Presidential candidate insisted NSA and CIA spied on him
By The Wayne Madsen Report
A billionaire political outsider who ran for the presidency of the United States claimed that his investigation of deep ties of his opponents to international drug cartels resulted in his surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community. Responding to the charge by the presidential candidate, the man who had been director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency said, "I am prepared to say that there is not a word of truth in this."
The CIA and its friends in the media labeled the presidential hopeful a conspiracy hound and ridiculed his notion that the U.S. political system was actually run by various hidden dark forces. If one thinks this is a description of the 2016 campaign and the presidential candidate making the charges about the CIA is Donald Trump, they would be wrong.
It was independent businessman H. Ross Perot in 1992 who incurred the wrath of former NSA director and CIA second-in-command Admiral Bobby Ray Inman and stood accused of dabbling in far-out conspiracies.
Perot believed that his efforts to uncover the existence of U.S. prisoners-of-war and missing-in-action servicemen in Laos were stymied by the former CIA director George H. W. Bush, who just so happened to be running for re-election in 1992. Perot claimed that after the Indochina War ended in 1975, Bush, then the CIA director, transferred all responsibility for U.S. POWs/MIAs from the CIA to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Perot believed that Bush wanted the CIA's fingerprints off the POW/MIA issue because it had been involved in the heroin trafficking business in Laos. Perot believed that the reports of possibly over a hundred U.S. MIAs being seen in Laos were ignored because Langley and Bush wanted the secrets possessed by the CIA about the missing U.S. servicemen to remain buried, along with the CIA's secret war in Laos that involved the Royal Laotian Army, Hmong tribesmen, and heroin smuggling.
Perot cited the activities of two CIA fronts, Nugan Hand Bank in Australia and a Hawaii-based company, Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong (BBRDW), in laundering the proceeds of the CIA's Southeast Asian drug-running operations. Moreover, Perot said the CIA proprietary airline, Air America, was involved in transporting heroin out of Southeast Asia. The CIA issued denials all-around about the bank, the Hawaii company, and Air America. Perot claimed that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Colin Powell and his close friend, Richard Armitage, whose nomination for Secretary of the Army in 1989 was scuttled as a result of pressure from Perot, were involved with BBRDW and the POW/MIA cover-up.
How soon we forget: U.S. Intelligence was accused of spying on Perot in 1992.
Senators John McCain and John Kerry led the charge to keep the POW/MIA-Laos issue secret. Both would later receive the presidential nominations of their respective parties. Perot alleged that a CIA agent was hired by the Bush campaign to hack into Perot's computerized stock trading program, preventing the third party candidate from gaining access to funds for campaign. The incident is similar to the Jeb Bush campaign hiring former British MI-6 agent Christopher Steele to develop a "dirty dossier" on Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. There is a distinct possibility that the NSA covertly asked its signals intelligence partners in Britain, Australia, and Canada, on George H. W. Bush's orders, to conduct electronic surveillance of Perot in 1992.
There was evidence that the CIA and NSA spied on a presidential candidate -- in 1992 -- with the target being H. Ross Perot.