Please introduce yourself.

Hi. I'm Mike Ruppert and I'm the publisher of From The Wilderness newsletter
and ex-LAPD Narc and general troublemaker for corrupting and evil influence
around the world.

Tell us about the Website.

The Website is www.copvcia.com, and what I want you to do is just think of Roe
v. Wade but just make this Cop v. CIA - policeman against the CIA - get it?

When you created the newsletter what were you responding to and what were
your intentions?

Well in March of ‘98, it was about four months after I confronted CIA Director
John Deutch at Lock High School on world television and kind of shamed him
and said - he had come to Los Angeles to talk about CIA - allegations about CIA
dealing drugs and I stood up on CNN and ABC Nightline and I said, "I am a
former LAPD narcotics detective. I worked South Central and I can tell you
Director Deutch that the Agency has dealt drugs in this country for a long time."
And the room exploded and what I saw at that time was there was a crying lack
of knowledge in the body politic about how much evidence there really was about
the criminal activities of the Central Intelligence Agency about specifically
dealing drugs. I said wait a minute - I can pull out a little newsletter and say if
you look at this document here's the proof for that. Because a lot of people were
running around with the vague notion that maybe CIA was bad guys and they'd
done some things wrong and they didn’t know how much actual proof there was.
So that’s been the mission - is to present the real proof that’s irrefutable about
what goes on.

Let's talk about your experience on the beat and what you confronted as a
citizen trying to do right in the streets - must be pretty wild as it is.

I haven't been a policeman now for a long time. I graduated from the LA Police
Academy class of 11/73, hit the streets in January of '74 in South Central Los
Angeles. It was a vastly different world then - there was no cocaine and we had
six-shooters and strait batons and nobody had a radio that you carried around
with you. But the world has changed enormously. I specialized in narcotics
quickly and heroin was the predominant drug on the street in my area - it was
Mexican brown heroin in those days and what happened to me was that I met
and fell in love with a woman who was a contract CIA agent and a career agent…
Now I come from a CIA family and they had tried to recruit me, so this was not
unexpected to me but I began to see that she was protecting drug shipments
and that the Agency was actively involved in dealing drugs and this happened
with her in Hawaii and Mexico and Texas and New Orleans and I kept saying I'm
a narc - I'm not going to overlook drug shipments and that’s what basically set
me on the irreversible course of events that kind of determined the rest of my life,
and that was 1977.

What is in a person who - I imagine - now maybe I'm naïve, but you imagine
someone in the CIA as thinking about protecting the country or at least the
intelligence community as something that’s ordered around national security -
what do you think it is that triggers them to want to reconcile drug shipments in
the country in line with that pursuit?

Well they don’t even have to reconcile it. That’s what took so long to figure out
but that’s what we teach now with From The Wilderness - is that it wasn’t just
CIA dealing some drugs to fund covert operations. It is that drug money is an
inherent part of the American economy. It has always been so, as it was with
the British in the 1600s when they introduced opium into China to fund the
triangular trade with the British East India Company.

- phone rings -

So describe what you were talking about.

The point about the drug trade is not that the CIA dealt a few drugs during the
Contra years to fund the covert operation that Congress didn't want it to engage
in. The CIA has dealt drugs for all 50 years of its existence - 50 plus years - even
before it was the CIA. And the point is that with 250 billion dollars a year in
illegal drug money moved - laundered through the American economy - that
money benefits Wall Street. That’s the point of having the prohibitive drug trade,
which the CIA effectively manages for the benefit of Wall Street.

During the Contra war or just before the Contra war, the annual cocaine
consumption in this country was about 50 metric tons a year - let's say back in
1979. By 1985, it was 600 metric tons a year. We are still consuming 550 metric
tons of cocaine a year in this country and that money that’s generated from that
is used - let's say Pablo Escobar or some drug dealer in Colombia calls General
Motors and buys 1000 Suburbans - GM doesn’t ask where it came from. Philip
Morris is now being sued by 28 departments (the same thing as States) in
Colombia for smuggling 2 billion dollars worth of Marlboro cigarettes into
Colombia and getting paid for it with cocaine money! That money boosts Philip
Morris' stock value on Wall Street. General Electric the same way - it's
documented in the US Department of Justice. So the purpose of the Agency
being involved in the drug trade has been to generate illegal cash - fluid liquid
capital which gives those who can get their hands on it an unfair advantage in the
marketplace.

