Inside Richard Mellon Scaife's Conspiracy

--William Shakespeare, Richard II

 The plot for the current right wing conspiracy attempting to bring down William Jefferson Clinton had already been hatched and settled on by early last December…So Hillary Rodham Clinton is right about one thing: there has been a coordinated plot to bring down her husband and his Celebrity Curved Penis.

Political operative Pat Matriciana, who created the Clinton Scandals (as a media property at least) with his hugely-successful,  millions-selling, President-laming "Clinton Chronicles" video, is the guy who clued me in.

Let me be frank: I’m not a fan of Bill Clinton. Its simple: I’ve been to Arkansas, and I have a conscience. But from what I saw of the other side, the Scaife faction, in this seemingly-permanent state of vicious contention for power, the whole damn American political system should be arrested and charged with being run as an ongoing criminal enterprise.

For five years there has been an organized drumbeat of allegations questioning Clinton’s very legitimacy as President. Clinton and his organization, which some have dubbed the Dixie Mafia, have been charged by Scaife’s minions with drug smuggling and murder.

These are slightly more serious charges than dry-humping interns.

"Let’s have a party and overthrow the President!"

But, led by Scaife and his communications division, which include but are not limited to, Christopher Ruddy, Pat Matriciana, the American Spectator magazine, and the Washington Weekly on the Internet, the Republican ‘line’ did a 180, as the unseen hand, or the Dark Archangel, (another of Scaife’s nicknames) orchestrated a full-on retreat from their earlier challenges to Clinton’s legitimacy, based on drug smuggling which occurred in Mena, Arkansas.

This came early last December, a full month before Monica Lewinsky came on-line.

And clearly, now we all know why. Monica is easy. Republicans rarely have sex, and then only for procreation. That’s why they’re Republicans.

And of course I believe that the people of this nation deserve better. I think its just too bad we can’t afford it.

I was an accidental tourist, lost inside the vast right wing conspiracy. I observed conspiratorus right wingus in its native habitat, and some of them were kind enough to treat me as one of their own. That’s why some of what follows may sound like its from one of those old Readers Digest stories, about children raised by wolves.            

I made some friends among the wolves.

            * *              *

I first met Matriciana one clear winter day early last December at the redwood-beamed Mission Inn in Riverside California. I was there because, as reported by Salon magazine, he had amassed a $3 million plus war chest from sales of the Clinton Chronicles video, a hugely-successful propaganda vehicle, whatever the merits or lack of them of the film itself, in which drug smuggling and allegations about Vincent Foster’s death are prominently featured.

I was having lunch with the slightly-oily likes of Pat Matriciana because I needed to persuade him to part with a tiny portion of his $3 million war-chest to help promote video sales of a 2-hour TV special I had just produced, "The Secret Heartbeat of America."

I needed to sell it straight-to-video because when we took it to our big dog friend in Hollywood, he came back with a pained expression. "This show will not air while Clinton's President," he informed us sadly. "That’s just the way it is."

And immediately I understood that he was right. Only your true friends in Hollywood will ever give you the bad news straight.

So I went to Matriciana looking for salvation, the same kind he had gotten from Jerry Falwell, who had hawked the Clinton Chronicles on evangelistic television until it was as well-known as the Jerry Springer show.

Instead, what I found was a glimpse into an especially dark rabbit hole.

* * *

 

Matrciana swept smoothly into the dining room that day, a cell phone pressed to one ear, tall and still-handsome in his late fifties, looking faintly-Senatorial, with the leonine mane of gray hair so favored today by many of our moneyed elite, and apologized for being late.

Pleasantries aside, he asked about our background. So I told him: catholic school boy from the Midwest, moved at age 15 to California when my Dad’s corporation transferred him, in 1967, to San Francisco.

"So I finished high school outside of Berkeley," I told him. "Now, Pat, my turn: mind if I ask you a question?"

"Sure," he answered confidently, scanning the menu, smiling at someone he knew across the room.

I shot it at him: "Are you Agency?"

I meant, of course, was he from the Company. The good ‘ol bad ‘ol CIA. But this is, apparently, not considered a polite question, though god knows why not… because before he answered he coughed, and looked surprised.

Maybe he’s just not all that used to direct address. But at the end of the meal he said to me that for some reason he’d told me a lot more than he was planning to, so I guess it was a successful tactic.

"I’ve been to Berkeley, too," his reply began

"I was 'detailed' to Berkeley in 1965, to establish a countervailing force to Mario Savio's Free Speech Movement. While there I founded the Campus Crusade for Christ.

And then it was his turn to grin:

"I invented," he told me proudly, "Jesus freaks."

* * *

"I get the willies when I see closed doors."

--Joseph Heller

Make of this what you will. I was not taking notes, or tape-recording our conversation. But his choice of words was so descriptive that it burned itself into my memory, right there in the dining room of the homely Riverside Mission Inn:

"I was detailed to Berkeley…"

For anyone who has ever suspected, in a dark paranoid moment, that our culture--especially in the 60's--was somehow psycho-managed by the CIA, Matriciana' s offhand admission is enlightening, because it was clear he was in earnest, and I had no reason to doubt that he was telling me the truth.

To me, its implications for the current scandal are staggering. Because Matriciana, when he made the Clinton Chronicles, wasn’t an independent producer toiling in anonymity. He was an intelligence operative for Richard Mellon Scaife, himself an intelligence operative, with longstanding ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Oh, no, not another CIA-bashing story! Folks, what can you say: they keep asking for it.

