Wackenhut Corporation

Wackenhut Corporation is a security and investigative firm founded in 1954 by George R. Wackenhut and three other former FBI Special Agents. Initially named Special Agent Investigators, it expanded to physical security and was renamed Wackenhut Corporation in 1958. Headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida, Wackenhut grew to become one of the world's largest security and investigative firms, with operations across the United States and internationally. The San Francisco Chronicle described it as being "led by former officials of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, Defense Department and federal law enforcement."¹²

Operations and Services

Wackenhut provides security and investigative services to businesses, industries, and various U.S. Government agencies. Its services include guard and electronic security for various facilities, personnel background reports, pre-employment screening, polygraph examinations, and criminal investigations. The company also develops sophisticated computerized security systems through its subsidiary, Wackenhut Electronic Systems Corporation.¹

Notable contracts include providing security for the Nevada Test Site, the Alaskan Pipeline, and Lawrence Livermore Labs, as well as numerous American embassies abroad.¹

Leadership and Government Connections

The company's leadership has historically included executives and managers with extensive backgrounds in the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other military and governmental security fields. Its board of directors has featured prominent former government officials such as Stansfield Turner (former CIA director), Clarence Kelley (former FBI director), Frank Carlucci (former CIA deputy director and Defense Secretary), James Rowley (former Secret Service director), Bobby Ray Inman (former acting chairman of President Bush's foreign intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director), and Joseph Carroll (former Director, Defense Intelligence Agency).¹

William J. Casey, former CIA director under Ronald Reagan, served as Wackenhut's outside legal counsel before his appointment.¹

The CIA Security File

On March 14, 1963, Fred R. Youngblood, chief of the nonofficial cover branch of the CIA's Central Cover Staff, met George R. Wackenhut at the Arlington home of Wes Reynolds, a former FBI agent who represented the company in Washington, "to explore its potential for cover support." His memorandum of March 26 records a firm of 1,100 employees with offices in eleven cities and Puerto Rico. Wackenhut "freely states that he trades on the reputation of the FBI by publicizing widely the 21 ex-FBI agents, including two former Assistant Directors of the FBI, in his management." He said he would be "willing to dispatch teams to set up personal security systems for foreign chiefs of state whom the Agency wants protected" and was "amenable to any reasonable application of his capabilities to Agency problems," including financing an overt operation set up at the agency's behest if it did not pay for itself. Youngblood found him "a clean-cut, energetic, ambitious young business man" who "is interested in profits, but it is my impression he is sincerely eager to do what he can to assist the government and feels that CIA offers one possible opportunity."³

A memorandum for the record of July 28, 1975, summarizes the file. The agency opened files on Wackenhut and his company in May 1960 "for the purpose of obtaining cover support for Western Hemisphere Agency employees assigned to Florida." He "was investigated by this Agency with favorable results, and a Covert Security Approval for his use was granted on 21 November 1961. Subsequently, his company provided cover backstopping to Western Hemisphere employees stationed in the Miami, Florida, area. In April of 1967 due to the notoriety that Mr. Wackenhut had received in connection with his activities in Florida, Mr. Wackenhut's Covert Security Approval was rescinded and this Agency severed our relations with him." That January Governor Claude Kirk had made Wackenhut the unpaid director of a privately financed "war on crime," staffed by the company's investigators.⁴⁵

On April 24, 1968, a year after the severance, the chief of the JMWAVE station in Miami sent headquarters a telepouch dispatch, subject "Wackenhut Corporation," reporting that the Miami Herald business section of April 23 "carried an article reflecting that the Wackenhut Corp., a Coral Gables, Florida firm, had announced an agreement to purchase the Reliable Reporting Service, Inc., Rockville Center, New York, which provides pre-insurance and pre-employment reports for more than 400 clients in the insurance, financial and industrial fields." It went to the chief of the Western Hemisphere Division "as a matter of information."⁶ Routing slips of September and December 1969 added to the file the card of the manager of Wackenhut Protective Systems in Rockville, Maryland. In March 1971 the agency's security office approved a contact clearance for a Wackenhut employee. On April 20, 1971, the special agent in charge, Arthur C. Sheridan, wrote to the Miami field office that "restrictions imposed on the use of Subject corporation in 1967 still apply and were recently reaffirmed in a cable dated 16 July 1970." The chief of a project with the cryptonym VENOM wanted contact with two Wackenhut men, Manuel J. Chavez and Junius Jaffe Mallin. "It is recognized that Subject firm could be an operational asset to Project VENOM in certain circumstances," Sheridan wrote, but "this office can accomplish its mission without the necessity of utilizing Subject corporation." Other records of the same Miami security office show VENOM collecting on the armed exile groups in the city: on Gerry Hemming and Roy Hargraves in July 1970, when they were reported to be planning a missile attack on Guantanamo to be blamed on Cuba, and on Ricardo Morales, whom the project had used briefly in 1964 and who in May 1971 was presenting himself at a Miami hotel as an agency operative "with mission to make an approach to local mafia."⁷

