He also served in Laos. According to Leslie Cockburn in “Out of Control,”66 Hoven “had an enormous range of contacts in the murky world of special—i.e., clandestine—operations.” Some of his compatriots included famous spooks like Carl Bernard, Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and Richard Secord.
But there was a surprising philosophical side to Paul Hoven, too.
For all his Soldier of Fortune bluster, Paul had rubbed elbows with some highly respected liberal activists in Washington, including Daniel Sheehan, an attorney who championed the causes of Daniel Ellsberg and Karen Silkwood.67
I was definitely intrigued.
As the Spartacus Forum tells it, “Daniel Sheehan made his name in the prisoner rights movement at Attica State Prison in New York. During the Attica riots in 1971, he attempted to negotiate a peaceful solution, before Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered authorities to take down the prison by force. He was a member of F. Lee Bailey’s law firm that represented Watergate burglar, James McCord. At Harvard Law School, Sheehan co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review. And he acted as general counsel to the Jesuits’ social ministry office in Washington.”68
In 1980 Sheehan took over as general counsel for the Christic Institute, “dedicated to uniting Christians, Jews and other religious Americans on a platform for political change.”
For his part, Hoven was a staunch Catholic. He worked for the Project on Military Procurement, exposing fraudulent billing by defense contractors.69 It was Hoven’s group that exposed the $10,000 screw and the $30,000 toilet at the Pentagon, among other eye popping items on procurement lists.
“Much of our information was supplied by the Pentagon Underground,” Hoven says. “The Underground was made up of a loose confederation of Military Officers and Pentagon civilians who believed two basic points: that weapon systems were not tested fully before purchase, and that the Pentagon was not responsible with its money.”70
“We supplied documents and assisted reporters with all military things. Our offices on Capitol Hill were broken into a number of times. My apartment was broken into. Nothing was ever taken, but items on my desk would be rearranged. The front door dead bolt would be unlocked, and the door would be opened a quarter of an inch,”71
Working together, Hoven and Sheehan got deeply ensnared in one of the hottest spook conspiracies ever to rock Washington. Together, this unlikely pair played a catalyst role exposing Oliver North and the Iran-Contra scandal, involving drug and shipments from Latin America and arm sales to Iran, in order to finance illegal U.S. operations in Nicaragua.
Paul used to brag to me that the idea for a special prosecutor on Iran-Contra was hatched in his kitchen.
Political analyst, David Corn, sums up Daniel Sheehan’s involvement with Paul Hoven and the history of their exposé of Iran-Contra in his book, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades (1994).72 It provides critical independent validation of my own interpretations of Paul Hoven’s extensive ties in the murky world of intelligence:
As Corn tells it in “Blond Ghost,” “Throughout 1985, Paul Hoven, a friend of Sheehan’s and a Vietnam veteran, regularly attended parties of ex-Agency men and weekend warriors, some associated with Soldier of Fortune magazine.
At a Christmas bash, Carl Jenkins, a former CIA officer who had been assigned to Miami and Laos, introduced Hoven to Gene Wheaton.
Wheaton served as an army detective in Vietnam, and in the mid-1970s a security officer at a top-secret CIA-Rockwell surveillance program in Iran called Project IBEX. In 1979 he returned to the United States, and held a string of security-related jobs. When he met Paul Hoven, Wheaton was scheming with Carl Jenkins and Ed Dearborn, a former CIA pilot in Laos and the Congo, to win federal contracts to transport humanitarian supplies to anticommunist rebels, including the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua. However the trio had failed to collect any contracts. They had complained to a State Department official that Richard Secord and Oliver North improperly controlled who got the Contra-related contracts.
At the Soldier of Fortune party, Hoven agreed to assist Wheaton. Hoven set up a meeting with a congressional aide who followed the Afghan program. Hoven did not realize that Wheaton had more on his mind than contracts. Wheaton had spent much of the previous year hobnobbing with arms dealers, ex-CIA officers and mercenaries, and he had collected information on past and present covert operations, including the secret Contra-arms project.