So when you hear the term war on drugs -

Well it's not a war on drugs. It's a war on people. Consider this: Joseph
McNamara, a former chief of San Jose from the Hoover Institute at Stanford
University published some really telling figures. In 1972, when Richard Nixon
started the war on drugs, the annual federal budget allocation was 110 million
dollars a year for enforcement. In fiscal year 2000, 28 years later, the budget
allocation was 17 billion dollars a year and yet in the year 2000, there are more
drugs in this country, they are cheaper, and they are more potent than they were
in 1972. That has to tell you that there's some other agenda going on here.

Going back to the idea of China and the opium war, it is described also as a war
on the people of China to bring them to a state of passivity where they couldn't
actually be a force - do you see in some ways the drugs that come in satisfying
a racist goal - with the crack laws especially in black inner city populations?

There's a number of ways to look at that. For the British, the introduction of
opium into China was a means to an end. China was a homogeneous culture.
When the British arrived there, the British were these Caucasian heathens, and
the Chinese didn't want anything to do with them. They didn't want to give up
their tea, they didn't want to give up their silk and the British said we can't have
this. They went to India and grew the opium poppy in East India in the foothills of
the Himalayas and smuggled it to China. And what they did over the course of a
hundred years was they converted China from a homogeneous culture that was
unified, into a society of warlords fighting for turf to see who had which drug
dealing regions.

If you look at what happened in South Central LA in the 1980s, the model is
exactly the same - it didn't change. The issue with drugs is this - and when I talk
about narcotics, I come from several different angles - it's not just that I am a
former narcotics investigator with the LAPD. I am also a recovering alcoholic who
has sponsored men in recovery for 17 years. I've served on the board of directors
of the National Council on Alcoholism. Alcohol is a drug. I have written more than
35 articles in the US Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence on treatment and
recovery - treatment and recovery of addiction. People are going to get addicted
no matter what you do and a certain percentage of any population will always get
addicted.

What the Agency has done - and I have written specifically on this and it's on my
web site – through institutions like the Rand Corporation and UCLA's
Neuro-Psychiatric Institute and a number of academic projects which the CIA
has funded, is they have deliberately engaged in pharmacological research to
find out which drugs are most addictive. For example, in 1978 - 79, long before
the cocaine epidemic hit here in the United States, research scientists from
UCLA's Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, some of whom, like Lewis Jolly West who
are very closely tied to the Mk-Ultra program, were doing research in South
America where South American natives were smoking bassuco, which has the
same effect as crack cocaine. And the addiction was so strong that they were
performing lobotomies and the people were still smoking the bassuco or the
paste in Colombia and they knew that because NPI and the Rand Corporation
brought that data back. So the CIA knew in 1980 exactly what the effects of
crack was going to be when it hit the streets.

Who benefits most from an addicted inner city population?

It's not just who benefits most - it's how many people can benefit on how many
different ends of the spectrum. We published a story in my newsletter From The
Wilderness in May of 1998 that was written by Catherine Austin-Fitts, a former
assistant secretary of housing. She produced a map in 1996 - August of 1996 -
that’s the same month that the Gary Webb story broke in the San Jose Mercury
News. It was a map that showed the pattern of single family foreclosures - or
single family mortgages - HUD back mortgages in South Central Los Angeles.
Actually it was Los Angeles but when you looked at the map all of these HUD
foreclosures, they were right in the heart of the area where the crack cocaine
epidemic had occurred. And what was revealed by looking at the HUD data was
that, during the 1980s, thousands of middle-class African American
wage-earning families with mortgages lost their homes. Why? There was drive-by
shootings, the whole neighborhood deteriorated, crack people moved in next
door, your children got shot and went to jail and you had to move out, the house
on which you owed $100, 000 just got appraised at $40, 000 because nobody
wanted to buy it and you had to flee - you couldn’t sell it so you walked on it,
and what Catherine's research showed was that someone else came along and
bought thousands of homes for 10-20 cents on the dollar in the years right after
the crack cocaine epidemic.

So the economic model is the same one that’s always been in play for the ruling
elite. It's use the poor people's money to steal their own land. You get the poor
people to buy the drugs - using their money you take that money to bring in
more drugs which destroys their property value - and then you steal it back. And
the same thing has happened not only in Los Angeles – it has happened in
Washington Heights in New York. As a matter of fact it's been documented by a
fabulous researcher - Professor Jon Metzger at the University of Michigan, who
is one of my subscribers - he's a doctorate of urban planning. It was discussed
in the Kerner Commission Report in 1967 after the Detroit riots where it became
US government policy - that no more than 1/4 of the population of any major
inner city should be minority - spatial de-concentration, they call it - which really
sounds Nazi to me… spatial de-concentration - but it's in the Kerner
Commission Report.

