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP96-00788R001100440022-9 ↩︎
Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. Dell, 1997. Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎
U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department's Investigations and Prosecutions (December 1997), Chapter V (Ronald Lister), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/ch05p1.htm ↩︎
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 20: "It is a sensitive matter." Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Prologue: "It was like they didn't want to know." Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎
U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy (December 1997), Executive Summary section III, and Chapter III (Norwin Meneses), https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/exsump1.htm and https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/ch03p2.htm ↩︎
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 20: "It is a sensitive matter." Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎
U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, S. Prt. 100-165 (December 1988), https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras ↩︎
U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy (December 1997), Chapter XI, section D, https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/ch11p1.htm ↩︎
U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The BCCI Affair, report by Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown (December 1992), section on Operation C-Chase, https://archive.org/details/thebcciaffair_202003 ↩︎
U.S. Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, Investigation into the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida's Resolution of Its 2006-2008 Federal Criminal Investigation of Jeffrey Epstein (November 2020), Parts III and IV, copy at https://archive.org/details/epsteindocs ; executive summary at https://www.justice.gov/opr/page/file/1336471/dl ↩︎

16 KiB Raw Blame History