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Summer 2002

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Issue 43

The Conspirators: secrets of an Iran-Contra insider

Al Martin
Pray, Montana: National Liberty Press, 2001, $14.95,
ISBN 0-97-10042-0-X

Alexander 'Al' Martin is a retired Lt. Commander in the US Navy, a former member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle-ranking player in the thicket of scandals known as Iran-Contra. This might be the most startling book written about post-war American politics; and it might be a complete load of hooey. I can't tell which; and I'm not even sure how I would set about checking which. To do so would certainly require a great deal of money and time to run round the United States checking Martin's astonishing allegations.

Martin tells us that virtually all the Iran-Contra fund-raising operations in the US were either designed as frauds or were exploited as frauds; that what began as an attempt to raise money for the Contras pretty quickly developed into a vast series of scams in which - as usual - the US tax-payer got royally screwed. These aren't vague generalisations; he names the fraudsters, from the vice President George Bush downwards, through the known Iran-Contra players, many others unknown to me, into the intelligence services, the justice system, the courts, the judges and the politicians. He names hundreds of people and dozens of operations and hundreds of millions - maybe billions (I didn't count) - of dollars ripped-off. He shows how it was done and by whom. (Even if the allegations turn out to be false, this would remain a guide to institutional fraud in America.) He also names dozens of people he claims were murdered to cover it all up: his cover-up death total is 400.

'How many others in my age group can say that they have personally known in their adult lifetimes almost 400 people who have died under clouded circumstances?'

Some of the names he gives are familiar, most are not. He claims to have evidence. He refers to tapes and documents in his possession; at one point he seems to hint that he covertly taped recorded many of the meetings he describes. (Odds on him being the only one doing so?) But there is no documentation in this book and no index. It reads as though Martin sat down and talked into a tape recorder and had the monologue transcribed.

At a couple of places a British connection appears. Here is one of those sections. This will give you a feel of the style of the book.

'....the infamous, sinister and renowned Churchill Matrix (sic) Corporation. This was an MI-6 deal and their personal hand-picked boy was Paul Henderson. This became public in 1988. In that lawsuit, the criminal action in London, where MI-6 finally had to admit it was one of their cut-outs and that in fact it had been used for illicit weapons transactions and that in fact Henderson was one of their guys.

After they made those admissions, any further look at Churchill Matrix got shut down in a hurry. One of the reasons is because of Mark Thatcher's connection to it.

Churchill Matrix kept financing Mark Thatcher deals.

Mark was a young guy, but these were the go-go 80s and his mother was Prime Minister and he figured he could do whatever he wanted.

I have a picture of him with Oliver North. I mean, he got very involved with us at one time. He liked the fast life. He liked to do drugs. He was big into racing cars. He liked women and he raised money for us among loyal Tories in England.

That money would then get funnelled through Churchill Matrix, until it later became revealed what Churchill Matrix was doing - vis-a-vis illicit and illegal armaments shipments in the Middle East.' (p. 42)

Much of this is wrong. The name of the Matrix Churchill, for starters. (And on p. 136 Paul Henderson becomes Paul Anderson.) But OK, the book is a transcribed tape and no-one checked the details. But he also adds:

'The only reason the deal fell apart and became public is that in this country Mark Thatcher got listed as a co-defendant in the original indictment'.

Which 'original indictment'? Which 'deal'? What kind of 'deal'?

And that wasn't the reason the deal fell apart in the UK. It fell apart because of a dispute between HM Customs and the rest of the secret state; and, when the whole stupid mess ended up in court, the late Alan Clark MP was unwilling to see MI6 agent and Matrix Churchill executive Paul Henderson wrongly convicted and blew the gaff - the occasion of his famous phrase 'economical with the actualité'.

Was Matrix Churchill 'sinister and renowned'? That certainly isn't how it was portrayed in the UK where it was presented as a rather humdrum machine-tool company, somewhere in the Midlands, a company bought by the Iraqis, to be used to make tools to make armaments for the war with Iran. And far from shutting down further inquiries, the court case here was the beginning of the investigation which led to the Scott Report and a great deal of publicity. To my knowledge Mark Thatcher is not mentioned in the Scott Report - not that I have actually read the copy I own; but other journalists have and they would have spotted Thatcher's name - and there is no evidence to support Martin's version of him.

In short, the entire section appears to be false in virtually every detail.

There is another section which made me wonder. On p. 58 he describes the murder of a witness and writes:

'This was actually a sanitation team which had been sent from Department 4 of the Central Directorate - otherwise known as the Domestic Wet Operations Division of the CIA.'

'Wet operations' used to the euphemism used by the KGB for assassination. Do we really believe the CIA uses the same euphemism? Do we believe the CIA has anything named anything remotely like that?

It might all be true, the system might be as corrupt as Martin's portrait; these are the same people who gave the us the great Savings and Loan rip-off. The book comes decorated with plaudits from three people who apparently take it all as true but sensational allegations are all he gives us.

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