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Lawrence Lifschultz is an American investigative journalist.
He extensively Bangladesh politics. Most recently he wrote a series of
articles on the assassination of Bangladesh's founding father Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman. On August 15th of 1975, Sheikh Mujib along with a number of his
family members were brutally killed by a group of young Bangladeshi army
officers. When the leader was killed, the world was going through the era of
the Cold War. Sheikh Mujib and his cabinet was tilting towards the Soviet
Union. At the same time Saudi Arabia, Pakistani ISI and the global jihadists
were still friends of the West. After Mujib's killing Bangladesh drifted
from her secular path. That was the beginning of Islamization of the
country.
One of the alleged killer of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is assumed to be living
in California. He is Lt. Col. Mohiuddin. When Mujib's daughter Sheikh Hasina
was the Prime Minister of Bangladesh [during 1996-2001], she tried her best
to extradite the retired army officer to Bangladesh but to no avail. The
following is an excerpt from Lifschultz writing, which includes
correspondence from US Rep Stephen Solarz.
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THE SOLARZ CORRESPONDENCE: A CONGRESSIONAL INQUIRY
DELIBERATELY DERAILED?
by Lawrence Lifschultz
The possibility of ultimately getting to the bottom of what
had happened in Bangladesh in the 1974-1975 period required that CIA
documents not be altered or tampered with in any way. Cherry had been the
CIA's Station Chief in Dhaka at the time of the Bangladesh coup. A simple
question posed itself. With Cherryworking as a member of the "historical
review staff" had any documents related to Bangladesh been tampered with or
simply made to "disappear"?
(Continued from yesterday)
IN April 1979, Kai Bird and I wrote Henry Kissinger a detailed letter asking
him to reply to specific questions regarding the 1971 contacts with the
Mustaque group in Calcutta. We also posed several questions regarding the
1975 coup against Mujib. US Embassy sources had wondered out loud to us
whether the CIA Station in Dhaka had disregarded Ambassador Boster's
instructions to break contact with the Mustaque group on their own
initiative or whether they had instructions to do so from Washington. We
asked Kissinger this question. We asked him if he had "Prior knowledge" of
the coup d'etat against Mujib. We posed seven specific questions. Four
questions concerned 1971 contacts with the Mustaque group. Three questions
concerned the 1975 coup. We asked Kissinger to reply promptly since we were
intending to publish an article in June in The Nation magazine in New York.
Kissinger replied in May. "I have read your astonishing letter of April 23"
wrote Kissinger in his dismissive, one paragraph reply. "It reached me while
I was traveling in Asia, and, therefore, your-two-week deadline has already
passed. In any event, I cannot deal with the extraordinary mixture of
allegations and innuendo contained in your letter, except to say that in
substance they are so far from the truth that I am impelled to question the
motives of your informants."
In June we replied to Kissinger. "The purpose of our April 23 correspondence
setting out detailed queries concerning US-Bangladesh relations in the
crucial periods of 1971 and 1974-75 was precisely to abolish any dimension
of allegation or innuendo," we wrote. "We do not believe this can be done
without direct answers to specific questions. We do not consider the
questions we have put to be, as you say, 'far from the truth.' Indeed, as
questions they are designed precisely to get at the truth. We know of no
other method, but to ask with as much precision as possible... In our view,
to be astonished is not to be specific in response."
When the Carter Administration came to power in 1976, a new director,
Admiral Stansfield Turner, took over the Central Intelligence Agency. Turner
began an intensive review of past covert actions involving possible illegal
actions by Agency officials. This internal review ultimately led to the
early retirement of several hundred CIA employees. There were reports
circulating in State Department circles that the Bangladesh case was also
under review. However, according to one State Department source the
Bangladesh case wasn't "bit enough" to garner the kind of attention Turner
was giving to actions that had led to unambiguous violations of the law.
Still it appears there was some form of inquiry. Little is known how
extensively the case was investigate within the Agency during the short
lived period when Turner sought to "clean house."
In the summer of 1992 a curious article appeared in The
Washington Post. At the time, the trial of a senior CIA official, Claire
George, was then under way for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra
affair. George had served as the Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA.
