Have Guns, Will Travel
July 22, 1991

by Curtis Lang		print version
		print version (graphics)

This article first appeared in The Village Voice.

Portland--Richard Brenneke flashes a grin, picks a hollow-point shell up off the kitchen table, and slowly begins to load his .357 Magnum revolver. We don't expect any trouble--outside his neat, five-room wooden bungalow, the suburban hills are as quiet as the rainy Northwest woods. It's just something to do with his hands as he talks. Ann Daniel Brenneke, his wife of more that 20 years, is sitting a few feet away on the living room sofa, watching reruns of the detective sitcom Sledgehammer on the VCR. The sofa is covered with brightly colored miniature stuffed animals--pigs, a horse, lots of elephants.

I ask about the stuffed animals. It's late at night and he's been working hard on his autobiography, but for a man whose weak heart has sent him in and out of the hospital seven times over the last two years, Brenneke shows remarkable stamina.

"We have probably got 40 elephants," Brenneke says. "There's a whole wall of them running down the couch, and the ones in the other room. Each one represents a gift that Ann and I have given each other," often on his return from a mission overseas, Brenneke explains. "Some go back to the 1970s."

"There's The Enforcer...He's purple' he's a big elephant, and he's got a Don King hairdo...The little guy that is called Tutu has got a little tutu on," Brenneke continues. "Squeaky, who is a little yellow elephant, has talked [to me] so much for so many years and has traveled around the world with me God knows how many times, that she lost her squeaker. You used to be able to shake her and she'd squeak. She's the matriarch of the family." Brenneke smiles. "That's personal, that's Ann and me. And it means something to us."

Despite his .357 Magnum with the dum-dum bullets, the owlish Richard Brenneke looks and acts as if he would be more at home in Disneyworld than in the world of spies, mercenaries, arms merchants, and drug smugglers that populate the October Surprise scandal. But he has been, in fact, a key source for many of the stories about the alleged Republican deal to delay the release of 52 American hostages until after the 1980 election. Brenneke was the first to say that the Israelis were selling tons of weapons illegally to Iran in the mid-1980s; he was the first to say the vice-president George Bush's office acted as the covert administrative headquarters for a U.S./Israeli armsfor-drugs smuggling operation in Central America; he was the first to claim firsthand knowledge that Bush's then national security adviser, former CIA official Donald Gregg, had been coordinating a mulitinational contrasupply network; and Brenneke was the first person to say there had been a series of October 1980 meetings in Paris between then Reagan campaign chair William Casey and Iranian representatives to finalize the Republican hostage deal.

In short, Brenneke claims he has jetted around the world with Squeaky the GOP mascot in his lap for over two decades while working as a freelance contractor for American and Israeli intelligence agencies--laundering money, programming and running military intelligence computer systems, and smuggling guns and drugs. All in the name of the American way of life. A patriot's duty.

Unfortunately, the very thing that makes Brenneke a credible witness--his career as a covert gunrunner and money launderer --causes problems for Congressional investigators of the October Surprise. For like every other whistleblower in the case, from ABC Nightline's Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian-born arms merchant, to William Northrop, and American-born former member of Israeli military intelligence and arms dealer, Richard Brenneke is a refugee from a mysterious, threatening, and often flaky world, one in which lying has long been standard procedure. These are not the sorts of witnesses of which airtight court cases are made.

The CIA says Brenneke is a liar, as does the White House; three years ago, the government went so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to convict Brenneke for perjury. Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry's Iran-contra investigators refused to use Brenneke's testimony--after exhaustively interviewing him for months in 1988--when Senate staffer Jack Blum decided he was an unreliable witness. Even former Jimmy Carter national security aide and October Surprise expert Gary Sick says he would not use Brenneke as a primary source of information.

And yet, Brenneke's allegations won't go away. Last week, Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh cut a deal with Alan Fiers, former CIA supervisor for Central America. In exchange for being allowed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors, Fiers has testified that top officials of the agency knew about the arms sales to Iran and the diversion of the profits to the contras much earlier than previously acknowledged, and that he was ordered to lie to Congress about it.

Last May, former president Jimmy Carter told the Voice that he suspected that Donald Gregg, who had moved from the CIA to the NSC during Carter's term, had leaked sensitive details of Carter administration negotiations for the release of the hostages to the Reagan/Bush camp. Fiers worked closely with both Donald Gregg and his aide, former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez; at the very least, Fier's testimony would seem to confirm that the agency, from top to bottom, supported illegal covert warfare and conspired to hide it from the American people. To do that, they would have had a need for many a contract pilot and money launderer like Richard Brenneke. And, once again, Brenneke was the first to point a finger at Gregg.

Brenneke says there is a paper trail--that he can prove much of what he has said, and that proof is what he's holding for his book. He did not show that paper to me. Until he publishes, then, it's a question of whom you choose to believe: the White House, Donald Gregg, and the CIA, or a middle-class former math professor turned money launderer named Richard Brenneke. It's a question of credibility.

"It does not serve my interest to make these statements," Brenneke freely admitted in a 1988 interview with former CIA agent Frank Snepp, then of ABC News. "As a matter of fact, what it does is to cost me possibly some friendships which I'll be sorry to lose. It certainly is not going to make me a very welcomed individual in the Republican party, and you're talking to a Republican voter here who voted for Ronald Reagan. And yet, I think these statements have to be made."