RICHARD BRENNEKE SAYS HE WORKED AS A
contract agent for Mossad and the CIA for two
decades. His curriculum vitae reads as much like an anat-
omy of the off-the-books world that produced the Iran-
contra affair, as the career history of a Portland, Oregon
property manager and one-time philosophy professor with
a taste for excitement. “A Renaissance man,” his attorney
and sometime government go-between retired Marine
Col. Richard H. Muller called him, with abilities as a
computer programmer and a pilot, knowledge of interna-
tional banking, and access, by virtue of his ancestors’
arms manufacturing business in Germany, to East Bloc
arms merchants.
Having refused a job as a computer analyst with the
CIA, Brenneke’s entry into covert life came through his
work, between 1968 and 1971, for United Financial
Group, an overseas investment fund comprising 126 com-
panies working from Oregon and British Columbia.’ Bob
Kerritt of the CIA and various Mossad officers paid Bren-
neke to report on his dealings for the company in Beirut,
one of its off-shore banking centers. After Brenneke pro-
vided documentary information to the Securities and Ex-
change Commission that resulted in a civil fraud suit and
the firm’s subsequent collapse in 1972, he set up an off-
shore operation in Panama, the International Fund for
Mergers and Acquisitions (IFMA), for Ramon D’Onofrio,
a Las Vegas financier. 2
Brenneke says that IFMA was used to launder organ-
ized crime funds until late 1972 or early 1973, when Bob
Kerritt asked if the CIA could use IFMA for its work in
Central America. 3 Brenneke concurred. 4 After the passage
of the Boland Amendment, Mossad took over the com-
pany, Brenneke says.:
During the period he was engaged in international
finance, Brenneke says he also flew occasional missions
for the CIA’s Air America in Southeast Asia and for the
Agency in South America. 6 (In 1983 he set up a company
in Oregon called Air America Inc. 7 )
In 1975, Brenneke says he was asked by an Israeli he
knew in Beirut to install intelligence computers in Guate-
mala and Costa Rica. (Israel was previously known to
Richard Brenneke
have installed computer systems in Guatemala and El
Salvador which were used by those governments to iden-
tify opponents, and, in the case of Guatemala, to compile
death squad lists.”) He also maintains that in 1981-82 he
upgraded the system in Guatemala and installed in Costa
Rica an entirely new database program, called INCEST,
for Israel-and hooked up a transmitter in the system for
the CIA.
The following year Brenneke became involved with
the Harari network, buying arms in Czechoslovakia, and,
on two occasions, co-piloting cocaine flights to the United
States. On one of these, he says, Mike Harari, Israel’s man
in Panama, put him under a gun and photographed him
loading the plane. 9 Nonetheless, in May 1988 Brenneke
went public. He claims his son’s drug addiction drove him
to quit the operation.1″ He then identified Donald Gregg
(Vice President George Bush’s national security adviser)
as the U.S. manager of the narcotics-linked contra resup-
ply network.”
Richard Brenneke was also involved in the Iran leg of
the Iran-contra affair. He claims to have worked in a 1980-
1981 operation which flew Jews out of Iran; this was part
of an Israeli agreement to sell arms to the Islamic Repub-
lic.’ Brenneke also tried his hand at selling arms to Iran:
in 1985 and 1986 he repeatedly tried to broker an arms-
for-hostages deal, but failed to enlist the Administration’s
cooperation. In one of a series of memos to the Depart-
ment of Defense, Brenneke asked that he and his partner,
John de la Rocque, a U.S. citizen living in France, be
made exclusive agents for such sales.” 3
THE PUBLIC FIRST BECAME AWARE OF BREN-
neke when his memos were filed by the defense for a
number of Israeli and U.S. citizens charged in a $2.5
billion arms deal with Iran that turned out to be a sting
operation. The memos were intended as proof that the
defendants had knowledge that Administration policy fa-
vored arms sales to Iran.
Brenneke has had his own brushes with the law: a 1984
lawsuit over the fabrication of an aircraft title for the
purpose of concealing a lien, so the plane could be used as
collateral for a loan; and a 1986 check-kiting case which,
according to The Oregonian, was settled without prosecu-
tion.” Brenneke’s work over the years with the Customs
Service further complicates the picture. First, in the mid-
1970s, he collaborated in efforts to expose customs agents
with knowledge of narcotrafficking. Then, until well into
1988, he helped try to set up an arms sale to Iran as a
sting.’
Because of his charge that a top aide to Vice President
Bush, Donald Gregg, was involved in a narcotics ring,
Richard Brenneke’s credibility has been vigorously chal-
lenged, both by Bush’s supporters and by journalists.
Since Brenneke has only telephone bills and his memo-
randa of conversations with Gregg to support his claim, it
has failed thus far to register as “truth.” He seems to know
quite a bit about some of the operations of the Iran-contra
affair, and he possesses documents which appear to back
up his claims to have participated in some of them. Bren-
neke’s motive for quitting the Harari network-a change
of heart when he discovered his son was a drug addict-
seems believable, and his assumption of a post at the
liberal Center for International Development Policy in
Washington adds credence to his dissidence.
Brenneke’s career is a snapshot of the nether world of
the covert operative. Such a career makes a man emi-
nently deniable-and that is exactly what the CIA has
tried to do. In February 1987, the Agency departed from
its standard “no comment” on personnel, to state its claim
that Brenneke never worked for the CIA.16
A Renaissance Man
I. International Center For Development Policy, The Brenneke Report:
An Assessment of the International Center’s Investigation (Washington),
Aug. 25, 1988.
2. James Long, “West Linn man linked to fraud inquiries,” The Orego-
nian (Portland), Dec. 10, 1986: The Brenneke Report.
3. Jim Redden, “Burning Bush,” Willamnette Week (Portland), July 14-20,
1988.
4. The Br enneke Repor t.
5. Redden, “Burning Bush.”
6. The Brenneke Report.
7. Leslie L. Zaitz et al., “Local ‘key’ to Iran deal couldn’t open door,”
The Oregonian, Dec. 10, 1986
8. NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April 1987.
9. The Brenneke Report.
10. Author’s interview, May 28, 1988.
11. Newsweek, May 23, 1988.
12. Sunday Times (London), Oct. 28, 1984.
13. Dated Nov. 30, 1985, this memo is addressed to Brenneke’s attorney
Col. Muller to be passed to “appropriate officials of the U.S. government.” It
notes that the name the Iranians have given the proposed deal (for F-4E
aircraft, and other weapons in the future) is Demavand.
14. James Long and Leslie L. Zaitz, “CIA denies it ever employed
Brenneke,” The Oregonian, Feb. 12, 1987: Long, “West Linn man linked.”
15. The Brenneke Repor t.
16. Long and Zaitz, “CIA denies.”
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