Stanford Investor Suit Targets Central Bank in Caribbean
16 Feb 2010 | 3:42 PM ET
By: Scott Cohn
Senior Correspondent, CNBC
One year after the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Texas billionaire Allen Stanford of running a massive fraud through his offshore bank in Antigua, a group of Stanford investors is suing the region's central bank, calling it Stanford's "partner in crime."
Separately, the Stanford Victims Coalition is marking the anniversary by launching a campaign to boycott Antigua, and particularly its lucrative tourism industry.
The class action suit seeks at least $100 million in damages from the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and its five member banks in the region. It was filed in federal court in Dallas by New York attorney Peter Morgenstern on behalf of as many as 28,000 Stanford investors.
After authorities shut down Stanford International Bank in Antigua last year for allegedly issuing $7 billion in bogus certificates of deposit, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank seized a second Stanford-owned bank, the Bank of Antigua, which dealt primarily with local deposits and loans.
The suit claims the seizure was illegal, and that the institution — which Morgenstern says is still "enormously valuable" — should have become the property of Stanford's alleged victims.
Instead, the bank's assets were distributed among the ECCB's member banks — Antigua Commercial Bank, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank, Eastern Caribbean Financial Holdings Company, National Commercial Bank (SVG), and National Bank of Dominica — which are also named in the suit.
Investors previously sued the Antiguan government for $24 billion, after U.S. authorities charged the nation's top banking regulator with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to hide the Stanford scam from the SEC.
Antigua has not formally responded to the lawsuit.
Now, the investors are hoping to turn up the heat on Antigua by urging travel agents to steer clear of the country's popular resorts. The group is also pressing Congress to block international aid to Antigua, which lost its largest employer when Stanford Financial shut down.
The SEC sued Stanford and his companies on February 16, 2009 alleging an $8 billion international fraud. The following day, a federal judge placed the firm in receivership, halting its operations worldwide, and potentially leaving investors with pennies on the dollar.
A federal grand jury indicted Allen Stanford and three top executives in June — all have pleaded not guilty — as well as former Antigua Financial Services Regulatory Commission chief Leroy King, who is fighting extradition to the U.S. The five are scheduled to go on trial in January, 2011.
--------------------------------------------
Victims of Stanford scam sue Antigua, Carib bank
Feb. 16, 2010
By DAVID McFADDEN
Asssociated Press
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Jilted investors of a global fraud allegedly run by jailed financier R. Allen Stanford filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Caribbean regulators, five regional financial institutions and the government of Antigua and Barbuda.
The class-action suit seeks compensation for the "unlawful seizure" of the Bank of Antigua, a Stanford affiliate, Attorney Peter D. Morgenstern said.
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, or ECCB, took over the Bank of Antigua in February 2009 in the wake of the U.S. fraud probe of the Texas tycoon's vast financial empire and redistributed its equity ownership.
But the complaint alleges the victims are entitled to the value of the Bank of Antigua when it was seized to provide some compensation to the roughly 28,000 investors from across the globe who allege they lost their life savings to the flamboyant financier.
"Instead of acting as a legitimate central bank, the ECCB became a partner in crime with the government of Antigua and Barbuda when it seized the bank," Morgenstern said in a statement. "The Bank of Antigua was, and remains, enormously valuable. All of that value rightfully belongs to Mr. Stanford's victims."
According to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in Dallas, the Bank of Antigua's value included loan receivables from the government of Antigua worth tens of millions of dollars, at least.
Phone calls made to several Antiguan government officials went unanswered Tuesday. Kennedy Byron, a director of bank supervision for the ECCB, declined to comment.
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank is the monetary authority for a group of eight island economies, and it explained its intervention at the time as an effort to contain damage to the local economy.
Stanford provided loans to the government of Antigua and was the country's largest private employer, with businesses that included a development company, cricket stadium, newspaper, an airline and two restaurants.
But Angela Shaw, a leader of the advocacy group Stanford Victims Coalition whose family invested $4.5 million in Stanford certificates of deposit, said foreign investors in Stanford's CDs were abandoned in the rush to protect the economy of Antigua, an island of some 80,000 people.
"How can they say they need to protect Antigua when it has come at the cost of foreign citizens from around the world, when it was purchased with stolen money?" Shaw alleged during a phone interview from Dallas.