The same item went on April 30, 1968, from the Office of Security to its New York field office "for your information only."⁸ The National Archives' index of the agency's file on the company lists, among records not yet reproduced here, a memorandum of April 25, 1967, from the deputy director of security, Victor R. White, to the counterintelligence staff on "DCI opposition to the use of private investigative firm"; a Washington Star clipping of November 8, 1971, circulated to the director of security, on the retired Air Force Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the retired Vice Admiral William Raborn, director of central intelligence from 1965 to 1966, joining the Wackenhut board; a note of February 4, 1974, on a telephone call from Raborn "trying to arrange an appointment with Colby for himself and Mr. Mayo"; a three-page memorandum from Howard Osborn to the director of February 6, 1974, on the company that "contains a recommendation for approval"; and a note from the director of February 11, 1974, "concerning telephonic contact with Admiral Raborn of Wackenhut Corp."⁹

The 1975 memorandum ends: "In November of 1974 it was learned that Wackenhut Corporation was providing guard coverage to Global Marine Development, Incorporated (GMDI), Los Angeles, California, a firm that the Agency office of DDS&T was dealing with. This Agency made no attempt to persuade GMDI to terminate their contract with Wackenhut Corporation, and it is assumed that GMDI is still receiving guard coverage from them." Global Marine Development built and operated the Hughes Glomar Explorer for the Directorate of Science and Technology, which used the ship in the summer of 1974 to raise part of a sunken Soviet submarine in Project Azorian. The Los Angeles Times disclosed the operation on February 7, 1975.⁴¹⁰

The Domestic Contact Service File

A second agency file on the company, case 65805 of the Domestic Contact Service, the overt office that debriefed businessmen and travellers, opens seven months after the Office of Security severed relations. On November 27, 1967, Gus C. Guerrero of the Miami field office met the vice president of Wackenhut Services, Inc., who "is cognizant of all contractual services in being with the company in foreign countries" and "will make arrangements for Guerrero to meet with Mr. Wackenhut and other members of the corporation whom he feels will be able to assist us." The company was "attempting to establish investigative and guard service agencies in several Latin American countries and are well established in Colombia at the present time." Information reports of January 2 and 10, 1968, on guerrilla operations, business, and government in Colombia and Ecuador, each beginning "During a recent business trip," followed within weeks.¹¹

Process sheets of 1970 and 1971, with Justin Gleichauf as field office chief and R. Heller of the international division as case officer, list the company as the contact for reports on Panama ("Attempt to Establish Intelligence Apparatus in US," "List of Suspects of Subversive Activities"), Brazil ("Background on Carlos Lacerda"), Guatemala, Ecuador, a photograph of a probable Soviet Mi-10 helicopter at Medellín, and, in the months around the election of Salvador Allende, Chile: "Expectation of Allende Victory/Fear of Industrial Violence/Interest in Developing Industrial Security Measures" (July 28, 1970), "Alessandri Leading in Election Preference/Fear of Urban Terrorism" (September 2), "El Mercurio Fear of Urban Terrorism/Security Measures" (September 10), "LAN-Chile Officials Desire Background Checks on Employees to Determine Anti-Communist Sentiments" and "Key Positions in LAN-Chile Airlines Given to Allende Regime Sympathizers" (December, both marked "Air Force report"), "Concern re Security of LAN-Chile Aircraft" (December 15), "Chile: The Threat of a New Cuba" (December 16), "Background Information on Reverend Roger Vekemans, S.J., Alleged Left-Wing Priest Affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party," and "Boycott of Chilean Newsprint/Anti-Allende Propaganda" (December 7, 1971). In March 1970 Wackenhut guards hired to see a deported Panamanian through Miami airport onto a LAN-Chile flight copied the list of Miami contacts in his luggage for the Salvadoran consul and for the agency.¹²

