COMMENT: For some time now, we’ve been refer­ring to Rom­ney as “The VerMITTler”–the Ger­man word for “agent.” As the strange goings on at Bain cap­i­tal attract more atten­tion the term appears more and more appropriate.

In an inci­sive post, Joseph Can­non noted the pres­ence at Bain of peo­ple with links to one aspect or another of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity, includ­ing peo­ple with links to the mur­der­ous El Sal­vadorean junta whose ARENA party was gen­er­ously assisted in its efforts by ele­ments of U.S. intelligence.  

A follow-up story gives more insight into the nature of those at Bain. Note Cannon’s caveat about some of the sites from which his infor­ma­tion is derived.

As indi­cated in our pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sion, inter­ests that place money “off­shore” do not do so for altru­is­tic rea­sons. The “off­shore” milieu unites tax evaders, arms traf­fick­ers, drug traf­fick­ers, ter­ror­ists and orga­nized crime syn­di­cates. Off­shore is also the province of intel­li­gence ser­vices. These ele­ments seem to be present at Bain.

Can­non notes the many links run­ning between Bain and the milieu of the late Howard Hughes, whose oper­a­tions were inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the doings of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and God only knows who else. Taken together, these links paint a pic­ture of a syn­the­sis of the over­world and the underworld.

With Hughes hav­ing become a recluse decades before his death and then remain­ing under the direc­tion of his “Mor­mon mafia” secu­rity con­tin­gent, we view Hughes’ state of affairs as open to conjecture–how much do we REALLY know about the guy?

With regard to the large num­ber of peo­ple and inter­ests over­lap­ping both Bain Cap­i­tal and Hughes’ oper­a­tions, we may be look­ing at a per­pet­u­a­tion of covert action capa­bil­ity and insti­tu­tional con­ti­nu­ity between the inter­ests lurk­ing behind the Hughes facade and ele­ments oper­at­ing within the Bain mantle.

Obvi­ously, the Mor­mon con­nec­tion may fig­ure into this as well.

In addi­tion to the ele­ments cited in the first of Cannon’s posts about Bain, the VerMITTler’s busi­ness and its par­tic­i­pants bring a num­ber of things to mind in con­nec­tion to Bain-linked ele­ments, which include: 

• Miguel Due­nas, scion of another of El Salvador’s 14 families.
• Pan­cho Soler, another mem­ber of the El Sal­vado­rian elite and alleged to be linked to the Howard Hughes milieu.
• Diego Rib­adeneira, a for­mer Ecuado­rian for­eign min­is­ter (Always remem­ber the CIA’s pro­found con­nec­tions to Latin Amer­ica, as well as the over­lap­ping links of the Under­ground Reich.)
• Frank Kar­don­ski, a native of Panama and heav­ily involved with pro­mot­ing that country’s busi­ness inter­ests, inter­ests that are inex­tri­ca­bly linked with money laun­der­ing and other ques­tion­able activ­i­ties. Kar­don­ski bought Key Bis­cayne Bank from Nixon crony Bebe Rebozo. That bank has been alleged to have been a vehi­cle for con­tri­bu­tions to Nixon’s cam­paigns from Howard Hughes. In light of the real pos­si­bil­ity that Bain is a front for “Funny Money,” we note that Paul Man­ning notes that Rebozo’s bank was also a laun­der­ing vehi­cle for Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work money. ” . . . . . . . The German-South Amer­i­can group also had direct access to the Nixon White House through their rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Wash­ing­ton, and were proud of the fact that Bebe Rebozo was Pres­i­dent Nixon’s clos­est friend. For, know­ingly or unknow­ingly, Rebozo processed mil­lions of their dol­lars through his Florida bank as part of nor­mal com­mer­cial oper­a­tions. . . .” (Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile by Paul Man­ning; p. 275.)
• Orit Gadeish, a for­mer assis­tant to Israeli for­eign min­is­ter Ezer Weitz­man. (Like the pres­ence of for­mer Israeli intel­li­gence asset Robert Maxwell, this con­nec­tion may be part of the same polit­i­cal dynamic that binds Rom­ney to Ben­jamin Netanyahu.)
• Frank William “Bill” Gay and Robert C. Gay. The for­mer was Howard Hughes’ chief of staff, the lat­ter his son and man­ag­ing direc­tor of Bain Capital.
• Frank Morse, a for­mer attor­ney for Howard Hughes and some­one alleged to be on good terms with the CIA.
• Robert Ben­nett, asso­ciate and infor­mant for Bob Wood­ward dur­ing the Water­gate “inves­ti­ga­tion” and some­one with links  to the CIA and the Howard Hughes milieu.

“Bain, Rom­ney, the CIA and (God Help Us) Howard Hughes (UPDATED–A Mys­tery Solved)” by Joseph Can­non; Can­non­fire; 7/12/2012.