Stanford and other executives of the now-defunct Houston-based Stanford Financial Group are accused of orchestrating a huge Ponzi scheme by advising clients to invest more than $7 billion in certificates of deposit from the Stanford International Bank on Antigua. Investors from 113 countries were promised huge returns and assured that their investments were safe.
But U.S. authorities say Stanford, a once prominent figure in the Caribbean, and the executives fabricated the bank's balance sheets, bribed Antiguan regulators and misused investors' money to pay for his lavish lifestyle.
The lawsuit says investors are entitled to compensation for the value of the Bank of Antigua when it was seized, and that equity ownership of the bank was distributed by the central bank to Antigua itself and five bank defendants for little or no compensation.
It says the financial institutions that took ownership of the Bank of Antigua are Antigua Commercial Bank, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank Ltd., Eastern Caribbean Financial Holdings Company Ltd., National Commercial Bank (SVG) Ltd., and National Bank of Dominica Ltd.
Stanford's financial empire was placed in the hands of a court-appointed attorney last year when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Stanford. The SEC accuses him of skimming more than $1 billion.
Stanford and the three executives pleaded not guilty to charges they ran a Ponzi scheme. Another former executive, James M. Davis, pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors.
The court-appointed receiver tracking down investors' lost money has said he hopes to gain control of more than $1.5 billion that would be returned to them. But an attorney representing the investors has said that goal may be unrealistic and victims should prepare to recover as little as 2 cents on the dollar.
--------------------------------------------
Caribbean Island Focus of International Arms Scandal
By ROBERT GLASS
14 May 1990
The Associated Press
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua (AP) _ A scandal over the shipment of Israeli arms to a Colombian drug lord has become a political bombshell in this tourist haven, where the ruling family has weathered previous scandals.
The island gained international notoriety in the late 1970s for allowing the testing of weapons for South Africa. It was in the news again in the early 1980s for harboring fugitive American financier Robert Vesco.
Now, Israel has accused Prime Minister Vere Bird's eldest son, Vere Jr., 54, of ordering weapons for Antigua's 80-man army that mysteriously ended up in the hands of Colombia's Medellin drug cartel.
Vere Jr., a Cabinet minister, has denied wrongdoing but resigned his Cabinet post pending the outcome of a judicial inquiry, the equivalent of a U.S. grand jury investigation.
Another son of the prime minister, Lester, 52, deputy prime minister and sometime rival of his older brother, is spearheading the local investigation, shrugging off any possible conflict of interest.
The Bird family, which has dominated the island's politics for more than three decades and grown wealthy while doing it, has long been accused of corruption in connection with developing the island's booming tourist industry. But this affair, with its suggestion of a government link with the sinister world of international drug trafficking and gunrunning, is a bombshell by comparison.
"This latest one shocked us to the core," said Anglican Archbishop Orland Lindsay.
Tim Hector, a leftist opposition leader, said he thought the nation could be in danger of a coup if the prime minister's son were charged.
"I believe we are teetering on the brink ... of a possible military seizure of power and control by Vere Bird (Jr.)," he said. Vere Jr. is said to command the army's loyalty.
Last month, Israel said it had shipped weapons to the Caribbean island in April 1989 on the understanding they would be used exclusively by the Antigua Defense Force.
Israel said the arms were ordered by Vere Jr., who identified himself as the minister of national security. There is no such ministry, but Vere Jr. does act informally as his father's national security adviser.
The Antiguan investigation determined that the weapons arrived here on April 24, 1989 and were shipped the same day to Santa Marta, Colombia.
Colombian officials say soldiers found 232 Israeli-made weapons in February during a search of ranches seized from Gonzalo Rodrigues Gacha, a reputed kingpin of the Medellin cartel who was killed in a gunbattle with police last December.
The weapons included machine guns, submachine guns, assault rifles, pistols, shoulder-fired rockets and infrared night scopes.
The Outlet, a weekly newspaper published by Hector's Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement, said the weapons deal was arranged by two Israelis, Maurice Sarfati and Col. Yair Klein.
Sarfati, a former Israeli army officer, once operated a melon farm in Antigua but went bankrupt and reportedly is being sought by U.S. authorities for defaulting on $1.3 million in loans.
