J. Stanley Pottinger is best known today as one of the most prominent lawyers representing victims of the infamous billionaire intelligence asset and pedophile sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. As a former member of the Nixon and Ford administrations, J. Stanley Pottinger has also played a central role in some of the most infamous official cover-ups to take place over the last 50 years. Prepare yourself, for this series won’t only expose Pottinger’s extremely influential and close relationship to government, the Republican Party and the CIA, it will also rewrite American history.
John Stanley Pottinger was born on 13 February 1940 to Eleanor and John Pottinger, who were from Dayton, Ohio. Stanley’s father, John Pottinger Sr., had been born and raised in Racine, Wisconsin and went on to study at the University of Cincinnati and Connecticut. After his studies, John Pottinger Sr. soon became a highly influential member of the Dayton business community and was very active in local civic affairs. He was eventually elected as the City Commissioner of Dayton, a position he held until his death at the age of 48. Pottinger Sr. was also in the insurance business and was the president of his own firm, John Pottinger & Co. Insurance Agency.
He was regularly awarded by the elites of the Dayton community with membership of such organisations as the Rotary club; the Dayton City club; and the Shrine club; he was a Free Mason at the John Durst lodge, as well as being part of the Scottish Rite – described as one of the appendant bodies of Freemasonry that a “Master Mason” may join for further exposure to the principles of Freemasonry. He was also active in the Dayton Chamber of Commerce, the Wilbur Wright PTA, the Dayton Better Business Bureau, and the Airway Improvement Association, among others. John Pottinger Sr. was a yachtsman who not only entered competitive events locally but also travelled around the world, including sailing around Europe and to Russia during the peak of the Cold War. Even with all those many different exploits, he still found the time to be the donor of the John Pottinger Trophy, which was presented annually to a member of the Dayton business community “who did the most to advance world trade.”
John Pottinger had two very interesting sons, one of whom was J. Stanley Pottinger, as he would prefer to be called, was an exemplary student and was continuously recognised for his keen intellect, being rewarded with various positions and titles throughout his youth. In May 1952, Pottinger was in the sixth grade at Washington school, where he was elected president of the elementary school division, which saw a fresh-faced Pottinger’s picture appear in the local Dayton Daily News. In 1955, he was selected as one of five youths from Dayton to attend the Baptist World Alliance event, which was being held in London that year.
Pottinger represented Wilbur Wright Middle School at the Buckeye Boys State in the spring of 1957, serving as president of his junior class and starring in the class play. In November of the same year, the young Stanley Pottinger was selected to be one of the 10 “most typical teenagers” during the Optimists Clubs’ Youth Appreciation Week, chosen out of a potential 550 candidates who had been entered. By that time, Pottinger was a senior at Wilbur Wright in Dayton. He was co-captain of the football team, an honour student, the chairman of the committee on committees of the senior class, and the sports editor of the “Wright Pilot,” the school's student publication. He was a top student, a keen athlete, and, like his father, he was on a path towards greatness.
For Americans living through the 1950s, the prevailing East vs West Cold War dynamic of the era heavily influenced their everyday lives. A litany of youth programs was created throughout this period, which were laser-focused on the strained relationship between the Democratic America and Soviet Russia. During the summer of 1957, Stanley Pottinger travelled to Soviet Russia alongside his parents and, on his return, it was reported that the young Pottinger was “busy giving illustrated talks to adult groups on his impressions of the other side of the Iron Curtain.”
It was clear that J. Stanley Pottinger had an interest in going into government service from very early on. In addition to receiving accolades for his hard work at school, he attended events like “Student Government Day”, where high-school youths assumed the roles of government officials, sponsored by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. In 1958, John Pottinger, Stanley’s father, was serving as the City Commissioner, and the family were living on 124 Murray Drive. The young Pottinger’s continuous success must have pleased his city official father, especially when Stan Pottinger served as the student mayor of Dayton and was chosen as Wilbur Wright’s representative senior. Pottinger was now the All-City quarterback of the football team, a track athlete, president of Jr. Civitan Service Club, chairman of the board of the senior class, president of the National Honour society, and voted the “outstanding senior” by his classmates.