Wheaton was obsessed with the 1976 assassination in Iran of three Americans working on Project IBEX. He attributed the killings to U.S. intelligence, and a ring of ex-spooks running wild in Central America and elsewhere.
So when Wheaton met with the congressional staffer and Hoven, he launched into a speech about political assassinations. Wheaton made his bottom-line obvious: a rogue element in the U.S. government had engaged in a host of nefarious activities.
The congressional staffer wanted nothing to do with Wheaton’s intrigue. But Hoven was interested. He called Danny Sheehan, thinking he ought to hear Wheaton’s tale.
By early 1986, press accounts revealed that a clandestine Contra support network ran all the way into the White House, spearheaded by Oliver North, even though Congress had barred the Reagan Administration from militarily aiding the rebels.
Here was the perfect target for Sheehan: a furtive program supporting a covert war against a leftist government. Then he met Gene Wheaton, who had a helluva tale for Sheehan.
Sheehan and Wheaton sat down in the kitchen of Hoven’s house in early February of 1986. Wheaton tossed out wild stories of clandestine operations and dozens of names: A whole crew was running amok, supporting Contras, conducting covert activity elsewhere. Drugs were involved. Some of this gang had engaged in corrupt government business in Iran and Southeast Asia.”
According to Spartacus, “Wheaton and Jenkins shared intelligence about a covert CIA assassination program in Vietnam in 1974 and 1975. Called the Phoenix Project, it carried out a secret mission of assassinating members of the economic and political bureaucracy, in attempt to cripple Vietnam’s ability to function after the U.S withdrawal from Saigon. The Phoenix Project assassinated 60,000 village mayors, treasurers, school teachers and other non- Viet Cong administrators. Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines financed a highly intensified phase of the Phoenix project in 1975, by smuggling opium into Vietnam from Laos.”73
As Blond Ghost relates: “As Sheehan talked to Wheaton and Jenkins, he had something else on his mind: a two-year-old bombing in Nicaragua. On May 30, 1984, a bomb exploded at a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua. Afterward, Tony Avirgan, an American journalist who suffered shrapnel wounds, and his wife, Martha Honey, accused a group of Cuban exiles with ties to the CIA and the Contras of planning the murderous assault. Their report noted that some Contra supporters were moonlighting in the drug trade.
Come late spring of 1986, Sheehan was mixing with spooks in Washington DC, collecting information on the Contra operation. Then Sheehan made a pilgrimage to meet the dark angel of the covert crowd: Ed Wilson. The imprisoned rogue CIA officer made Sheehan’s head swim. The essence of Wilson’s story, Sheehan claimed, was that the Agency in 1976 had created a highly secretive counter terrorist unit apart from the main bureaucracy of the CIA. The mission— conduct “wet operations” (spy talk for assassinations). After the election of Jimmy Carter, this group was erased from the books and hidden in private companies. Shackley was the man in charge, both in and out of government.
At one point after Sheehan met with Wilson, it dawned on him: everything was connected. The La Penca bombing, the North-Contra network, the Wilson gang, all those CIA-trained Cuban exiles, the whole history of Agency dirty tricks, the operations against Castro, the war in Laos, the nasty spook side of the Vietnam War, and clandestine CIA action in Iran. It was an ongoing conspiracy. It did not matter if these guys were in or out of government. It was a villainous government within a government.
Sheehan applied the resour
ces of his small Christic Institute to the case. He knitted together all this spook gossip with a few hard facts, and dropped the load. In a Miami federal court, Sheehan filed a lawsuit against thirty individuals, invoking the RICO antiracketeering law and accusing all of being part of a criminal conspiracy that trained, financed, and armed Cuban-American mercenaries in Nicaragua, smuggled drugs, violated the Neutrality Act by supporting the Contras, traded weapons, and bombed the press conference at La Penca.