On September 21, 1970, George Wackenhut "invited me to a demonstration of a new device his company has developed," Gleichauf reported: a transmitter "less than the size of a half pack of cigarettes" made by the subsidiary Electro-Finders, Inc., which "can be used to track vehicles as well as persons," carried "in a heel" or at the waist, recently tested by the Los Angeles Police Department. The Technical Services Division asked for a demonstration in November, and a cable under case 55539 reported that two men, Riley and Rohrer (the second name uncertain in the scan), would "be picked up by [redacted] of the Wackenhut Corporation and taken to the demonstration." Two technicians visited Coral Gables and the company was invited to demonstrate in Washington at agency expense; in May 1972 Gleichauf, by then chief of the Dallas office, forwarded a brochure from "an old friend" at the company, "the system is now available on the market," recalling one of the visiting technicians as Paul Reilly.¹³

On October 1, 1973, "a former Agency staffer now employed by the Wackenhut Corporation" passed the Miami office a tip from the Dade County Organized Crime Bureau, "with the understanding that Wackenhut would in turn convey it to the Agency": a man had been arrested "apparently in the course of installing a mike or wire," had "immediately claimed that he was on a mission for the CIA and apparently successfully avoided charges and publicity," and was "the top wire man for local State's Attorney Richard Gerstein," who "is known for his efforts to bring local conspiracy charges against the Watergate group, a plan which we believe Archibald Cox successfully blocked," and "we believe has also acted on behalf of Dade County Sheriff E. Wilson Purdy." The officer noted "for the record, we maintain some slight contact with a few Wackenhut employees, several of whom are former Agency staffers," and reported it "in the belief that Angus Thuermer and perhaps others might wish to be forewarned." In December the office recorded that a Wackenhut man had become a senior Latin American security executive of a company whose name reads as ITT, "in view of the considerable interest expressed from time to time in any Agency involvement" with it. In January 1974 the company "offered this information gratuitously" on a "Cuban Terrorist Program Designed to Affect US-Bahamian Relations": "for security reasons, they have made this look like a report to a client, thus 'addressee' and 'firm' refer to CIA." A copy went to the "WH Station."¹⁴

By March 1974 Gleichauf, "the former Chief of the Miami and Dallas Field Offices," was himself employed at the Coral Gables headquarters and passing on what a co-worker had heard in Algeria about the identification of "CIA agents." On June 25, 1975, the chief of the service's Denver office, James M. Sommerville, answered a headquarters inquiry, prompted by a German newspaper article and repeated by a local FBI agent, about a private organization in Denver "staffed with ex-government types and performing such things as telephone taps for wealthy private citizens." His staff recalled that "shortly after the CIA expose first appeared in the New York Times, we received in the mail a brochure from The Wackenhut Corporation, 262 Havana, Denver, Colorado," describing "a private investigative service with capabilities beyond that of the average private investigator in that they are staffed with men and women formerly employed by the FBI, Secret Service and DIA," and "we also believe that under the list of services they offered was some type of electronic surveillance." They had thrown it away, and passed the recollection to the FBI "stressing that this was indeed a long shot."¹⁵

On June 22, 1976, headquarters opened a new case under the same number, "LA Division Request for Contact of Wackenhut Corporation Officer." The officer was Bruce Berckmans, the company's director of international operations, "a former staff agent under the LPGLOBE program" who "was asked to resign from the Agency in 1970." Through Tom Clines of the Latin America Division he "has requested contact with an Agency representative as he has information which may be of interest to the Agency," believed to concern "political developments in Jamaica"; the division "has no operational interest in Berckmans nor his company," and the Office of General Counsel had concurred. At the Wackenhut offices on June 24 Berckmans produced a letter of grievances over his forced resignation for the inspector general and said he was considering a suit; on June 28 he telephoned to say "he has decided not to sue the Agency," and on July 2 offered himself as "a normal DCD contact." The Miami office closed case 65805 on June 30, 1977: "action completed."¹⁶