EXCERPT: . . . We have already dis­cussed Poma. He was one of the founders of the fas­cist ARENA party of Roberto D’Aubuisson — a party that ran the death squads which ruth­lessly mur­dered any­one who chal­lenged the oligarchy’s con­trol. The CIA aided — arguably con­trolled — the death squads.

Miguel Due­nas hailed from another of the 14 fam­i­lies [that run El Sal­vador]; in fact, the Due­nas clan may have been the worst thing ever to hap­pen to El Sal­vador. It turns out that Miguel Due­nas — I pre­sume that we’re deal­ing with the same fel­low — ran the Banco Com­meri­cial of El Savador, which deter­mined which farm­ers would and would not get credit. A nice lit­tle arrange­ment, this was; the Due­nas fam­ily used it to con­trol a mas­sive share of the country’s cot­ton and cof­fee pro­duc­tion. In a coun­try where small farm­ers had once been allowed to own and work their own land, the Due­nas clan expro­pri­ated their fields and reduced the farm­ers to near-slavery. The National Guard kept the serfs in line.

One of the most inter­est­ing names on our list is the late Frank Kar­don­ski. Born in Panama, he cre­ated the Panamin­ian Stock Exchange, owned Tower Bank, and did much to pro­mote Panama as a place of for­eign invest­ment. Of course, dur­ing this period (the 1980s), Panama became a haven for any­one hop­ing to laun­der drug loot.

Here’s the bit I like best:

In 1990, Kardonski’s fam­ily bought Key Bis­cayne Bank from Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, a long­time Key Bis­cayne res­i­dent and long­time friend of for­mer Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon.

Bebe Rebozo was the president’s hideously mobbed up pal, and his bank was a noto­ri­ous haven for mafia money. Is the bank still used for such pur­poses? I don’t know. Per­haps read­ers in Florida can tell me more.

(A younger man named Frank Kar­don­ski — who may be related to Romney’s old pal, judg­ing from the facial resem­blance — runs an air­line that oper­ates between Florida and Cen­tral Amer­ica. Read­ers of Daniel Hop­sicker will no doubt raise an eyebrow.)

“Diego Riban­d­inarea” should actu­ally be spelled Diego Rib­adeneira. I believe that Romney’s ref­er­ence goes to the Diego Riban­d­inarea who became Ecuador’s ambas­sador to Peru and pre­vi­ously served as for­eign min­is­ter. I’ve seen no deroga­tory infor­ma­tion about this guy. Of course, the CIA has a long his­tory in Ecuador; see here and here. In 2008, the pres­i­dent of Ecuador, Rafael Cor­rea, charged that that the CIA con­trols that country’s mil­i­tary intel­li­gence ser­vice and much of the police. Judg­ing from the brief bio here, Rib­adeneira seems to have devoted his life to diplo­matic ser­vice, not busi­ness — so it’s a lit­tle odd to see Rom­ney men­tion him as the co-founder of an Amer­i­can ven­ture cap­i­tal firm. (Could we have the wrong Diego...?)

The only online ref­er­ence to Pan­cho Soler — another off­spring of the El Sal­vado­ran aris­toc­racy — occurs in this rather wild tale, set in the 1970s, when Pan­cho was a young Har­vard grad and good friend to the son of the bru­tal (CIA-backed) Nicaraguan dic­ta­tor Anas­ta­sio Somosa. The story con­cerns Howard Hughes, who made a bizarre jour­ney to Nicaragua after being “kid­napped” from his infa­mous Las Vegas hideaway.

(Sources dif­fer as to whether Hughes left vol­un­tar­ily. At roughly the same time he changed lodg­ings, the Bond film “Dia­monds Are For­ever” was shot in Vegas. In that movie, bad guys kid­nap a mil­lion­aire obvi­ously mod­eled on Hughes. In other words, life and art imi­tated each other simultaneously.) . . . .

. . . .1. Soler. Bain Cap­i­tal co-founder Pan­cho Soler appar­ently had some­thing to do with arrang­ing Hughes’ sojourn in Nicaragua in the 1970s. (Side note: Did you know HH was there for the big 1972 earth­quake? A long time ago, the L.A. Times claimed that the poor old guy rode out the big one bounc­ing around in the back seat of a car parked on a Man­agua side street.)

2. Kar­don­ski. Another Rom­ney part­ner, Frank Kar­don­ski, took over Bebe Rebozo’s old mafia bank in Key Bis­cayne. As this bio puts it:
One of the ways that Rebozo helped Nixon was to obtain large cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions from Howard Hughes.
Long story there. You already have the gist of it.