Also in 1958, a young Stanley Pottinger travelled with his father to the Caribbean, where he served as the crew on a sloop. This was to be the last voyage the pair took together. Stanley Pottinger was mentioned on 2 December 1958, visiting his sick father in the hospital, where he delivered a letter from the other four city commissioners wishing him a speedy recovery from his illness. It was reported on 5 December 1958 that John Pottinger was about to undergo a complicated cardiac operation targeting two of his heart valves. The following day, it was announced that John Pottinger, Stanley’s father, had suffered a fatal heart attack and had died during heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. John Pottinger was the fourth Dayton City Commissioner in a row to die while in office.
Pottinger was heading to enrollment at DePauw University after graduation, where he planned to major in economics, but Harvard soon beckoned him instead. At Harvard, he flourished: “Meeting students from all over America and the world,” stated the freshman Pottinger about his first term experiences at the prestigious university. He also described to his hometown newspaper how it was to “attend lectures by the same professors who had written his textbooks. My government lecturer drafted the Weimar Republic’s constitution, and another is a government budget advisor.” Pottinger went on to say: “Harvard has no fraternities, but there are special-interest clubs for everything from acting to parachute jumping.” Pottinger wasn’t interested in the normal extra-curricular activities open to the usual Harvard student; instead, in March 1959, he was to be the only freshman appointed to a special 8 man committee of the Harvard Student Council, set up to consider all aspects of the university’s athletic program. While at Harvard, Pottinger built up a strong friendship with Navy Ensign William Stuart Parsons, eventually becoming his best man when Parsons got married in 1962—a year which was very eventful for the Pottinger family in general.
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
Then came the case involving the disappearance of David Forbes Pottinger, J. Stanley Pottinger’s brother, who had been treading in the footsteps of their late father, became a Dayton City Commissioner. On 1 August 1962, David F. Pottinger attended a commission meeting. By the following morning, he was declared officially missing, with Dayton police launching an all-out search and expressing their concerns of foul play being involved while “working on the assumption violence was committed.” At 8 am, on the morning of 2 August 1962, David Pottinger’s car was spotted “with blood” in East Dayton, six blocks from his house. However, soon afterwards, the police also declared that the trail of blood which had been found had “lost its significance.” One of David Pottinger’s shoes was discovered a few feet from the vehicle, and investigators also recovered a white T-shirt, which was found lying in a street nearby.
Stanley Pottinger was very quickly on the scene to help with the investigations. He told the press that his brother had been carrying over $2000 in cash, apparently to “close a deal on a house”. David Pottinger’s wife had become concerned for his safety when he failed to return home. She waited until 3 am to inform Pottinger’s mother, with Stanley Pottinger raising the alarm with the police at 5 am. The police questioned a waitress working at the Stockyards cafe near where Pottinger’s car had been found. She stated to the police that a man fitting his description had purchased three cans of beer at 11 pm to take away with him, leaving at about midnight. The police found two empty cans of the same brand that the waitress had sold him near Pottinger’s car. Soon, the neighbourhood was being intensively searched for clues. Police checked gardens, garages, basements and bushes, while light aircraft circled the area above, and the local authorities were soon considering calling in the FBI.
Within days of his disappearance, 300 Boy Scouts had been organised to comb a 16-square-mile area of East Dayton twice while Stanley Pottinger was busy searching his brother’s private offices for clues at the nearby Talbott Towers. Soon, rumours were circulating that the family had heard from their missing relation, with Stanley Pottinger forced to make a statement to the press to quash the supposed hearsay, stating:
“I wish it were true. We’ve had no word or idea of what happened to him, But we’re still optimistic. It’s difficult to feel that way under the circumstances, but we’re all trying to keep our hopes up.”
The rumours of David Pottinger contacting his relatives became more detailed with the Journal Herald reporting that a Sergeant Peake, who had been tasked with investigating the commissioner's strange disappearance, had “checked out two anonymous phone calls which said that Commissioner Pottinger had called his family and was going to Jamaica.” In fact, the situation was becoming increasingly complicated by the day, and it was only going to get worse.