Federal Contracts, the Board, and the Files

The law firm of Senator George Smathers of Florida found the way around the 1893 federal statute that barred employees of private detective agencies from government work by creating a Wackenhut subsidiary that supplied only guards. The first large federal contracts, at Cape Canaveral and the Nevada Test Site, followed. The early board included Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, General Mark Clark, and the John Birch Society leader Ralph E. Davis. After the Fair Credit Reporting Act took effect in 1971 the company cut its files from about 2.5 million names to about 250,000, and in 1975 it gave them to the Church League of America of Wheaton, Illinois, to which George Wackenhut was a major contributor, keeping the right to consult them. The files are now in the Tamiment Library at New York University.¹⁷¹⁸

The retired FBI agent William Hinshaw told Connolly: "It is known throughout the industry that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut." Philip Agee said: "I don't have the slightest doubt that the CIA and Wackenhut overlap." Asked whether his company was an arm of the CIA, George Wackenhut answered, "No!" At the end of the interview he said to the reporter: "You've done an awful lot of research. How would you like to run all our New York operations?" Connolly reported that in June 1991 the head of the company's special investigations division, Wayne Black, traveled to Caracas on an Abu Dhabi passport for a client, Blanca Ibanez, to discredit the security chief of President Carlos Andres Perez.¹⁷

Horsch

The Philadelphia filmmaker R.C. Horsch said in a recorded interview that after leaving high school in 1961 he worked freelance for Wackenhut, "a security firm staffed by FBI agents," until about 1965. "I bugged telephones and committed burglaries for them," he said. "The burglaries were mostly to install electronics or bug telephones or just things like burglarizing a potential client to demonstrate that their security was not up to par." He said one regular client, introduced as "Mr. Smith," was E. Howard Hunt of the CIA, and described jobs at the Fairchild Hiller plant in Hagerstown, Maryland, in Trenton, New Jersey, and in Philadelphia. Horsch was convicted in later years of forgery, counterfeiting, and passport fraud.¹⁹ The CIA memorandum of March 26, 1963, lists Philadelphia among the company's offices.³ When the Secret Service arrested Horsch, then Raymond Hoersch, for counterfeiting in December 1974, authorities described him as unemployed and quoted him as saying that he "hadn't worked for 11 years."²⁰ In May 1962 Charles B. Flack Jr., a former FBI agent, merged his investigative firm into Wackenhut and became district manager of its Philadelphia office at 2 Penn Center Plaza, with responsibility, as he wrote to the FBI, "for the operation in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey area." From April 24, 1962, to January 5, 1965, FBI headquarters barred its offices from any contact with the company, on the ground that it had used misleading advertisements and traded on the former FBI affiliation of its staff, and that its officials had "reportedly engaged in personal misconduct and questionable business activities." The company's prospectus of March 1966 listed among its ten largest customers of 1965 the "Republic Aviation Division of Fairchild Hiller Corporation," whose plant was at Farmingdale on Long Island, and described a service guiding industrial concerns through Department of Defense security regulations; it stated that the company "does not engage in business espionage."²¹ On May 18, 1967, George Wackenhut told the Senate subcommittee of Edward V. Long under oath: "as a private investigating concern the Wackenhut Corp. has never in its entire history tapped a telephone wire. I am under oath, sir. So help me God, we never tapped a telephone wire." Asked about miniature transmitters, he said: "We have used them. We used the radio transmitters until the ban against them last year by the Federal Communications Commission." He also denied under oath that a 1957 report of his on corruption in Miami Beach drew on wiretaps; in a letter to the subcommittee of June 5, 1967, he wrote that "there were a few references to information in the Miami Beach report which had been obtained by others from the tapping of a telephone line."²² No document located names a Hoersch or Horsch in connection with the company.

