This is a posting about the Madoff-like Allan Stanford was really working for the CIA. It reminded me of another conspiracy during the Reagan-Bush years that allegedly led to the Clinton presidency.

LAS VEGAS, NV (March 26, 2009) – So I’m reading Talking Points Memo’s Muckraker page. There is a story about Allen Stanford’s number 2 man and long-time buddy flipping for the FBI.

What caught my eye was a comment from one of the TPM readers. He writes:

The Stanford Group has close ties with our government and we may never get true information on his operation. The key is finding out the source of funds for the $6 million that bankrolled his first international bank venture, Guardian International in 1985. This was less than two years after he declared bankruptcy in Texas from a second failed business. The first was a restaurant and the second a fitness center that he owned in Waco.

If you track the planes that Stanford Aviation owned and now FAA records show as being sold in the last few months, you quickly see the pattern forming like with previous CIA operated planes that crashed with loaded bundles of drugs.

On May 5th, 2006, President Bush issued a memorandum that was published in the Federal Register that ceded power to newly appointed DNI chief, John Negroponte, the right to avoid the laws of the financial world and the SEC Act of 1934 if it was needed for “national security”. Dawn Kopecki reported on it when she was with BusinessWeek in that same month.

30% of the CD funds that are missing came from Venezuela where rich landowners were encouraged to place their money to avoid detection by Chavez but with an understanding that a portion of the proceeds would be used to undermine the government of Venezuela. Now what government would be supportive of American corporate interests that it would operate secret ops like this in Venezuela. Only one.

Is this true? We may never know.

But it reminded me of a book I read in the late 1990s. It was called Compromised: Bush, Clinton, and the CIA. And the circumstances were somewhat similar. But instead of Venezuela, it was Nicaragua and Honduras in the 1980s.

Here’s the premise.

Remember the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan Administration circumvented Congress by using the Iranians to deliver weapons to the rebel Nicaraguan Contras who were fighting the Communist Nicaraguan Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega.

Well, Compromised gives us a deeper look. The premise is this. William Casey, Reagan’s CIA Director, wanted to drop ship the guns into Nicaragua using rebels from Nicaragua and neighboring Honduras. But these guys weren’t pilots. They had to be trained.

To train them, the CIA needed some place where no one could see the training. The best place, away from the borders and American law enforcement, was Arkansas. Bill Clinton was governor, and, according to the book, was willing to allow the training in return for money to fund his presidential campaign where he would knock of Reagan’s Vice President, the first George Bush. The money, the book says, came from smuggled drug money used by the CIA and laundered in Arkansas banks and deposited into Clinton’s accounts.

I have had a number of folks in intelligence tell me that they doubt the story. Oliver North has also debunked it.

What kept the story alive for me was the 2000 presidential election.

I was watching the returns when I remembered the book and commented to my wife, “Well if that book was true then the payback to George H.W. Bush would allow his son to become president, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.” That was only a few minutes before we heard Peter Jennings say that the electoral votes for Florida were not going to Al Gore.

My wife and I looked at each other in ironic silence.

The person I want to ask about this is my good friend John Dancy. John was a former NBC Correspondent who first broke the Iran-Contra Scandal. I’ll see John in a few weeks at the Ara Parseghian Celebrity Golf Event in Tucson.