In September 1991, George was indicted and charged with ten felonies,
including obstructing justice, obstructing a congressional investigation,
making false statements, and perjuring himself before congressional
committees.
According to Lawrence Walsh, the retired judge, who served as prosecutor in
the case, "Claire George's indictment mobilized the intelligence community.
Support came not only from officials in active service, but also from the
CIA's alumni, who were steeped in the agency's traditions and proud of its
accomplishments. They keenly felt the irony of the fact that a career
officer, who had been trained to protect the secrets of the agency with lies
if necessary, was now being indicted for lying to congressional committees."
Claire George's trial lasted four weeks. After eleven days of deliberation,
the jury returned its verdict. George was found guilty of lying to Congress.
He had lied to both the House and Senate intelligence committees. After the
trial, Craig Gillen, the lead prosecutor in the George case, stated, "This
marks the first time that a senior CIA official was convicted of felony
offences for crimes committee while he was in his position at the CIA.
Congress expects and deserves full and truthful answers from the
intelligence agencies." Gillen concluded, "Make no mistake about it, we are
pleased with this verdict. Word has gone out to senior officials in the
intelligence agencies that they cannot use the secrets of our nation to
hide." As one of his last acts of his Presidency, George Bush, a former CIA
Director, pardoned Claire George and other senior officials, convicted of
lying to Congress.
After the pardon, Lawrence Walsh, the Independent Prosecutor and a retired
judge with Republican Party credentials, denounced the pardon. "There was no
excuse for pardoning these persons," declared Walsh. "They were prosecuted
for covering up a crime, for lying to Congress, to keep Congress from
finding out what had happened... They were deliberate lies."
A decade before George was indicted, the CIA Director in the Reagan
Administration, William Casey had appointed Claire George to be the
CIA's "liaison with Congress." This was the time when William Barnds, a
"retired" CIA officer, was "supervising" the Bangla-desh file at the
Congressional Subcommittee on Asia chaired by Stephen Solarz. According to a
statement Robert Gates made to Joseph Persico, William Casey's biographer,"
once Claire [George] got there [i.e. up to Congress], he reinforced all of
Casy's worst instincts. Their attitude was 'don't tell Congress anything
unless you are driven to the wall.'" Gates was CIA Director under George
Bush.
The Post article of 5 August 1992 described how a member of George's legal
team named Phil Cherry, a retired CIA officer, had been discovered visiting
the CIA's archives during the trial. "In a development outside the
courtroom, Philip Cherry, a retired CIA covert operations officer who has
appeared in court as an unpaid members of [Claire] George's legal defence
team, was seen last Friday afternoon leaving CIA headquarters," reported The
Post. "He was using a pass normally possessed by agency employees."
"Asked Monday what he was doing at the agency [CIA]," The Post article
stated, "Cherry, a lawyer, said that it had nothing to do with the
case. Asked why he had a CIA pass, he responded, 'No comment.' In response
to further questions from The Post's reporter, a CIA spokesman declared that
"Cherry had applied earlier for a contract position with the CIA's newly
expanded historical review staff and had been offered a post." The CIA
spokes-man, Peter Earnest, stated that Phil Cherry had simply "come in to
see his contract and pick up his badge."
The CIA acknowledged that Cherry's role on Claire George's legal team and
his access to secret CIA archives might be deemed to be improper. "We don't
want a conflict or the appearance of a conflict," the CIA told The Post. The
speculation was that documents might be removed, lost or tampered with by
CIA "insiders" to protect one of their own. Upon reading the Post article my
concern instantly focused on Bangladesh, not the Iran-Contra affair.
Phil Cherry, working as a member of a CIA's "historical review staff," sent
shivers down my spine. It was absolutely farcical. Given the issues that
Stephen Solarz had raised in his letter to Les Aspin of the House
Intelligence Committee regarding "allegations about CIA involvement in the
1975 coup," Cherry's presence in the archives represented a clear "conflict
of interest."
The possibility of ultimately getting to the bottom of what had happened in
Bangladesh in the 1974-1975 period required that CIA documents not be
altered or tampered with in any way. Cherry had been the CIA's Station Chief
in Dhaka at the time of the Bangladesh coup. A simple question posed itself.