Schaefer

Gerard John Schaefer, the Martin County deputy convicted of two murders in 1973, worked as a security guard in Florida in 1970, between his dismissal from two teaching posts and his entry into the Wilton Manors police, for Wackenhut by one account and Florida Power & Light by another.²³

Florida, 1967

On January 13, 1967, FBI headquarters instructed its Florida offices to give Kirk's investigators nothing: "The Bureau does not recognize the Wackenhut Corporation as a properly constituted law enforcement agency." The order was repeated by telephone on April 3, after Kirk had seen the attorney general. Hank Messick, the Miami Herald crime reporter whose articles had led to the indictment of two county sheriffs in 1966, and to whom the bureau had itself been passing leads, joined Wackenhut that December and left after six weeks. "I quit the Wackenhut Corp. because I have reluctantly concluded a cruel hoax is being perpetrated upon the people of Florida," he said. He objected that the company kept as a private client Sir Stafford Sands, the former Bahamian minister with gambling interests, while it was supposed to be pursuing Meyer Lansky. Wackenhut replied: "I do not find it necessary to dignify Mr. Messick's remarks with a reply." In September 1967 the Miami office reported the reaction of an informant inside the Bonanno family to press reports that a "contract" had been let on the Dade County state attorney, Richard Gerstein, a tip that "had been 'leaked' to the press by GERSTEIN'S office, which had received the tip from a Wackenhut Detective Agency source." The informant "stated that this was the biggest laugh to hit Miami in some time, in that GERSTEIN was, and still is, 'their' number one connection in the Miami area." He said: "Them guys, including Wackenhut, and all the locals haven't yet come close to us. The only people who have the proper line on us are those in the FBI."²⁴ A former Wackenhut detective, Norman Casper, later worked as an informant for the Internal Revenue Service against the Castle Bank in the Bahamas.²⁵

In the course of Governor Kirk's campaign Wackenhut told the legislature that "overlord of the whole state's criminal syndicates" was Santo Trafficante, "longtime Tampa Mafia boss, now living in Miami." The clippings are in the FBI's Miami file on the company. Trafficante's casino manager in Havana, Lewis McWillie, had been visited there in 1959 by his friend Jack Ruby, and a CIA memorandum in the Warren Commission's files reported that Trafficante, while held by Fidel Castro's government that year, was "frequently visited" by "an American gangster" named "Ruby." McWillie told the House committee in 1978 that he had twice visited the detention camp and seen Trafficante there, and was not clear whether Ruby had gone with him. The FBI's four files on the company contain no reference to Ruby, to McWillie, or to a Wackenhut office in Texas before 1968.²⁵²⁶²⁷

The Assassinations Committee

The security file reached the public through the House Select Committee on Assassinations. On January 6, 1978, the committee's chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, sent the CIA a request for 38 files. Item 18 was E. Howard Hunt. Item 19 was "Jim Garrison aka Wackenhut Corp.," item 28 "Garrison 1967 investigation," and item 36 "Southern Research Corp." The National Photographic Interpretation Center answered on January 30 that it had "no documented information or files on the Southern Research Corporation, presently known as the Wackenhut Corporation." The Office of Logistics found under item 36 contract actions with Wackenhut for 1970 to 1975 in the management information system of the Directorate of Science and Technology. Bruce Solie of the Office of Security certified on July 18, 1978, that committee staff had reviewed the Wackenhut file "in conjunction with the HSCA's investigation into the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." His memorandum adds: "Under procedures established with the HSCA, certain items of information were not reviewed by HSCA staff members. These items were placed in envelopes, sealed, appropriately identified, and put back into the security file prior to HSCA review." Material the staff did see was marked "with a green circular dot."²⁸

The pairing of the names goes back to New Orleans. The lawyers who defended Clay Shaw against District Attorney Garrison's conspiracy charge, Edward Wegmann and his brother William, engaged two firms of former federal agents, Wackenhut and Holloway Associates of Texas. Edward Wegmann's files, given to the Assassination Records Review Board by his daughter in 1995, show Wackenhut men reporting to the defense with the WDSU television reporter Rick Townley on April 19, 1967, and interviewing the Cuban exile Carlos Bringuier on May 9. The researcher who first went through the files wrote that Wackenhut "was the same company that did the reports for Eastern Airlines in the dismissal proceedings against David Ferrie. The firm was then called Southern Research." The company's own histories do not mention the name, and the phrase "presently known as" first appears in Blakey's letter. Louisiana's corporate register shows a Southern Research Company, Inc., chartered in Shreveport on December 2, 1958, which absorbed a polygraph firm, Truth Verification of Louisiana, in 1973 and is still in business, with sister companies in Baton Rouge and Lake Charles. Its New Orleans company, Southern Research Company of New Orleans, Inc., was chartered on September 5, 1963. It filed notice of dissolution on October 5, 1967, and was dissolved on December 13. The Wackenhut Corporation had qualified to do business in Louisiana on May 3, 1965. Shaw was arrested on March 1, 1967. The CIA rescinded George Wackenhut's security approval the following month.²⁹

