Has Representative Curt Weldon always been unhinged? Has he always felt the CIA is out to get him? I don’t know. But I do know that he has been an unremitting critic of the CIA ever since his nephew died in a C-130 crash in Angola back in June 1991. Almost all traces of the incident have disappeared. A Lexis-Nexis search of major papers turned up only one reference to it. A wire search had this brief dispatch from Agence France Presse on June 11, 1991.
Nine people, including four foreigners, were killed when a freight plane chartered by the Angolan airline TAAG crashed on Monday on taking off from Luanda airport, the Portuguese news agency LUSA reported on Tuesday.
A woman survived the crash but was in critical condition, the report said.
LUSA said three of the dead were U.S. nationals and one an Italian.
The Hercules C-130 was owned by Caribbean Air Transport company. It was heading for Cafunfo in the diamond-mining region of Lunda in north-eastern Angola.
The Angolan news agency ANGOP monitored in Lisbon, named the three dead Americans as Flight Captain Robert Snellgrave, mechanic Robert Weldon and load master Chuck Henrichs. The pilot was Stefan Paoletti, an Italian.
To find more information on this incident I had to do some creative googling. I found a good write up in this Arizona Republic article from February 24, 1997. It’s a case study in the corruption of the Bush Crime Family.
Roy Reagan
You see, the C-130 that crashed in Angola belonged to a man named Roy Reagan. You can read about Roy Reagan’s exploits, trial, and eventual victory on appeal (over a technical statute of limitations issue) below:
The problem between Curt Weldon and the CIA arose because of the connections between Roy Reagan and St. Lucia Airlines. It seems Curt’s nephew was flying, as a mechanic, into Angola on secret CIA missions using aircraft that belonged to (or should have belonged to) the U.S. Forestry Service. U.S. Forestry planes were forbidden by statute from operating outside the United States. Weldon, understandably, wanted to understand the nature of his nephew’s trip, but the CIA gave him the run-around. Weldon, a sitting Congressman then as now, took that as a personal insult. St. Lucia airlines is famous for its role in the Iran-Contra affair.
“My original point of contact was General Colin Powell, who was going directly to his immediate superior, Secretary Weinberger,” North testified in 1987. But in their later sworn testimony, Powell and Weinberger continued to insist that they had no idea that 508 missiles had already been shipped to Iran.
By fall 1985, however, the covert supply line was on the verge of exposure. On Nov. 22, 1985, a panicky Oliver North called Duane Clarridge, the CIA’s European Division chief, at home. “Look, I got a problem,” North explained. “And it involves Portugal.”
North needed Clarridge’s help to assure that Portugal would let an Israeli plane carrying HAWK anti-aircraft missiles land in Lisbon. The missiles were then to be transferred to another plane for shipment to Iran.
In his memoirs, A Spy for All Seasons, Clarridge said North lied to him about the plane’s contents, claiming the shipment was oil-drilling equipment. Without further checking, Clarridge said he swung into action.
As European Division chief, he first tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Portuguese to let the El Al plane land. When the Portuguese refused and the plane returned to Israel, Clarridge next arranged for a CIA proprietary, St. Lucia Airlines, to pick up North’s cargo in Israel and fly it to Iran, with a stop in Cyprus, on Nov. 24, 1985.
But Clarridge’s actions touched off a panic inside the CIA, where deputy director John McMahon was furious at the degree of CIA participation. CIA lawyers ruled that Clarridge’s intervention amounted to a covert action needing a formal presidential finding and notification of Congress.
Reagan finally signed an intelligence finding authorizing arms shipments to Iran on Jan. 17, 1986, but still hid it from Congress. That same day, Weinberger handed Powell the job of pulling the missiles from U.S. stockpiles and shipping them to Iran via Israel.
It’s amazing how few people paid a price for Iran-Contra, isn’t it, Mr. Powell? In any case, the connections between Roy Reagan and St. Lucia…
After leaving the Air Force, [Roy] Reagan used a network of contacts to successfully broker former military aircraft on the open market. One C-130 obtained by Reagan in 1986 was sold to Dietrich Reinhardt and Peter Turkelson, both of whom have been identified as CIA operatives by Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA). Weldon investigated the affair following the crash of this C-130 in Angola while on a CIA mission. Robert Weldon, the congressman’s nephew, died in the crash. Reinhardt had previously owned St. Lucia Airlines, which was used by Oliver North to smuggle missiles to Iran during the embargo.
Weldon was convinced that the CIA was lying to him about the circumstances of his nephew’s death. And, the truth is, they probably were lying, and they were lying for a whole variety of reasons. The mission in Angola was classified, the plane was being used illegally, and admitting to using the plane would have opened up a vast money laundering scheme that may have involved drug-running and arms trafficking. Letting Weldon in on those types of secrets could have led to serious problems. Weldon was unsympathetic. I would be too, if as a sitting Congressperson I couldn’t get my brother answers about the circumstances of his son’s death.
In my opinion, the whole experience turned Curt Weldon into a paranoid freak with an extreme vendetta against the CIA. I am not totally unsympathetic. However, his behavior has been getting strange lately. First he wrote a bizarre book using Iran-Contra middle man Manucher Ghorbanifar as a source. Ghorbanifar has had a burn notice for being a fabrictor from the CIA since the 1980’s. Then he launched into his whole Able Danger crusade, which seemed to be a campaign to promote the wonders of data mining over the more pedestrian tactics typically pursued at Langley. Then he critized his opponent for choosing to have his daughter’s brain cancer treated in a Washington area hospital instead of in Pennsylvania. And now he is accusing the CIA of actively working to defeat him by supporting Joe Sestak.
So it’s not surprising that as Weldon girds for the most difficult re-election bid during his two decades representing the Philadelphia suburbs, his campaign is alleging that the CIA is probably abetting the opposition. Last month, his campaign manager Michael Puppio Jr. announced that Weldon’s expected Democratic opponent, Joe Sestak, a former Navy vice admiral, had taken campaign contributions from Mary McCarthy, the CIA operative recently fired for allegedly leaking secret information to the media. McCarthy, who was specifically accused of being a source for The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story on secret CIA prisons overseas, has denied that charge through her lawyer.
The media also has raised suspicions in the Weldon camp. The reporter on the Post article, Dana Priest, wrote a piece last year about Weldon’s book that the congressman viewed as critical.
It’s just a question of following the money, says Puppio. “What’s a CIA analyst doing giving money to a partisan political candidate?” he asks. “I’m not sure she violated any laws, but then when that analyst is alleged to have leaked information to a reporter who in turn is extremely critical of Curt Weldon, that raises some big questions.”
The CIA may have screwed Weldon back in 1991. But he has shown every evidence of being insane and unhinged in the last few years.
Sestak spokeswoman Allison Price says her candidate just wants to get back to issues important to the voters. “We have repeatedly urged Curt to address the issues of the campaign,” she says. “We don’t get the conspiracy issues with him. We don’t understand what goes on in Curt’s mind.”
It’s time for Weldon to go.
