- "I was the guy who gave the ten million from Marcos to your
campaign," the Filipino told Rollins. "I was the guy who made the
arrangements and delivered the cash personally. ...It was a personal
gift from Marcos to Reagan."
In his book, Rollins described
this stunning news with a light touch. The first thought that raced
through his head, he wrote, was "Cash? Holy shit."
However,
Rollins has refused since to divulge the name of either the Filipino
politician or the Republican lobbyist. And it speaks volumes of the
mood during the mid-1990s – when Ronald Reagan’s legacy was taking on
mythic status – that no one pressed Rollins for details of this crime.
Also,
that Rollins could drop this tidbit into his memoir, go mum on
identifying the direct participants, and still remain a universally
respected Washington insider says a lot about the morality of today’s
political establishment.
In his memoir, Rollins tried to
minimize the significance of the suitcase full of cash by suggesting
that the illegal contribution might never have reached the campaign or
President Reagan. "I knew the lobbyist well and I had no doubt the
money was now in some offshore bank," Rollins wrote.
But Rollins
had no way to know for sure – and it would have been a very risky move
for the lobbyist to divert $10 million in cash that Marcos was sending
personally to Reagan, especially since the lobbyist would have to
assume that Marcos had told Reagan that the money was on the way.
There also was a history to the allegations of Marcos-Reagan payoffs.
Dancing with Mrs. Marcos
The
Marcos-Reagan relationship dated back at least to 1969 when President
Richard Nixon assigned Reagan to represent the United States at the
gala opening of Imelda Marcos's multi-million-dollar cultural center in
Manila.
Reagan charmed the Philippine president and his wife.
The former Hollywood movie actor twirled Mrs. Marcos around the dance
floor.
By 1980, Marcos had another reason to root for a Reagan
presidency. Marcos was weary of President Jimmy Carter's nagging about
human rights violations in the Philippines. Marcos also was unnerved by
Carter's inability to protect another friendly despot, the Shah of
Iran, who was overthrown in 1979 and forced into a humiliating exile.
If
Reagan were to defeat Carter, Marcos could expect that the human rights
lectures would stop and U.S. officials would look the other way when it
came to Marcos's staggering corruption.
Carter’s reelection
campaign also was hobbled by his inability to free 52 American hostages
then held by radicals in Iran, a crisis that opened the door to
Reagan's landslide victory.
In the years since, some witnesses
have claimed that Marcos put up money to support a covert Republican
operation to contact Iranian authorities behind Carter’s back and to
bribe them into delaying release of the hostages until after the
November 1980 election.
Documentary evidence of a
Marcos-to-Reagan payoff in 1980 first surfaced after Marcos was ousted
by a popular revolution in March 1986.
As Marcos's fall neared,
Reagan arranged for the dictator to be flown to safety in Hawaii. After
Marcos left, his opponents ransacked government files and found a Feb.
17, 1986, letter signed by a senior Marcos aide, Victor Nituda.
In
the letter, Nituda told Marcos that Reagan's emissary, Sen. Paul
Laxalt, R-Nevada, was demanding that sensitive files, including ones
listing the 1980 transactions, be turned over before Marcos could go to
Hawaii.
Nituda's letter specifically cited accounts set up for
Reagan and his 1980 campaign manager William J. Casey, who became
Reagan’s CIA director in 1981. Laxalt had served as Reagan’s campaign
chairman in 1980.
Laxalt "expects all documents checklisted
during his last visit or the deal [for a Hawaiian exile] is off,"
Nituda wrote. The first two documents listed were "1980-SEC-014: Funds
to Casey" and "1980-SEC-015: Reagan Funds Not Used."
In a
follow-up letter three days later, Nituda added, "we urgently need to
fly the last batch to Clark [Air Force base] soonest. [National
security adviser William] Clark and [Reagan chief of staff Michael]
Deaver are not happy with what we've sent them so far."
Nituda
wrote that Laxalt wanted files from 1984, too, including papers on bank
loans and Marcos's "donations to Gen. [John] Singlaub" who then was
raising secret funds for the Nicaraguan contra rebels.
For
years, Laxalt's spokesmen have denied that the senator had any
discussions with Marcos about the information referenced in the Nituda
letter. In an interview in 1996, Deaver also told me that he has no
idea what Nituda was writing about.
Supporting Evidence
But
there was evidence supporting the Nituda account. During his Hawaiian
exile, Marcos said he gave Reagan $4 million in 1980 and $8 million in
1984, in an admission to Republican lawyer Richard Hirschfeld, who
secretly tape-recorded the conversation.