The New Orleans office of Southern Research was run by Joseph Oster, a former city police detective who had worked for Guy Banister. A credit report of July 1960 in a CIA security file describes him as vice president of "Southern Research, Inc., whose home office is in Shreveport," a firm of ten or twelve employees, and as having come to it from "Guy B------ Associates, Inc." Oster told a lawyer for the Assassination Records Review Board in January 1996 that he had left Banister "because Banister was getting more involved in controversial political causes, to the detriment of attracting paying clients," that he had investigated Ferrie for Eastern Air Lines in 1962 and 1963, and that he had gone with the district attorney's men to Ferrie's house on the night of the assassination. He left the firm in the middle 1960s. The president of the Shreveport company, Thomas Ostendorff, gave the board its file on Ferrie, number 11-N-224. Wegmann's records, the board wrote, "indicate that the Shaw defense team had retained Southern Research Company as of mid-1967," a witness before the Orleans Parish grand jury was asked in January 1969 whether he had been "interviewed by Southern Research or any investigating firm that is doing Shaw's investigation," and a file on Gordon Novel records that Southern Research interviewed his lawyer, Steven Plotkin, on April 7, 1967. "Mr. Oster stated that neither he nor Southern Research had worked for the Clay Shaw defense team." The board's lawyer noted "the conflicting accounts we have found."³⁰

On April 14, 1967, the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division recorded that Attorney General Ramsey Clark had told reporters the bureau had investigated Shaw and cleared him. "This is not true and we so informed the Attorney General." The New Orleans office, it went on, had told "Charles R. Carson, a Wackenhut Corporation investigator, and Dean Andrews" only that it had no comment, and the bureau "has no intention of telling these or any other individuals that the Attorney General's statement is incorrect." A witness told the review board at a public hearing that the former FBI employee William Walter had said to Garrison in 1973 "that the FBI through Wackenhut, the Metropolitan Crime Commission and Aaron Kohn, had wire tapped his office." On May 3, 1967, George Walker of the company's Coral Gables headquarters gave the FBI in Miami a letter from a man who said that before the assassination a Cuban in his boarding house, known as "Cash," had remarked that to kill Kennedy one had only to excite a Cuban with a high-powered rifle.³¹

In November 1967 William Harvey, the former head of the CIA's Task Force W, who was planning a law practice, asked the FBI's liaison officer, Sam Papich, about "reputable private investigators that might be willing to use Harvey's services to establish contacts and investigative coverage on the Continent." The CIA's director of security, Howard Osborn, recorded the answer: "Mr. Papich suggested Wackenhut Corporation or the Fidelifax Company as having a good reputation in the trade." The same memorandum reports two telephone calls in October from John Roselli asking Harvey to act as his lawyer.³²

Controversies and Allegations

Despite its public profile as a security firm, Wackenhut Corporation has been associated with several significant controversies and allegations, particularly concerning its political leanings and its alleged role in covert government operations.

Political Leanings and Dossier Collection

George R. Wackenhut, the company's founder, was characterized as a "hard-line right-winger" whose political values were reflected in the company's operations. Wackenhut actively built dossiers on suspected dissidents and sold this information to interested parties. By 1965, Wackenhut claimed to maintain files on 2.5 million suspected dissidents. This number grew to over 4 million by 1966, following the acquisition of the private files of Karl Barslaag, a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The company's monthly publication, the "Wackenhut Security Review," consistently criticized protest movements of the 1960s, earning accolades from right-wing organizations such as the John Birch Society and the All-American Conference to Combat Communism.¹