It was soon reported that David Forbes Pottinger had run off with the 17-year-old babysitter of his children, Sherryl “Sherri” VanderWiel, who was also reported missing. Witnesses stated that the Kettering teenager had been meeting the City Commissioner at frequent intervals after school before their disappearance and that David Pottinger had also been frequenting various restaurants and bars at nearby Silver Lake and Crystal Lake with women other than his wife. Stanley Pottinger labelled these revelations as “a lie”, stating:
“We won’t dignify these lies by talking about them.”
However, the evidence was mounting against Stanley’s sibling. Friends of the missing schoolgirl gave statements to the police, which described a flourishing relationship between David Pottinger and Sherryl VanderWiel. On 7 August 1962, Stanley Pottinger was interviewed at police headquarters in Dayton, alongside Pottinger’s stepfather, James D. Chittenden, but the line of questioning was not revealed.
On 17 September 1962, the Ohio-based Akron Beacon Journal published an article entitled: “Missing Dayton Official Found In Tenn. Ditch,” which reported that David F. Pottinger had been found alive in a ditch in Tennessee. He was swiftly taken to the University Hospital, where he was said to be suffering from amnesia. Even though Pottinger had claimed to have amnesia, his memory loss appeared to be rather selective, with the aforementioned Ohio-based newspaper reporting that the 26-year-old had told a tale of “being beaten by three men in an investigation of gambling and prostitution he had been conducting.” The news spread like wildfire that the missing Dayton City Commissioner had been found alive and well in a ditch forty-six days after his disappearance. The Kansas City Star reported that: “Pottinger said a gambling scandal in Dayton prompted him to begin a private and unofficial investigation of alleged rackets,” going on to state:
“He contacted many persons who had information, but failed to find anyone willing to testify until receiving a phone call from a man August 1, he said. The man told Pottinger he could supply information but needed money.”
Even though he could explain the events which supposedly led to his bout of amnesia, Pottinger claimed not to know where he had been or what had happened to him since his disappearance.
The following day, intrigued newspapers reported that Pottinger was found in a muddy roadside ditch with a minor scalp wound. Pottinger travelled back to Dayton after his brief hospital stay, with his wife and family picking him up in a rented automobile to take him home. He was only allowed to be released from the hospital in Knoxville if he agreed to be admitted to St. Elizabeth Hospital in Dayton for further tests and for the authorities to be able to question him. Police Inspector Clair Martz was standing by to question Pottinger, stating, “We’ll be in touch with Pottinger,” and going on to say that they wanted to speak to him for “strictly a routine investigation.” Pottinger was claiming that at the rendezvous with the informant, he had taken $2,100 from an office safe in case he had to pay for the information. Supposedly, he had arrived at the pre-designated meeting point when three men dragged him from his car, beat him up and fled with the money.
On 20 September, Pottinger underwent a series of neurological tests as well as examinations to determine if he was suffering from any nervous disorder. When asked whether or not Pottinger’s claims of suffering from amnesia could be substantiated, his doctor stated:
“That is a very difficult question. I think the only evidence that he had suffered amnesia is that he claims to remember nothing. There’s little objective evidence that he has had amnesia, but this would be true in many such cases.”
However, Pottinger’s claims of amnesia aside, there were originally two people who had supposedly gone missing, and the babysitter was also resurfacing at the same time. The Lancaster Eagle Gazette reported on 19 September that New York Police had been asked to detain Sherryl VanderWiel after her family admitted that they had received communication from the 17-year-old. Her family stated that on 8 September, Sherryl had written to them from New York asking for her mother to send her a package of clothing. The Kettering Police Chief John Shyrock gave the New York police the order number for the package of clothing. Still, Sherryl was soon heading out of New York and on her way to stay with Elvon D. Sewell, a member of her family in Alexandria, near Washington, DC.
On 25 September 1962, The Daily Advocate reported that David Pottinger was undergoing a psychiatric examination and that Dr Bernard M. Kuhr was conducting the tests. By this time, a complete investigation and disclosure of the case was being called for by Dayton’s Mayor Frank R. Somers and the City Manager, Herbert Starick. Finally, on Friday, 28 September 1962, it was announced that police were allowed to question David Pottinger on the following Monday, and by 1 October, Pottinger’s story began to quickly unravel.