So the plan is literally kill, loot - let me make it real simple - it's kill the Indians,
take the land. Kill the Indians. Take the land. Take the wealth. So it is something
of a misnomer… or a misconception to believe that all of the cocaine or all of the
crack cocaine was only used by African Americans. There's as much crack
almost being used by whites as there was by African Americans - certainly in
terms of total consumption - whites probably consumed more cocaine than
African Americans but they consumed powder. And what we saw was a
deliberate effort by the Agency or Agency-related organizations to make sure the
large quantities of the cocaine and the high quality cocaine got into the inner
cities like Los Angeles and it was protected.

And that’s what I saw with the LAPD - I saw the hands-on working relationship,
the interface between local police departments and the CIA. I was first recruited
when I was a senior at UCLA, the Agency flew me to Washington and said,
"Mike we want you to become a CIA case officer - you've already interned for
LAPD for three years, you interned for the chief, your family was CIA, your
mother was NSA, blablabla, and then we want you to go back to the LAPD and
being an LAPD cop will just be your cover." Now the Agency has done that -
we've documented it in New Orleans, in New York in police departments all
across the country. And I've seen the interface where the CIA will deal very
quietly with local agencies to protect their drug operations and that’s one of the
reasons they have to do it - it weeds out competition.

Now the people who go on from CIA training and become police officer covers,
do they not ever - are they not inherently crooked? Is it for money or do they
actually believe there's a benefit here?

Well we were talking earlier before about Lenny Horowitz and his great book,
Emerging Viruses. He has a quote in the front of that book that’s one of my
favorite quotes of all time - it's from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And Solzhenitsyn
says that men, in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is
good - otherwise they can't do it. Now the Agency - not everybody in a local
police department who connects with the CIA is a case officer. The Agency will
use contractors. They’ll approach guys who have military specialties and they’ll
hire them on the side. There are some, like LAPD chief Daryl Gates, who I
believe was a case officer his whole life - and we can go there later if you want
to… Others are just contract employees but they brainwash themselves and it’s
easy to believe – it’s one of the worst human vices of all - if you're making all this
money and you have power, then you're doing it for a good cause. So there's an
aspect of delusion about it but it is one that becomes extremely vicious when
you try to bring it out of denial.

The guy that goes and buys the house at the cheap rate, how is he really
connected to the CIA who are bringing in from Nicaragua - some people would
say that’s a simplified version of a conspiracy theory - how would you respond to
those people?

I'm not saying that the person who bought the - and this is all documentable, this
is provable, this is not speculation, we can trace this money very quickly - it's
very easy to do. That’s one of the reasons we've been so dangerous at From the
Wilderness - because this is not speculation. People don’t have to know - did
the guy who was operating the roundhouse that turned around the train that was
rolling to Aushwitz know what was going on in the shower room? I'm not making
that argument but it was all part of the system that produced the same net
result. And what you find repeatedly - one of the things that we'll be seeing more
of I think in From the Wilderness and certainly I've seen excellent research on
this is that one of the biggest investors in HUD multi-family units and HUD
mortgages is Harvard University. It is a huge corporation that has a long list of
ties to organized crime. Well, you take major firms like Harvard or related
investment firms that also turn out to be huge campaign contributors, and they
find out that there's 200 houses on the market for 20 cents on the dollar they
don’t ask how it got that way, they just follow the money.

I just did an interview, I was at the Shadow Convention where I interviewed a
number of very famous people: Jesse Jackson, John Conyers, Maxine Waters,
Ariana Huffington, Scott Harshburger of Common Cause - a great many very
important American people - and I talked to them about the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals in July of 2000 confirming that there was evidence that CIA was ordering
drug dealing by a Contra leader - Renaldo Pena - and it was funny because I got
all these political answers but the one guy I talked to was a guy named Rex
Nutting, who was the bureau chief of CBS Market Watch - he is the head guy for
CBS for the stock market. And we're sitting back in the room - I'm waiting for
Huffington to get free - and I'm talking to this guy and we're talking about the fact
that Richard Grasso, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, last July
went to Colombia and cold called on the FARQ guerrillas and asked them to
invest their drug money in Wall Street. And Rex Nutting says, "Well of course,
they always go where the money is - it's obvious."