Sheehan’s plaintiffs were journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey. He demanded over $23 million in damages. With this lawsuit, Sheehan believed, he could break up the Contra support operation, and cast into the light shadowy characters who’d been up to mischief for years.
Hoven and Jenkins were stunned. Neither expected Sheehan to produce such a storm. Sheehan was not about to be a quiet disseminator of information. “I had been left with the assumption,” Hoven noted, “that I was set up to pass information to Sheehan. But they—” [whoever set up Hoven to contact Sheehan] “—mucked it up because Sheehan was not playing it close to the script.”
In fact, Sheehan championed the impeachment of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush for their role in Iran Contra. Celebrities like Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Don Henley and Kris Kristofferson raised funds for the impeachment campaign led by the Christic Institute.
In the final round, the Special Prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, gave prosecutorial immunity to 14 defendants. When President Bush, Sr. lost his re-election in 1992, one of his last acts in office was to pardon the remaining six individuals indicted by the special prosecutor for Iran-Contra. The Christic Institute moved to Los Angeles in 1995.74
Seven years had passed since Danny Sheehan and the Christics busted open Iran-Contra, with a little help at the right moments from Paul Hoven.
Now Hoven showed up with Pat Wait to meet me in August, 1993. For the first couple of months, we danced around each other. We were not friends. We were not colleagues. To put it bluntly, Paul did not appear to like me. But he would not go away. He told me straight up that it had been decided somebody must watch over me. That task had been delegated to him. And he took his assignment very seriously.
Always he told me bluntly that our meeting was not a random event. “They” asked him to watch over me. “They” planned the approach with careful attention to personal details. One of Paul’s friends was a Rosicrucian in Minnesota, and I was known to have a keen interest in spiritualism and metaphysics. “They” considered the value of his friendship with this Rosicrucian in assigning him as my watcher— because it would help establish a bond between us. Paul stressed this numerous times.
As to who recruited Hoven, that was always mysterious. But Hoven made a point of explaining how Congress prohibits the CIA from running operations inside the United States, or targeting American citizens for domestic surveillance. Domestic anti-terrorism operations—like I was caught up in— fell under the auspices of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Hoven told me. And he insisted no person or agency was breaking the law, or violating any congressional mandate by shadowing me. By chance, this conversation took place a couple of nights before I was going to interview for a Press Secretary job in Congressman Ron Wyden’s office. That’s when Paul told me on a “need to know” basis.
Hoven told me he’d been forced to retire as a “contract officer” on permanent disability, because of a cardiac virus he picked up in Panama. He’d been a guest producer with Mike Wallace at “Sixty Minutes,” covering the U.S. invasion of Panama, when a viral infection destroyed 40 percent of his heart capacity. In early 2005, Hoven had a heart transplant at the Mayo Clinic.
Despite his heart disease, Hoven had no difficulty filling the role of my “case officer” or “handler.” It was also Hoven who informed me that Defense Intelligence ran a special operation on psychic research parallel to the Soviets, during the Cold War. Hoven knew one of the Directors of the psychic research program, and they’d spoken about me.
If you looked up ‘spook’ in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure you’d find a picture of Paul Hoven. Everything pointed that way. He was definitely enmeshed in those circles.
Even his heart attack brought out the spooks.
At a Spartacus “education forum,” in 2007, Hoven told the story:75 “At the time of my heart attack, two events were taking placed that I was involved in: 1) the meeting at Marine Headquarters to get Oliver North transferred out of the White House, and 2) the cancellation of the Division Air Defense program 40 mm Bofors Cannon on the old M-48 tank body. This was the first time that an active Pentagon weapons system was cancelled.”
“When I started having chest pains after drinking some orange juice, I assumed it was a muscle cramp. Finally, my roommate called 911. I lived in Arlington, Virginia, and Arlington County ran the only ambulance service. I was given some nitroglycerin, and the stretcher was placed on the ground in front of the ambulance.”
