Jonathan Kwitny

Jonathan Kwitny was born March 23, 1941, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for approximately twenty years, developing a reputation as one of the American press's most rigorous investigators of the nexus between U.S. intelligence operations, organized crime, and foreign policy. He died November 26, 1998, in Indianapolis, at age 57, from cancer.¹

The Crimes of Patriots

Kwitny's most significant work, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA (W.W. Norton, 1987), was the product of years of reporting on the Nugan Hand Bank, the Sydney-based financial institution that served as a CIA financial conduit and money-laundering operation from its founding in 1973 until its collapse in 1980. Kwitny tracked down and interviewed participants across multiple countries, reconstructed the bank's structure and the backgrounds of its remarkable board - which included retired American military generals and a former CIA deputy director - and documented the bank's role in facilitating drug money flows from the Golden Triangle and funding covert operations.²

Among the key findings Kwitny reported: Michael Hand, the bank's American co-founder and a former Green Beret with CIA associations from the Laos operation, fled Australia under a false identity on June 14, 1980, shortly after co-founder Frank Nugan was found shot to death. Kwitny identified a man code-named "Charlie" - described as a former U.S. Special Forces member and ex-CIA operative - as having helped Hand escape to Fiji. Australian authorities were never able to locate Hand after his disappearance. The book documented how the network of American military and intelligence veterans surrounding Nugan Hand connected to the broader private covert operations infrastructure associated with Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, and Air America.²

Endless Enemies

Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (Congdon and Weed, 1984) documented Kwitny's thesis that American covert interventions and support for repressive regimes consistently created the conditions for blowback - producing enemies rather than allies. The book drew on Kwitny's reporting from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to argue that the logic of anti-Communist intervention had systematically damaged American interests by associating the United States with corrupt and brutal governments. The book received positive reviews from foreign policy analysts and won the George Polk Award for journalism.¹

Vicious Circles

Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace (W.W. Norton, 1979) examined organized crime's penetration of legitimate American business, drawing on Kwitny's reporting for the Wall Street Journal on mob influence in industries including meat packing, trucking, and waste disposal. The book contributed to public understanding of how organized crime operated through legitimate commercial structures rather than purely through enforcement and extortion.¹

Man of the Century

Kwitny's final major work, Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II (Henry Holt, 1997), represented a departure from his intelligence and organized crime reporting. The biography of the Polish pope who confronted Soviet power in Eastern Europe drew on Kwitny's interest in the Cold War dimensions of the Catholic Church's role in Polish resistance. The book received significant attention as a comprehensive account of John Paul II's life and his relationship to the political changes that ended Communist rule in Eastern Europe.¹

Legacy

Kwitny's reporting on Nugan Hand Bank preceded by years the broader academic and investigative literature on the private covert operations networks of the 1970s and 1980s. His sourcing and reconstruction of the bank's operations remained the documentary foundation for subsequent treatments of the subject, including accounts connecting Nugan Hand to the broader Ted Shackley-centered network and to the financial infrastructure that supported operations from Angola to Southeast Asia to Iran-Contra.