The drug money is always going through Wall Street. Wall Street smells money
and it doesn’t care where the money comes from. They'll go for the drug money.
And we jokingly laughed that the CIA in '47 when it was created with the National
Security Act, it was written by a guy called Clark Clifford, who was a Wall Street
banker and lawyer. He's the guy that brought us BCCI. The outlines for CIA - the
design for the Agency - was given to Clark Clifford by John Foster and Allen
Dulles - both law partners in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. In
1968-69 - '69 after Nixon came in - his chairman of SEC (Securities and
Exchange Commission) was William Casey - the same guy who was Ronald
Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence. And the current vice president in
charge of enforcement for the New York Stock Exchange, Dave Dougherty, is a
retired CIA General Counsel. The CIA is Wall Street and vice versa. When you
understand that, and money is the primary objective, everything else just falls
into place.

Thank you so very much.

I saw light bulbs going on all over there…

What is the character of our governing body that’s taken on this apparatus?
What times do we live in?

Well this is the Roman Empire. This is the Roman Empire before the fall - there
is no question. I have written extensively in From The Wilderness and we’ve
been right - we talk about a thing called a map. You ever have the experience
where you're reading a map - you're trying to go to a party or some place you've
never been before? And you follow this map and you read it and you see
according to the map I'm supposed to be at 34th and Main. And you look up at
the street sign and it says 34th and Main. You feel good. But if you look up at
the street sign and it says 5th and Broadway, you get this real sinking feeling
inside. Everybody - most of the world is operating from a bad map. From The
Wilderness has a good map because we've been able to predict what's going to
happen, we can explain it and make sense out of it.

The map that we're following is that - and this is where I agree wholeheartedly
with the Le Monde in Paris - they're a fabulous publication that are about to give
us a pretty decent endorsement in September - this month - is that organized
crime is probably the lubricating force for the entire world economy right now.
There's a trillion dollars a year in organized crime money. That trillion dollars a
year is liquid and if you think of money kind of - criminal money, drug money - as
water, which is thin - it can flow very quickly form point a to point b. And in the
world markets, where you apply money is where you control business. You
control markets. You control banks. You control interest rates. Drug money
flows fastest. Money that is not criminal money has to go though regulations and
banking systems, it has to go through taxations. It's tracked. The lawyers follow
it. That money moves like molasses.

So those who have the access to the cheapest capital always win. That's why, if
you don’t play with drug money in the world economy today, you can't play at
all. That’s why we have documented that drug money was going directly into Al
Gore's presidential campaign. Why? Because the Republicans, going as far
back as Reagan, were using drug money and that’s how they put Reagan into
office - with Bill Casey. If you don’t play in that mode, you can't play at all. But
that is like - the analogy I use is it's like a snake eating its own tail - it's got to
stop sooner or later.

We were faced with a huge economic lapse in 1997 when the Asian economies
collapsed and the whole world held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop
in the American markets. Well it didn’t drop. But you know why it didn’t drop?
Because we went to war in Kosovo. We blew up several hundred billion dollars
worth of bridges and refineries and factories. The KLA controls 77% of the heroin
that’s entering into Western Europe. We loosened up that money. American
companies got all these new contracts to rebuild the refineries, the bridges and
the economy was saved. Now we’re going to war in Colombia - we have already
taken combat casualties but it's not sustainable because Colombia is and will
become another Vietnam. And South America is already saying we're not going
there. So I think we're on the brink of some really serious economic upheavals in
the US economy that are essential because the system cannot last. The way I
see it - this is this very much like Rome. And I see some big changes coming
very soon.

Obviously you deploy information in the desire that people might become
conscious and make a change. What do you think - when the average American
says a) why is this not in the major media and b) if it's true then it's gotta stop -
when someone says why is this not in the major news media what do you say?

As far as the major media goes, it’s real simple. First of all, if you look at what
just happened with AOL and Time Warner who own CNN… We have proved in
From The Wilderness that CNN was - flat lost a lawsuit over the use of serrin
gas during Vietnam… the Tailwind Suits were settled and the former producer
April Oliver just bought a six-bedroom house. I mean CNN cannot afford to tell
the truth because what happened when they tried to tell the truth is Henry
Kissinger and Colin Powell picked up the phone and scared Ted Turner to death
by threatening his stock value on Wall Street.