Colombian officials have accused Klein, a reserve officer in the Israeli army, of organizing, training and equipping paramilitary groups, and declared him a fugitive from justice.
Klein said in Israel that the arms shipment was originally intended for a training school he wanted to set up in Antigua for Panamanian rebels opposed to Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, who was ousted by U.S. forces last December.
When plans for the school fell through, Klein said, the Panamanians wanted the weapons shipped to Panama, but somehow they were diverted to Colombia.
Many questions remain, among them whether anyone in the Antiguan government was aware the arms shipment was headed for Colombia.
In Antigua, a former British colony of 80,000 only nine miles wide and 12 miles long, the government is largely a function of one family, the Birds.
Vere Bird Sr., the 80-year-old prime minister, first rose to prominence in the 1930s as a union organizer in the days of colonial sugar plantations and has led the nation all but five of the past 34 years. His Antigua Labor Party controls 15 of the 17 seats in Parliament.
Vere Jr. is the minister of public works and communication. Lester, the deputy prime minister, is also leader of the ruling party and minister of foreign affairs, economic development, tourism and energy.
Antiguans take it for granted that either Lester or Vere Jr. will succeed their father, who is in declining health, and many believe the outcome of this scandal could help settle the matter.
The brothers, both British-trained lawyers, have both weathered previous scandals.
In 1987, Vere Jr. was implicated, but never charged, in an investigation of a government project to repave the runway of the island's airport. He had formed a private company to carry out the project, which was supposed to cost no more than $3.5 million but ended up costing $11.5 million.
It was Lester who helped Vesco when the fugitive surfaced in Antigua in 1982 with a bizarre plan to buy half of Barbuda, Antigua's small sister island, and establish a principality called the Sovereign Order of New Aragon.
Vere Jr. is widely regarded as his father's favorite. Lester, who was an All-American long jumper at the University of Michigan in 1960, is seen as the brighter of the two.
In separate interviews, the brothers played down their rivalry and the possible impact of the scandal on their political futures.
"I clearly had no intention of ... reducing (this matter) to a question of a fight for power within the domestic situation," Lester said. "After all, he is still my brother."
Vere Jr. would not discuss specifics of the case, but said: "I've never been associated with anything of the kind and would never be."
About his relationship with his brother, he said: "Whenever I meet him, it's a most amicable ... relationship. When we leave, I don't know what transpires."
The Antigua government has hired a Washington, D.C., attorney, E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., to head a team that has flown to Israel to get evidence. A British jurist, Louis Blom-Cooper, has been named to conduct a judicial inquiry, which is expected to open hearings in June.
--------------------------------------------
Island's Hushed Scandals, Unhushed
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
16 June 1990
The New York Times
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua -- After years of hushed scandals that failed to spoil the calm of this tourist haven, the discovery that a shipment of Israeli arms was sent through Antigua on its way to Colombian drug traffickers has shaken the nearly five-decade dominion of Prime Minister Vere C. Bird.
After years of hushed scandals that failed to spoil the calm of this tourist haven, the discovery that a shipment of Israeli arms was sent through Antigua on its way to Colombian drug traffickers has shaken the nearly five-decade dominion of Prime Minister Vere C. Bird.
The Colombian authorities disclosed in April that they had found a crate of Israeli assault rifles on the farm of Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, after a raid on the property in which Mr. Gacha, a leader of the Medellin drug cartel, was killed. Since then, mounting evidence has pointed to the involvement of the Prime Minister's eldest son, Vere Bird Jr., in obtaining the weapons, causing a political crisis.
An investigation of the affair has turned up documents bearing what appear to be the younger Mr. Bird's signature over the nonexistent title of minister of national security of this Caribbean island nation, formally called Antigua and Barbuda (pronounced ann-TEE-guh and bar-BYOO-duh) after its two main islands.
Investigators and Antiguan officials say the fictitious title was used to certify to the Israeli authorities that the shipment of small arms was destined for the country's tiny armed forces.
Israel Calls Shipment Illegal
On May 31, a court in Israel indicted Lieut. Col. Yair G. Klein, an Israeli reserve officer who Antiguan officials say supplied the arms, on charges that he illegally furnished military equipment and training to Colombians.