Sherryl VanderWiel returned home to her family in suburban Kettering and announced that she had been with Pottinger the entire time she was missing. A police captain named Richard Grundish gave his account of the girl’s statement in the Kansas City Star:
“Pottinger went to Port Clinton after leaving his blood stained car and one shoe in a Dayton cafe parking lot. Two days later he met Sherryl in Springfield with a car he had purchased in Middletown under an assumed name. From there they drove to the East coast, where Pottinger bought an 18-foot boat at Oxford, Maryland, and they spent weeks cruising along the Eastern coast, finally selling the boat in Falmouth, Massachusetts.”
Pottinger had not only taken the $2,100 from his office, but he had also borrowed around $3,500 shortly before his disappearance. Stanley Pottinger’s brother had groomed a minor for sex, trafficked her across state lines and made plans with her which began to unravel within a couple of months.
Pottinger was facing a formal charge of violating the Mann Act, a “White-Slave Traffic Act” which made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of “any woman or girl for prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”. However, on 3 October, the US Attorney’s office refused to file a formal charge of a Mann Act violation against Pottinger. The assistant US Attorney Ronald Logan stated:
“There is, of course, a technical violation of the Mann Act if the girl’s statement is true that she was with Pottinger for 40-something days in his absence and if they were together in various states at various times.”
Regardless of which law could be enforced, the police were indicating that Pottinger was still going to face criminal charges. Inspector Martz soon announced that they were planning to charge Pottinger with the lesser charge of ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor,’ which came with a maximum penalty of a $1000 fine and a year in a workhouse.
On 4 October 1962, Pottinger admitted that the stories he’d given about being beaten and suffering amnesia were lies. While Pottinger waited for his trial, his previous position as city commissioner was being hotly contested, with eleven candidates publicised as trying out for the role. By 12 October, it had been decided that David Pottinger was to be arraigned in Juvenile court, but when this was to happen was left to the court, along with Pottinger’s attorneys and doctors. Just over a week later, Pottinger initially pleaded innocent to a three-count charge, which the media reported as including “acting in a manner tending to cause the delinquency involving the Pottinger baby sitter.” Frank Nichol, the juvenile court judge overseeing the case, appointed a psychiatrist to evaluate Pottinger’s mental status. However, two days later, on 22 October, his personal psychiatrist, Dr Bernard M. Kuhr, told the judge that David Pottinger was competent to participate in his own defence even though he was to remain under psychiatric treatment at Miami Valley Hospital.
Curiously, the juvenile court judge confirmed that no trial date had been set and that no jury trial had been requested. He even went as far as saying that “as far as I know, there will not be a trial.” In fact, the supposed victim in the case, the wayward Sheryl VanderWiel, was reported as leaving the city by her attorney Glen Mumpower, who refused to give her intended destination to the press. Eventually, the trial of David Pottinger was announced to take place on 29 November. Nine days after the announcement of a trial, on 14 November 1962, Pottinger was released from the psychiatric ward where he had stayed for six weeks in total. David Pottinger’s attorneys originally entered a plea of not guilty on the delinquency charge, and if the case went to trial, he was heading towards the maximum sentence. On 15 November, he was admitted to Harding Sanatorium in Worthington, where he was expected to continue his treatment.
However, by 21 November, the Dayton Daily News reported:
“A Nervous David F. Pottinger appeared in Juvenile court today to plead “no contest” to two of three charges stemming from his tryst with a teenage babysitter.”
David Pottinger’s ruse had officially and abruptly come to its eventual climax, with the latter article stating:
“The second phase of the Pottinger case began with the announcement through his attorneys that his disappearance and tale of amnesia and personal assault were a hoax.”
Pottinger was sentenced to $1,000 probation and five years probation by the Montgomery County Juvenile Court, overseeing the debacle of a case.