It's very interesting to note that one of the companies that I track as far as
laundering drug monies - General Electric - happens to own NBC. Now what
happens - everybody knows that GE brings good things to life - they make
DVDs, VCRs, they make everything - they make television sets, telephones.
When drug money in South America says I'd like to buy 100 million dollars worth
of TVs and DVDs so that someone laundering drug money in Colombia can open
a chain of appliance stores and make that money legal, GE asks absolutely no
questions about where that money is coming from. As a matter of fact there are
no requirements for Wall Street to report drug money being invested.

If you and I go to a bank and we take in $10,001 in cash, the bank has to fill out
a currency transaction report because you might be laundering money. GE can
accept a check for 100 million dollars from the biggest drug lord in the world and
there is no requirement in the world that GE report that to anybody. But with a
thing called the price to earnings ratio on their shares, a hundred million dollars
in net profit for GE in South America - which was very easily done last year -
equates to, at a price to earnings ratio of 30 to 1, an increase in GE's stock
value of 3 billion dollars.

So we're living in a hugely inflated bubble and not one of the major media outlets
in this country - all of which are publicly traded corporations afraid of takeover,
trying to maximize profits - can afford to tell the truth. That’s why we see these
great opportunities for little organizations like From The Wilderness and you
guys and everybody else that’s coming up now - because what we’re peddling is
the truth and what we find is the truth sells.

Very well said.

So now the second part of the question is this: what do you think the reaction of
the American people will be when a critical mass of people actually digests this
information in a rational way?

Denial is not a river in Egypt. There's gonna be a lot of wailing and gnashing of
teeth. If I think of this in terms of - and this is a model that I like - there's several
ways that I describe this - America is hopelessly addicted to its consumerism…
and blinded by the fact that the good things that we enjoy in our lives are at the
price of slave labor in Indonesia, East Timor and all over the world. But we’re
blind to that - the same way that a drunk on a barstool is blind to the fact that
he's drunk. Alcoholics don’t stop because they don’t know when to stop, they
don't know how. One is too many and ten thousand is not enough.

The two models that I use to describe what happens in the American culture -
one of which is we're like a family in which the father is molesting the youngest
daughter - and everybody in the family conspires in a conspiracy of silence to
scapegoat the youngest daughter because they're afraid of what's going to
happen to the family if they speak out - or worse yet, oh my god, he's going to
come after me. America very much works that way.

But the other way that I look at it is that we have to hit a bottom. Something is
going to have to break. Something's gonna have to fall out - something's gonna
have to destabilize the equilibrium here before people will even begin to look at
what's going on. Yes, we've made some enormous progress over the last five
years because there's a real hunger for good information, but as far as reaching
the vast majority of the American people, something's gonna have to knock 'em
off their barstool.

Cool. How would you characterize our "democracy" - the two party system? Is
there any truth to the fact that we elect our officials?

No. It’s a joke. There are two ends of the same party. There are two factions.
There's what I like to call a Clinton faction - even though he is leaving office - and
a Bush faction. But they are like the Genoveses and the Gambinos. If I am going
to be the shopkeeper who is gonna have - who is gonna be oppressed - it
doesn’t make any difference to me whether there's a Gambino or a Genovese
sticking a gun in my face and taking the money out of my pocket. We rationalize
this by saying, well they keep the economy good etc, etc. That's the blind spot.

But no one in the American political system is allowed to rise to the level where
they can seriously compete for the White House unless they are already
compromised. Period. I know - I've been there. I was the press spokesman for
the Perot presidential campaign in Los Angeles County in 1992. I had known
Ross Perot before - we had spoken on issues of the POWs and the CIA and
drugs, and what I found out is I have yet to meet a millionaire who has my best
interest at heart. And what I saw done was Ross had no intention of winning and
it was all fixed even as far back as '92. I don’t think we've had a fair election in
this country since John Kennedy, even if that was fair - so…

Can you explain some of the political adventures or misadventures that brought
the CIA to the public eye around drug dealing?

Well if you go back historically, the Agency has been real active in Central
America since the Second World War. I mean the Agency was down there even
before it was CIA with United Fruit and all the major landowners in Central
America. In 1979, Anastasio Samosa, the dictator of Nicaragua, was overthrown
by the Sandino movement - the Sandinistas. And they were a "Marxist"
movement and Ronald Reagan mobilized the country to stave off this alleged
threat of communist imperialism on America's doorstep. And it was a whole lot
of rubric and Congress d

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