JUNE 14 - 20, 2002
To Protect and to Spin The ex–LAPD cop who became a 9/11 conspiracy king by David Corn
AN L.A. COP MEETS A BEAUTIFUL AND MYSTERIOUS DAME. HE falls hard; she lets him. They move in together, but she takes him for a ride, disappearing evenings, gallivanting about. She has no obvious source of income. But she's deep in-the-know about mobsters and guns. One day there's a bullet hole in her '65 Ford Comet; 48 hours later she dumps him. He chases her to New Orleans, where she's hanging with Mafiosi and military men. The cop is shot at. Back in L.A. he is followed. It gets to him. He checks into a psychiatric hospital for a spell. But he starts to figure things out. It's 1978, and his ex, he believes, is somehow hooked up with U.S. intelligence and the mob in a plot involving Iran, where radical clerics are threatening the regime of the Washington-friendly shah. And someone is worried this cop knows too much. He's being tailed, his home is broken into. He tells his superiors at LAPD. They do nothing. Fearing for his life, he retires from the department.
The story's not over. Years later, he cracks the case. His girlfriend, he concludes, was with the CIA, and her mission was to work with organized-crime lieutenants assisting Kurdish counterrevolutionary forces in Iran in return for access to Mideast heroin. The old guns- for-drugs business. In 1981, he gets a newspaper to print his tale. But his ex-lover-the-spy denies all and says he's nutso -- which, of course, is what you would expect a wily CIA operative to say. So the CIA gets off. The ex-cop's career is in the toilet. He takes a job at a 7-Eleven and is busted on his first shift for selling alcohol to a kid. A setup, right? For a while, his parents have to support him. Then in 1996, when his old nemesis, the CIA, is accused of scheming with L.A. crack dealers, the ex-cop has another chance to take down the Company. He tells the world the CIA in the late 1970s attempted to recruit him to protect its drug racket in South-Central. But his claim draws little attention; again, the CIA skates. But this former cop doesn't quit. He starts a newsletter, opens a Web site (www.copvcia.com -- get it?), and keeps pursuing the gang that wrecked his life. And then -- finally -- he unearths the CIA's most damaging secret, the ugliest truth imaginable about the Agency, information that could bring the CIA to its knees and topple an entire government. He's got the CIA by the short hairs. There's only one question: Can he get people to believe?
Is this the latest Mel Gibson vehicle? No, it's all true. Sort of. <snip>