Allegations of CIA Front Operations

Multiple sources have alleged that Wackenhut served as a front for the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Richard Babayan, identified as a CIA contract employee, claimed that Wackenhut had been used by the CIA for years to provide cover for clandestine operations. Bruce Berckmans, a former CIA agent who later became a Wackenhut international-operations vice president, reportedly saw a formal proposal from George Wackenhut to the CIA offering Wackenhut offices worldwide as fronts for CIA activities. William Corbett, a terrorism expert and former CIA analyst, further stated that Wackenhut allowed the CIA to occupy positions within the company to conduct clandestine operations and supplied intelligence agencies with information in exchange for lucrative government contracts.¹

El Salvador Operations

Wackenhut was very active in El Salvador during the Contra war, providing employees to protect the U.S. embassy and other installations, and doing "things you wouldn't want your mother to know about," one Wackenhut employee told Spy magazine in 1992.²

The Cabazon Joint Venture

A particularly controversial aspect of Wackenhut's operations was its joint venture with the Cabazon Indian tribe in Indio, California. Formalized on April 1, 1981, this partnership aimed to leverage the sovereign nation status of the Indian reservation to bypass federal jurisdiction and congressional prohibitions on arms exports. The venture, known as "Cabazon Arms," sought to establish a production facility for high-tech armaments and explosives for export to third-world countries, including the Contras in Nicaragua and nations in the Middle East. The firm was using the Cabazon reservation's tax-exempt status and its freedom from federal oversight to gain a competitive advantage in soliciting federal weapons projects.¹²

Dr. John Nichols, the Cabazon tribal administrator and a former CIA agent who claimed experience going back to the Chilean destabilization program in the 1970s, secured a Department of Defense secret facility clearance for the reservation. He then proposed to Wackenhut the manufacture of various weapons systems, including 120mm combustible cartridge cases, 9mm machine pistols, laser-sighted assault weapons, sniper rifles, and portable rocket systems. The venture also explored the development of biological weapons. Michael Riconosciuto served as the Director of Research for this joint venture, and was involved in meetings with figures like Robert Frye (Wackenhut VP), John P. Nichols, and Peter Zokosky, and Dr. Harry Fair of the U.S. Army's Railgun Project at Picatinny Arsenal, where Riconosciuto's scientific expertise was noted.¹

PROMIS Software Modification

Within the Cabazon Joint Venture, Michael Riconosciuto claimed to have modified the proprietary PROMIS computer software. This modification, allegedly spearheaded by Earl Brian and made available through Peter Videnieks of the U.S. Department of Justice, was intended to facilitate the worldwide implementation of PROMIS in law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Riconosciuto's affidavit detailed his work on the software, including specific modifications for the RCMP and the CSIS in Canada. This alleged pirating and modification of the PROMIS software became a central component of the PROMIS Software Scandal.¹

It was here that the "trap door" was built into the U.S. version of PROMIS, based on Israeli information. This operation was conducted by a small CIA group, headed by Robert Gates, who sought to keep it secret from the NSA due to interagency competition.³³

Danny Casolaro Investigation

Investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was investigating the Wackenhut/Cabazon weapons projects as part of his "The Octopus" investigation when he was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991. The probe into his death was ordered by associate attorney general Webb Hubbell, who had his own connections to weapons manufacturing for the Contras through Park On Meter in Arkansas.²

Other Allegations

Beyond the Cabazon venture, Wackenhut was also implicated in other international controversies. A 1992 SPY magazine article by John Connolly alleged that Wackenhut secretly assisted Iraq in its efforts to obtain sophisticated weapons and contributed to unrest in Venezuela.¹

Epstein

On July 13, 2009, Story Cowles wrote to Jeffrey Epstein: "Would you like to meet the wackenhut security candidates at your house, FSF or Jacks office. Friday is best for them." Epstein replied: "jacks off."³⁴ A 24-page set of security officer reports on forms headed "G4S Wackenhut" covers the post at "358 El Brillo," Epstein's house in Palm Beach; one report, for the night shift of November 16, 2009, marks the officer as armed and records hourly perimeter checks, an office door found ajar and a gym door open, and the officer monitoring the main entrance.³⁵

End of Wackenhut

The Wackenhut/Cabazon Joint Venture was terminated on October 1, 1984, following Robert Frye's heart attack. Its activities subsequently became the subject of numerous investigations by entities such as the U.S. Department of Justice, the House Judiciary Committee on Inslaw, U.S. Customs, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as various police agencies and media outlets worldwide.¹