Vere Bird Jr., who resigned his Cabinet post of Minister of Public Works in the wake of the arms scandal, has said he did not know that the weapons were intended for use in another country.
Through the local press, Mr. Bird, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has suggested that his younger brother, Lester, who initiated the Antiguan investigation into the matter, was trying to improve his chances of becoming the next Prime Minister when their 81-year-old father dies or steps down.
Anger over the arms scandal and widely perceived corruption in the Bird family, which dominates the Government, bubbled over on this island on May 26. About 5,000 people in this country of 80,000 marched through the narrow, crumbling streets of the capital, St. John's, carrying placards and chanting ''We Shall Overcome!'' and ''The Birds Must Go!''
Long String of Controversies
Businessmen, opposition figures, diplomats and even some members of the governing Antigua Labor Party have said the arms affair is merely the gravest abuse in a long string of controversies involving the Birds that illustrate the results of concentrating near-total power in the hands of one family. The scandals that have resulted, they say, have made Antigua a standout even in a region increasingly known for drug smuggling and money laundering, activities to which Antigua is also no stranger.
Business leaders, long supportive of Mr. Bird's Government for its laissez-faire policies, have begun to express concern that the island's reputation could threaten an already slumping tourist industry, which generates 70 percent of the gross national product.
Most of the tourists are Americans, and since World War II the United States has operated two naval installations on Antigua. But local diplomats and business people say their country, a Commonwealth member, retains stronger political and cultural ties to Britain than to the United States.
The operator of a major hotel complex said the ruling family had become consumed with ''unbridled ambition, greed, wheeling and dealing.''
''Trouble has been coming for some time now, but this has just hastened it,'' said Hilbourne Frank, a member of Parliament from Barbuda. Speaking of Prime Minister Bird, he said, ''When things are brought to light here and they involve his sons, he has always just brushed them aside.''
Under Mr. Bird's leadership, this island of coral-shielded beaches and green hills has been developed for upscale tourism, raising it from sugar-dependent poverty to become one of the most prosperous nations in the region.
''The problem is he didn't know when to stop,'' a diplomat said of Mr. Bird. ''If he had given up power before this scandal, he would have gone out as a genuinely loved national hero. Now, he'll be seen as just another despot.''
If Antigua benefited economically from Mr. Bird's leadership, most observers here agree, so did the Bird clan, and handsomely.
Seeking a Slice of Every Pie
The diplomat, who requested anonymity, said that for several years, Mr. Bird, who now walks only with assistance and whose memory has begun to fail, had systematically sought ''10 to 15 percent of everything, every major deal on the island,'' for himself and his clan, which includes a 27-year-old mistress named Cutie Francis.
Educated only through elementary school, Mr. Bird, tall and engaging, emerged from one of this island's most desperate slums.
In 1943, he became leader of the Antigua Trades and Labor Union, the vehicle he would ride to power after successfully pushing for higher pay and improvements in the conditions of the island's black plantation workers.
Every time he has faced a crisis, Mr. Bird has urged the masses to remember that before he came to power there were only rough jobs cutting sugar cane in the fields and dirty pond water to drink.
Mr. Bird's party won every election in the colony from 1951 through 1967.
In his only defeat, his working-class supporters abandoned him in 1971 when he cut wages in an unsuccessful effort to save the sugar industry. But the victor, the Progressive Labor Movement, was able to hold power for only one term before it was defeated by its own political ineptitude and the effects of the worldwide oil crisis of the 1970's. Mr. Bird was back in 1976.
Holding a near monopoly in Parliament for most of the 1980's, Mr. Bird quickly turned his attentions from governance to business, his critics say.
''He came back to power feeling the population had been ungrateful to their great savior and determined to amass great wealth,'' said Tim Hector, publisher of The Outlet newspaper, the nation's only news organization not owned or controlled by the Bird family.
In 1977, Mr. Hector said, a Canadian company called Space Research came to the island to work on weapons testing. In exchange for the use of a firing range, senior Antiguan officials say, Mr. Bird was promised advanced equipment and training for the country's armed forces, which number only about 100 members.