* * *

Here’s a naïve question: if the campaign against Clinton today is led by shadowy men with equally shadowy agendas, what has become of democracy in this country?

Remember Watergate? If you’re like me, you remember it wrong. Because while I cheered Nixon’s removal as his just desserts for prolonging an obscene war longer than World War II lasted, apparently he was done in deliberately by two CIA agents, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, who bundled the burglary on purpose.

I’m still glad they ‘got’ Nixon, who was far scarier than Clinton will ever be. But the truth is the truth, and what we all thought about Watergate, apparently, and sadly, is a fairy tale.

The righteous indignation of the American people, coupled with the vigilance of a free press, didn’t bring down Richard Nixon.

The CIA did. You could look it up.

"And the Whitewater denouement looks even worse."

Because, instead of being forced to either put up or shut up, with real evidence of serious crime, our nation is being mocked by people who are betting, probably rightly, that in the excitement of the sexual 3-ring circus we’re about to be subjected to, no one will have the temerity to ask "where’s the beef?"

The truly sad thing is they’re probably right.

And since they’ve now proven themselves, in my mind at least, to be less than honorable in their motives, it behooves us all to look a little more closely at the forces behind the forces arrayed against William Jefferson Clinton.

Take the controversy swirling for years around Mena, Arkansas, for example: reporter Murray Waas detailed the Scaife connection to this oldest and darkest Clinton conspiracy theory of them all, about an airport in Arkansas from which clandestine flights carried -- according to investigators -- guns to the Contras and cocaine back into the United States.

The rap on Clinton is that he turned "a blind eye" to this illegal, CIA-linked operation. Don’t you love it? A ‘blind eye,’ a metaphor churned out, no doubt, by the same press flack for the elite deviant home team who wrote the line about our boys having just been ‘looking the other way.’"

The truth is, ‘our boys’ were and are knee-deep in cash. Narco-cash. DrugMoney.

And among this number can be included William Jefferson Clinton, his friend Dan Lasater, Barry Seal, as well as such Republican luminaries as Oliver North, Donald Gregg, and George Herbert Walker Bush.

The only explanation that explains the abrupt Republican course change last December is a desire to protect their own. And, quite possibly, to keep the drug money rolling into the coffers.

Matriciana told me was that there was one deal-breaker for him, should he decide to help to fund the marketing of "The Secret Heartbeat of America."

"I belong to an exclusive Republican committee of one hundred," Matriciana said.

That must be where they decided to play the ‘sleaze’ card.

But he gave me to understand that he saw, in these meetings, the widow of former CIA Director Bill Casey, a ‘dear’ friend. And he would have no part of any project that implicated Casey in drug smuggling…even if it were true.

Today it looks as if Bill Casey was directly responsible for the cocaine epidemic which ravaged this country during the 1980’s, through his green-lighting "Operation Black Eagle, which allowed guys like Barry Seal and Oliver north to engage in drug trafficking while still considering themselves "anti-Communists."

And it was on Bill Casey’s watch that it happened, as Pat surely knows. His concern for Mrs. Casey, while touching, undoubtedly masks a larger organizational imperative: to keep the drug trade under wraps, and as invisible as it can be made to the American people.

Remember Whitewater?

"Whitewater is a rope bridge of Democratic scandal stretched across a raging river of Republican crime," said one Iran Contra bag-man, waxing uncharacteristically poetic for a man bitter about not getting his ‘golden parachute, or as he termed it, his ‘briefcase,’ when Iran Contra hit and intelligence operatives went to ground.

According to the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories, Clinton himself profited from the drug operation at Mena. Another variation on the theory has it that Bubba's winking approach to the drug smuggling carried on through the Mena airport proves that Clinton is nothing more than a pawn of the intelligence community.

This explanation has always made a certain sense to me. A guy with as much time on his hands as Clinton appears to have is clearly not in a senior management position.

* * *

 If it (assassination) were done when 't is done, then 't were well
It were done quickly.      --William Shakespeare, Richard II

Plots to kill the king have probably been around as long as there’s been a king. And they are not necessarily an evil thing, either, especially in the dog days of summer, when there’s so little else to do.

But what can we conclude about a group which spends four years amassing evidence of narco-corruption at the very top of the government of the United States—then covers it up in favor of a play-by-play of a sad middle-aged man’s sexual frustration?

That they’re dirty, too. It's time to stop pretending that this scandal touches just one party, or just one group. Both political parties are involved. Indeed, it's apparent that in the present political climate, those who are not willing to show tolerance for the drug trade will simply never be allowed to attain office.

Had George Bush stayed in office a second term, there is no way that he would have escaped involvement in the Iran-Contra mess. Bill Clinton was George Bush's "safety net."

Conspiracies can be blown, and they can be defeated. But they cannot simply be

ignored. The refusal to admit any validity to conspiracy theory is itself a form of spectacular delusion-blind belief in the liberal, rational, daylight world in which we all have "rights", in which "the system works", and in which "democratic values will prevail in the long run."

I didn’t get mixed up with court intrigues for any of the fun reasons one can think of to conspire to engage in regicide…like dating really really ambitious girls.

I was merely trying to get television distribution for a two hour special about CIA drug smuggling through Mena Arkansas. And were it not for this, I would never have met Pat Matriciana. And that would have been a shame, because I never would have met the man who glibly professes an evangelical Christianity, while boasting at the same time of having invented Jesus freaks.

We live in interesting times.

part2--who is richard mellon scaife?