Hirschfeld turned part
of the tape over to Congress. But the core allegations – that President
Reagan had received illegal pay-offs from a foreign dictator – were
never seriously explored. Marcos died in exile in 1989.
Though
making no reference to this history, the Rollins book adds further
corroboration that Marcos did make large payments to Reagan. Rollins
wrote that he asked Laxalt about the $10 million payment when the two
men were alone at cabins they owned in Front Royal, Virginia.
"Paul
absorbed the story with increasing interest," Rollins wrote, then
quoting Laxalt as declaring: "Christ, now it all makes sense. When I
was over there cutting off Marcos's nuts, he gave me a hard time. ‘How
can you do this?’ he kept saying to me. ‘I gave Reagan ten million
dollars. How can he do this to me?’ I didn't know what the hell he was
talking about. Now I get it."
Though clearly self-serving and
quite likely disingenuous, Laxalt's comment confirmed that he and
Marcos discussed the alleged payoffs to Reagan. That contradicted the
earlier denials from Laxalt's aides that the topic never arose.
But it seems more likely that Laxalt, who was one of Reagan's closest advisers, knew exactly what Marcos meant.
Hirschfeld
also dangled hints that he possessed bank records showing where many of
the Marcos accounts were located and documenting how much money went to
Reagan and to other Republicans. Yet, when I spoke with Hirschfeld who
was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, he refused to release any
documentary evidence voluntarily.
In the mid-1990s, when
Rollins's book was published, the national press corps was absorbed
with a host of “Clinton scandals” involving his personal finances and
his marital indiscretions. So there was no appetite to revisit
unresolved mysteries of the 1980s, especially ones that might put the
well-liked Ronald Reagan in a negative light.
It didn’t seem to
matter much that President Reagan might have been taking secret payoffs
from a foreign despot or that the dictator's money might have been used
to influence the outcome of the 1980 election by extending the
captivity of 52 Americans held by a hostile state.
BCCI Mystery
An
investigation of the Marcos money might have shed light, too, on
another perplexing mystery from the 1980s: the curious relationship
between the U.S. government and the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce
International.
On Jan. 22, 1981, two days after Reagan's
Inauguration, Marcos and some cronies co-founded a Hong Kong bank in
partnership with New York financier John Shaheen, one of Casey's
closest friends dating back to their days together in the World War
II-era Office of Strategic Services.
Called the Hong Kong
Deposit and Guaranty, the bank was capitalized with $20 million
supplied by Princess Ashraf, the Shah of Iran's strong-willed twin
sister who shared Marcos’s intense hatred of President Carter.
The
bank attracted onto its board leading BCCI figures, including Abu
Dhabi's Ghanim al-Mazrouie and Saudi diplomat Hassan Yassin, the cousin
of Iran-Contra figure and Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi.
In
1983, the Hong Kong bank collapsed with reported losses of more than
$100 million. The money was never recovered, but Shaheen associates
claimed that prior to the bank’s failure, substantial amounts were
funneled to Marcos, who reportedly was pulling the strings behind the
scenes.
The Hong Kong bank might have been a missing link in
the intelligence mysteries of the 1980s, connecting the early
Reagan-Iran deals with key BCCI players. It also could explain how
Marcos was repaid for his alleged 1980 largesse and why he would be
even more generous in 1984. [For details, see Robert Parry’s
Secrecy
& Privilege.]
In a normal political/media world, there would
have been a clamor about the alleged payoffs to Reagan as well as
demands that Rollins be put under oath before government investigators
who would demand to know the names of both the Filipino with the
suitcase and the Republican lobbyist. Then, they, too, would have been
interrogated.
The government also would have forced Hirschfeld to turn over whatever evidence he had on the mysterious bank accounts.
But
none of that happened. Instead, the remarkable admissions in the
Rollins book were quietly swept under the rug and Rollins remained a
respected member of the Washington political fraternity.
Now,
Rollins has reemerged as the national chairman for the campaign of
former Arkansas Gov. Huckabee, who is fast rising to the top of the GOP
field.
With the story of the $10 million Marcos-to-Reagan payoff
long since forgotten, Rollins can expect to appear on TV news shows as
a respected spokesman for the Huckabee campaign, with Wolf Blitzer and
other pundits praising Rollins for his good-natured integrity.
Writings 
The pundits on CNN’s “Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” were unanimous: Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins was a great guy and his hiring as national chairman for Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign gave it a solid jolt of credibility.
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