The Sons Stake Their Claim
The Outlet reported that some of the weapons being tested by Space Research, 155-millimeter howitzers, were being shipped to South Africa, where they were used in the Angolan civil war. A defiant Mr. Bird declared that having freed his country from domination by whites, he had no regrets in the matter despite the fact that the shipment violated Canadian export laws as well as the international arms embargo against South Africa.
The owner of Space Research, Gerald V. Bull, quietly pulled out of Antigua. On March 22 he was found dead in Belgium after reportedly working with the Iraqi Government to develop an advanced long-barreled cannon.
By the late 1970's, Mr. Bird's sons, Vere Jr. and Lester, both British-trained lawyers, had been elected to Parliament and held vital Government posts. From the accounts of business and opposition leaders and diplomats, the two brothers, always rivals, quickly proved even more rapacious than their father.
Lester Bird, the only Bird family member to consent to an interview, said of his reputed fortune, ''I am not a U.S.-dollar millionaire.''
In the early 1980's, Mr. Hector and others said, Lester Bird became involved in an abortive attempt by the fugitive American financier Robert Vesco to purchase half of Barbuda to establish a principality that was to be named the Sovereign Order of New Aragon.
Lester Bird, who was a long-jump champion at the University of Michigan in the 1960's, said that while a group unsuccessfully petitioned the Cabinet to establish what he called ''a little Monaco that would issue its own stamps and passports'' on Barbuda, he had not known that Mr. Vesco was part of it.
In another deal that infuriated Barbudans, in the mid-1980's, a company controlled by Lester Bird began mining the island's fine pink sand for sale to developers.
Lester Bird, who is 52, said his company, Antigua Aggregates, a real estate development and cement import concern, divested its interest in the sand mining ''when the Barbudans made an uproar.''
In addition to being Deputy Prime Minister, Lester Bird is also the leader of the ruling party and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Economic Development, Tourism and Energy. Asked if there were conflicts of interest in his family's business dealings, he said, ''I don't really see that.''
Although he is the eldest son, Vere Bird Jr., 53, has always been overshadowed by his brother, say people who know them both. He also has often been linked to controversies and scandals. $12 Million for Repavement In 1987, in a scandal that earned him the nickname ''Runway,'' Vere Bird Jr., then chairman of the Public Utilities Authority, personally negotiated a deal with French banks and contractors to repave the modest Vere C. Bird International Airport's landing surfaces.
The project, whose value had been estimated at $3.5 million, ended up costing nearly $12 million, leading the Cabinet to censure Vere Bird Jr., although one minister said the elder Mr. Bird ''barred any discussion of punishment.''
''There have been charges of corruption here for some time, but there was never any proof,'' said John St. Luce, the Minister of Finance. ''Now, we are a little two-by-four country caught up in something very big.''
--------------------------------------------
Scandal may topple Antigua's leadership/Arms deal embarrasses Israel, U.S.
By DON A. SCHANCHE
Los Angeles Times
22 July 1990
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua - A festering scandal over illicit arms sent from Israel to Antigua may bring down the corruption-ridden, family ruled government of this Caribbean microstate.
In the still-shadowy transaction, an illegal shipment of 100 Uzi submachine guns, 400 Galil assault rifles and 250,000 rounds of ammunition, ostensibly ordered for Antigua's 70-man Defense Force, went instead to Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, one of the top three barons of the Medellin drug cartel.
Rodriguez Gacha was shot and killed last December by the Colombian police.
A purchase order purporting to legitimize the shipment and guarantee Antigua as its final destination bore the name of the elder son of Prime Minister Vere Bird Sr., 81-year-old patriarch of the scandal-prone clan that has dominated this two-island Caribbean nation, formally called Antigua and Barbuda, since 1951.
Although there is no such post in Antigua, the document identified the son, Vere Bird Jr., as "Minister of National Security.' Despite the irregularity of the guarantee, the fictitious title and the disproportionate quantity of arms for such a small security force, Israel apparently accepted the suspect document in place of the customary End User Certificate routinely required in government-to-government arms deals, officials here said.
"There's no way in the world that letter would be accepted by a government in a legitimate deal,'' one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The officials said that Israeli complicity was also suggested by the presence of an Israeli army officer who escorted the arms to Antigua but raised no objection when, in an evidently prearranged switch, the arms were transferred with the help of Antiguan customs officials to a Colombia-bound ship only hours after they arrived on April 24, 1989.