“A second ambulance arrived, and the two crews started arguing over who was to take me to the hospital. The second crew mentioned that I was the person involved in canceling DIVAD. [Note: The ambulance crew arrived knowing those highly specialized details about Hoven’s current projects, which would have been classified.] “They were both informed that I was to go to George Washington Hospital in Washington.”
“The second ambulance crew won the argument, and proceeded to take me to a Northern Virginia hospital, instead.” [Closer to Langley.]
“We pulled into the building, and 16 doctors, nurses and techs were there to greet me. They saved my life. After three days, I was transferred to my HMO hospital in Washington. I was informed by Knut Royce (former interpreter for the Emperor of Ethiopia) that one of my nurses was the daughter of the CIA liaison in the White House.”
“Months later, Carl Jenkins [another famous spook who trained Cuban exiles in Mexico for the Bay of Pigs] and I were at O’Toole’s Bar in Langley, [a CIA watering hole]. We met an ex-special forces doctor on his way to Afghanistan to provide medical care to rebels fighting the Soviets. My heart attack came up in conversation. He asked if I drank something cold before the attack. I mentioned that I had some orange juice. He said there was a substance that causes heart attacks and is delivered in cold beverages. Danny Sheehan told me there were 9 or 10 of us [involved in Iran-Contra and the Project for Military Procurement] who had heart attacks. I was the only one who did not die.”
But was Hoven a spook?
Once I asked Paul how I could identify spooks that might approach me at the United Nations. He just smiled and shook his head.
“Susan,” he said. “If it waddles like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”
“But Paul!” I said. “How can I be sure?”
“Susan,” he said. “It’s a duck.”
He wasn’t the only one.
Very quickly I discovered Pat Wait had extraordinary access to numerous high level intelligence sources, as well. She’d known Richard Fuisz, my CIA handler, for 20 years. After my arrest, Pat Wait swore that Hoven and Fuisz “could face prosecution for perjury and obstruction of Justice, if they denied their intelligence ties or supervising” my work.
But not everybody was so informed. Some people who’d known Paul and Richard for years, were totally clueless as to their intelligence activities. That’s the nature of the beast. Nobody volunteers this sort of background. If you don’t need to know, you’re out of the loop. And you ain’t comin’ inside the circle.
If they don’t want you to know, they’ll keep you guessing. They can hide behind all sorts of technical language to deny it, if they wish. It’s nothing to get upset about. That’s how the spooks work. I find it amusing.
For awhile, I suspect they tried to figure out whether I might have possible use, or if my warning about the 1993 attack had been a fluke.
To his credit, Hoven took a big chance on me. In May 2004, he proposed that my uncanny ability to filter counter-terrorism scenarios, combined w
ith my steadfast opposition to war and sanctions, might find application in real politics in the Middle East.
Very cautiously, he floated the idea that I might approach Libyan diplomats at the United Nations to start talks for the Lockerbie Trial.
I would become what’s known as an “Asset.”
“Assets” are private citizens who have developed some specialized field of expertise or interest that grant us special access to target groups desirable to the Intelligence Community.
In a practical sense, an Asset resembles a pawn in a chess match. We stay on the playing field as long as possible, to be leveraged and exploited for a greater purpose (typically obfuscated from the Asset’s view). Except this game is so extraordinary and dynamic, most people wouldn’t care that they’ve been caught or exploited. It’s an opportunity to play in a real game. In the case of Libya or Iraq— two nations under sanctions— it would mean access to high ranking Arab officials that very few individuals could talk to, establishing a point for back channel dialogue in support of counter-terrorism policy. My access would grant me a unique opportunity to contribute towards ending the sanctions that I loathed so deeply.
I jumped at the chance. As an activist, it was everything I could wish for. I rationalized that I would not be compromising my anti-war principles by supporting counter-terrorism policy. I hoped the consistency of my support for non-violence would win respect from Arab governments, and ultimately their cooperation.
I would not work against Arab peoples, or culture or the Islamic religion, either. I would prove that anti-terrorism could succeed on the basis of diplomacy and respect for cultural dignity, without military threats or sanctions.
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