DEAK
The biggest CIA-drug money scandal you never read
With the release of the new Gary Webb film “Kill The Messenger” and the sudden renewed interest in what goes on in that dark underbelly of the US Empire — drug running, money laundering, death squads, assassinations of lives and of reputations — I’m reminded of the incredible life and death of Nicholas Deak, the CIA’s Cold War banker hailed in Time magazine as “the James Bond of the world of money” until the mid-1980s, when his global finance empire was destroyed by Reagan Administration accusations of large-scale Latin American drug money laundering.
The Reagan Commission on Organized Crime spent much of 1984 attacking Deak's global foreign exchange firm, Deak-Perera. By the end of the year, Deak was forced to appear before the commission in a testy public interrogation; his financial empire collapsed within days.
A year later, in 1985, Deak was assassinated in his Wall Street high-rise by a paranoid-schizophrenic bag lady from Seattle, who’d been hired for the job by Latin American mobsters, according to a private internal investigation led by former FBI detectives. The assassin, Lois Lang (pictured above), had previously spent several murky years in the underbelly of Silicon Valley, where she fell under the care of a famous Stanford Research Institute psychiatrist, Frederick Melges — an expert on dosing his subjects with drugs and hypnosis to induce “artificial” dissociative states. Perhaps not surprisingly, Dr. Melges was up to his eyeballs in secret CIA behavior modification programs that were going on at Stanford until they were exposed in Congressional hearings in 1977. [For more on this stranger-than-fiction story, read "James Bond and the Killer Bag Lady" co-authored with Alexander Zaitchik.]
Nicholas Deak’s end came fast. Exactly thirty years ago, in 1984, his global financial empire, Deak-Perera, was accused by the Reagan Administration of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars of Colombian drug cartel cash.
Nicholas Deak should’ve been the least likely target for a Reagan Administration takedown over cocaine money laundering, and not only because the same Reagan Administration was busy aiding and abetting the CIA’s mercenary army, the Contras, as they moved cocaine into the US, and illegal weapons into their Honduras bases. What made targeting Deak all the stranger was that one of Deak’s closest longtime friends, William Casey, was head of Reagan's CIA at that time. And as Gary Webb’s reporting (and Robert Parry’s exposés before and after Webb) have shown, Casey’s CIA was at that very same time aiding and protecting the Contras’ cocaine-running operation.
Deak’s downfall was covered in the New York Times by a young greenhorn Ivy League grad named Nicholas Kristof, a budding serial dupe who, unsurprisingly, failed to connect the giant dots in front of his face about Deak’s deep ties to the CIA, and his close personal relationship with the Agency’s director, Bill Casey.
Kristof’s December 1984 article, “Collapse of Deak & Company,” begins:
In the world of foreign exchange and precious metals, no name glitters like Deak-Perera.
Founded in 1939 by a Hungarian immigrant, Nicholas L. Deak, the company grew into prominence by making markets in currencies no one else would touch and in later years, by aggressively promoting private investment in gold. Today, it is the largest nonbank foreign exchange and precious metals operation in the United States.
…At the heart of the collapse, according to the Deak family, are allegations in a report by the President's Commission on Organized Crime about the laundering of money, so that drug traffickers could secretly repatriate profits to Latin America. Kristof did enough of his archive searching to uncover Deak’s role in some spectacularly shady intelligence operations, but somehow managed to miss Deak’s own intelligence links — including Deak-Perera’s central role in the Lockheed Bribery Scandal, the “Watergate of Corporate America,” under which the CIA funneled millions of bribe dollars to a Japanese war criminal-turned-Yakuza don, who used the funds to influence Japan’s ruling party. Deak-Perera moved the CIA’s funds; Lockheed reps and a Spanish-born priest in Macao carried the cash. Here, however, Kristof leaves out the CIA’s role, so that it all appears, in Kristof’s limited grasp, to reflect “the peculiar world of high finance”:
https://pando.com/2014/10/26/the-biggest-cia-drug-money-scandal-you-never-read/