A controversial Israeli entrepreneur, Maurice Sarfati - sought by authorities in both Antigua and the United States after defaulting on U.S.-guaranteed loans of $1.3 million on a melon farm here - and ex-Lt. Col. Yair G. Klein, a former anti-terrorist officer of the Israeli army who has been charged in Jerusalem with illegally providing military equipment and training to Colombians, are other key figures in the scandal.
The gunshot-riddled body of a third Israeli, Arik Afek, a known Klein associate, was found stuffed in the trunk of a car at Miami International Airport Jan. 24, and the Miami police are trying to determine whether he, too, was involved.
When news of the arms scandal broke last April, following a formal diplomatic protest by Colombia, attention focused on Vere Jr., 53, as the key Antiguan official involved in engineering the scheme. His brother, Deputy Prime Minister Lester Bird, 52, was first to point a finger, not only implicating Vere Jr. but also hiring Washington lawyer Lawrence Barcella, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia famed for tracking down rogue CIA agent Edwin Wilson in Libya in the early 1980s, to investigate.
Lester's hostility toward Vere Jr. is of long standing. In a struggle that has often assumed the qualities of a soap opera, the millionaire brothers, both London-trained lawyers, have been vying ``like Cain and Abel,'' as Vere Jr. once put it, to succeed their faltering octogenarian father, now serving his sixth five-year term as prime minister.
The elder Bird has remained largely out of the fray and out of public sight, shielded in recent years by his protective 27-year-old mistress, Cutie Francis, a powerful local businesswoman who has been at his side since she was a 14-year-old beauty queen.
But protests concerning the arms scandal forced "Papa'' Bird, as he is known here, to go public last month and order an official commission of inquiry, run by an impartial London jurist. The commission is scheduled to open hearings here Monday.
No matter how the inquiry turns out, all three Birds already may have suffered fatal political damage from the arms scandal, said opposition politicians and some of their allies in the Antigua Labor Party.
'This could mean the end of the Bird dynasty,'' said Baldwin Spencer, opposition leader in the 17-member Parliament.
John St. Luce, minister of finance and longtime Papa Bird supporter, said: "People think the era of the Birds is over. It's not a monarchy, not a dynasty.' Unless investigators turn up an innocent explanation of Israel's role in the incident, Jerusalem, too, stands to suffer from the scandal.
Although Israel may not have known that the guns were destined for the drug cartel, the country "had to know the deal was fishy,'' said an official who has closely followed the investigation.
He said that ever since part of the arms shipment was discovered on the late drug lord's Colombian ranch Feb. 2, Israel has been 'dragging its heels'' and offering only token cooperation to Antiguan investigators trying to unravel the scandal.
'Is this just the tip of the iceberg?'' asked the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
He said that Washington, too, should be embarrassed and added: 'The U.S. government has shown a clear lack of interest in clarifying this scandal. We have a good, clear trail here that can actually be followed and perhaps open other trails to the narco-traffickers, yet it's not being pursued. Why?' A Washington congressional source familiar with details of the scandal said that he believed the Bush administration has so far stood aloof because it does not want to make diplomatic trouble with Israel or get entangled in an explosive internal quarrel here that might endanger agreements that permit highly secretive U.S. Navy and Air Force bases to operate.
If Klein, the former Israeli army officer, can be believed, Washington may be covering up its own role in the affair. Klein's link to the drug lords was disclosed last year when a U.S. television network showed him supervising the arms training of men Colombian authorities identified as drug cartel assassins. He said a few weeks ago, in an unsworn statement, that it all began with plans to build a "survival school'' on the island.
Earlier, Klein told the Miami Herald that the deal grew out of a 1988 attempt to establish a base on Antigua where pro-U.S. rebel forces could be trained to topple former Panama strongman Manuel A. Noriega.
Another of the bewildering tangle of threads suggesting that the United States was at least aware of the arms deal appeared recently in a handwritten memorandum from Lt. Col. Clyde Walker, a native Antiguan and former detective sergeant in the British provincial police who heads the island's tiny Defense Force.
The memo was written to Lester Bird and explains Walker's role in early planning of the arms transfer. It says that as early as February 1989, Walker had given an intelligence report on Klein's plans to two representatives of the CIA, whom he named.
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------