3. The Gays. As noted, Bain’s Man­ag­ing Direc­tor was the son of the guy who man­aged Hughes’ busi­ness affairs — dur­ing the time when Amer­i­can spooks were qui­etly tak­ing over the day-to-day run­ning of Hughes’ com­pany. As we shall see, Frank “Bill” Gay con­trolled much of Hughes’ money after the old man’s death. The impor­tance of this fact will soon become clear.

But before we get to that, let’s add to our list of Romney/Hughes links:

4. Morse. Frank Morse ran a Bain com­pany. He is — not to mince words — a CIA-friendly attor­ney who rep­re­sented Howard Hughes dur­ing the key period described above. After that stint, Morse worked for Adnan Kashoggi and Larry Kolb, the agent for Miles Copeland who got close to both Khashoggi and Muhammed Ali. (I’ve cor­re­sponded a bit with Kolb, who describes his adven­tures in a fas­ci­nat­ing book called Over­world; see these pre­vi­ous posts. An inter­est­ing guy, to say the least.) Nowa­days, Morse is work­ing with Robert C. Gay.

5. Ben­nett. Robert Ben­nett, now a Sen­a­tor, has close links to Mitt Rom­ney, as dis­cussed in this pre­vi­ous post. Ben­nett pre­vi­ously was a CIA guy, run­ning a front com­pany called Mullen & Co.

The famous (or should-be-famous) Lukoskie memo, uncov­ered by writer Jim Hougan and pub­lished in his book Secret Agenda, reveals that Ben­nett was a source of Watergate-related infor­ma­tion for Bob Wood­ward — who, suit­ably grate­ful, kept the CIA out of the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Water­gate cov­er­age. (The CIA’s fin­ger­prints are all over Water­gate, if you look closely.) Hougan thinks that at least some of the “Deep Throat” infor­ma­tion came from Ben­nett, not Mark Felt. To this day, Wood­ward doesn’t like to talk about his inter­ac­tions with the spook who became a senator.

Ben­nett, almost need­less to say, played a key role in the saga of Howard Hughes. When given the oppor­tu­nity to work for Hughes, Ben­nett shut down Mullen & Co. in less time than it took you to read this sentence. . . .

...well, I’m still not entirely sure what Ben­nett did on a day-to-day basis. Although Ben­nett held the title of Pub­lic Rela­tions Direc­tor for Summa, Hughes’ com­pany, he seems to have done a remark­ably lousy job. The only pub­lic­ity Hughes got in those days was neg­a­tive. Evi­dence indi­cates that Ben­nett helped to arrange Project Azo­rian, which used a Hughes ship, the Glo­mar Explorer, to raise a sunken Soviet nuclear sub­ma­rine.
There are even more Romney/Hughes con­nec­tions. Right now, though, you must be ask­ing: What does it all mean?

To be hon­est, I’ve not been able to dope out the rea­son why so many Romney/Bain asso­ciates have his­to­ries going all the way back to the weird world of Howard Hughes. Maybe we’re look­ing at a sur­real chain of coin­ci­dences. But one guy has tried to cob­ble together a the­ory that ties it all together: The afore­men­tioned Paul Drockton.

As noted ear­lier, I’m quite wary of con­spir­acy buffs like Drock­ton; he inhab­its a world in which I do not feel com­fort­able. That said, we must give credit where due: His The­ory of Rom­ney — or should we call it a The­ory of Hughes? — just may hold water. At the very least, I hope his work will inspire fur­ther research. [Update: Turns out it doesn’t hold water very well at all. Please see the addi­tional mate­r­ial at the end of this post.]
That the­ory — which you can read here — is pretty sim­ple: The Mor­mon Mafia looted Howard Hughes’ hold­ings after the old man died. Bain may have pro­vided a mech­a­nism for the Big Howard Hughes Snatch Job.

In 1953, Hughes — hop­ing to do an end run around the IRS — trans­ferred his stock in Hughes Air­craft to the char­i­ta­ble Howard Hughes Med­ical Insti­tute. In 1985, GM bought Hughes Air­craft from the Insti­tute for more than five bil­lion dollars.

You’d think that Hughes Med­ical would now be one very well-heeled char­ity. But you’d be wrong. Ten years ago, its hold­ings had dwin­dled to $15.8 mil­lion. Dur­ing that time, the Insti­tute was under the man­age­ment of our old friend Bill Gay, who died in 2007.
A lot of dough seems to have slipped through that guy’s fin­gers. Oops.

Drock­ton asks: “How much of the Med­ical Institute’s money was man­aged by Bain Cap­i­tal?” It’s a fair ques­tion. As you may recall, dur­ing this time period the man­ag­ing direc­tor of Bain was Robert C. Gay, Bill Gay’s son. It’s not out of the ques­tion to sup­pose that Dad invested the money with sonny-boy.