With Cherry working as a member of the "historical review staff" had any
documents related to Bangladesh been tampered with or simply made to
"disappear"?
In the 1990's a historical commission with responsibility for declassifying
CIA documents concerned with Guatemala discovered that almost the entire
archive had been destroyed. Detailed documentation from within CIA archives
of the coup against Arbenz that the Agency had masterminded had been purged
from the records. This had involved the destruction of thousands of
documents. The enduring expectation of American historian that ultimately
documentation would be available for historical research had been frustrated
by an act of "historical cleansing" by the US Government itself.
Shortly after Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution was published in 1979 a
reviewer made the following observation: "One could sympathize with
Lifschultz's agony that without the power of subpoena, truth could never be
discovered. But could it be revealed even with that power? Lifschultz still
hopes that he can, given the opportunity and a fair chance, find the truth.
But the deviousness and capacity of intelligence agencies to kill the truth,
at all stages, of any legitimate investigation would, however, seem adequate
for making Lifschultz's task a difficult one. In these dangerous shoals, the
great service Lifschultz offers to the ordinary man is simply to impress
upon him the oppressive apparatus of today's state... If, in such
conditions, the Bangladesh Revolution is unfinished, so is Lifschultz's
search for the truth. He would be the first to admit that.... The best of
this book is the author's abiding faith in eventually finding the truth by
pursuing it relentlessly." These were kind words. But, the truth is this
pursuit is not the task of one individual alone.
The writer is working as a Research Associate at the Yale
Centre for International and Area Studies, Yale University. He was recently
named a Fulbright Scholar for South Asia.
******
Solarz's letter to Lifschultz, dated June 3, 1980
Dear Mr. Lifschultz:
As I indicated to you in my previous letter, I have tried to pursue with the
State Department several of the allegations raised in the materials you sent
to me
The State Department readily admits that it had contacts in 1971 with
several Bengali officials who were interested in discussing arrangements
that would have allowed Bangladesh to remain part of Pakistan. Considering
that the dismemberment of Pakistan, a traditional US ally, was not in the US
interest, the State Department contends that there is nothing either
surprising or disturbing about the United States trying to negotiate an
arrangement with Bengali officials to prevent this outcome from occurring.
With respect to the Embassy meetings in the November 1974 - January 1975
period with opponents of the Rahman regime, the State Department once again
does not deny that the meetings took place. However, the Department does
claim that it notified Rahman about the meetings, including the possibility
of a coup. This would seem to put these meetings in a less conspiratorial
light.
On the crucial question of CIA involvement in the post-January 1975 period,
I have not been able to unearth any hard evidence in either direction. I
find your allegations sufficiently disturbing to believe that they merit
further investigation. However, I believe that such an investigation can
really only be carried out by the Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, which has the best chance of obtaining access both to CIA
cable traffic and to the relevant figures in the intelligence community. I
have therefore referred the materials you sent to me to Congressman Aspin,
along with a letter urging him to look into the matter. (copy attached).
I thank you for bringing this matter to my attention, and I hope that you
will keep me informed about any new information that you may obtain on this
subject.
Sincerely,
Stephen Solarz
Member of Congress, House of Representatives,
Washington D.C.
Solarz's letter to Les Aspin, dated June 3, 1980
Dear Les: I am forwarding to you materials recently sent to me by a
reputable journalist, Lawrence Lifschultz, which contain disturbing
allegations about CIA involvement in the 1975 coup which deposed Sheik
Mujibar Rahman in Bangladesh.
Although I have made formal inquiries about Lifschultz's various charges
with the State Department, I am not fully satisfied with all of the answers
I received. In particular, on the crucial question of CIA contacts with the
coup perpetrators in the January 1975 through August 1975 period, I have
been unable to unearth any hard evidence either to confirm or refute the
allegations.
I quite agree with Lifschultz' statement that "whether or not the United
States had prior knowledge of these plans cannot be conclusively settled
without Congressional subpoena power." Since a thorough investigation of CIA
activities in Bangladesh is clearly within the jurisdiction of the Permanent
Select Committee, I am turning over Lifschultz's material to you, in the
hope that you will take appropriate action.
I thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Stephen J. Solarz
Member of Congress, House of Representatives,
Washington D.C.
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