The decision of whether to further indict Pottinger came almost a week after he appeared in the Juvenile Court. The Butler grand jury failed to return any indictment against the former City Commissioner on a charge that he used a false name to obtain the legal documents for a vehicle used during his escapade. The jury had been given evidence that Pottinger had “used a fictitious name in purchasing a car in Middletown,” however, on 31 July 1962, County Prosecutor Robert Marrs failed to convince the jury to indict.
Although David F. Pottinger was not headed to the workhouse, he was also not destined to return to public office. On 1 May 1963, about 6 months after his conviction, it was announced in a Journal Herald headline that:
“David Pottinger and Family Move to Florida.”
However, David F. Pottinger’s luck didn’t seem to improve, and by the summer of the same year, the Dayton Daily News was reporting on him running aground a boat owned by a Mr. & Mrs Russell Boaz, with a short report entitled:
“Pottinger Skippered Mired Schooner.”
J. Stanley Pottinger’s Rise to Power
John Stanley Pottinger had ducked out of view of the press halfway through the debacle surrounding his disappearing brother, David. He returned to Harvard University to study Law, eventually receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Pottinger began practising law, taking up a position as General Counsel for Broad, Busterud and Khourie, which would later become Broad Khourie and Schulz, based out of San Francisco. In 1966, Pottinger is noted as counsel representing the condemned man Dovie Carl Mathis, convicted of the murder of Vernon Ray. But, during this period, Pottinger was also looking for a way into government service.
In 1967, it was reported that J. Stanley Pottinger was the “lawyer and county committee counsel” for the Republican Party. An article in the San Francisco Examiner at the time touted Pottinger as a potential candidate to replace Democrat Charles W. Meyers’ vacated State Assembly seat. In fact, Stanley Pottinger was representing the State Republican Central Committee during this period and was about to catch the break he’d been searching for. In December 1969, Pottinger was appointed as a regional attorney in San Francisco for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW).
By March 1970, J. Stanley Pottinger was part of Richard Nixon’s team, which “toured the South enunciating desegregation policy”. He was appointed to this position by Robert H. Finch, the HEW Secretary, with Finch saying that Pottinger was “committed unequivocally to the enforcement of constitutional and statutory law relating to civil rights.” He was soon being reported in the New York Times as the director of the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Pottinger had replaced Leon E. Panetta, who had been dismissed months earlier for, as the latter article mentions, “moving ahead of Administration policy on desegregation.” Panetta’s dismissal had been followed by resignations and more than one-third of the staff members from the Office for Civil Rights sending a letter to Nixon stating their “bitter disappointment”. Pottinger had reportedly been active in the California Republican Party by this period in history, including publicly supporting Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign.
Pottinger went straight to work in his new role within the Nixon administration, stating in April 1970:
“We have striven mightily to eliminate all-black schools, and we will continue to do so. Our policy on that has not changed a bit.”
Also in April 1970, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Jerris Leonard, brought Pottinger and Jerry Brader, the director of the Division of Equal Educational Opportunities for the Department of HEW, with him to South Carolina to meet with local and state officials about the continued segregation of schools throughout the South.
In fact, over the following year, Pottinger issued warnings to various districts in South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Delaware, Maryland, and Texas, among others. However, it wasn’t only the American South which found itself still under investigation by Pottinger’s team. With the enforcement of desegregation policies, unexpected consequences in other states were also manifesting. By 1972, segregation in border state schools had increased slightly, with Pottinger admitting to reporters that the reasons why this was occurring were unknown, stating: “I just don’t know why. We’re going to have to check it out.”
In his position as director of the Civil Rights Division of the HEW, Pottinger wasn’t only supposedly championing the desegregation of American schools, but he was also involved with the gender equality movement. In June 1971, it was reported that complaints had been filed with the Federal Government against some of the top universities in America. Brown, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford were among the big names accused of hiring and promoting their male staff ahead of the female workers. Pottinger himself argued that “sex discrimination had become a substantive issue since women activists started pressing for enforcement of a Presidential order of 1968 prohibiting sex discrimination by Government contractors.” It is also during this period that J. Stanley Pottinger began having a sexual relationship with a known CIA asset, a relationship that will be thoroughly examined in the second part of this series.
Pottinger was also dealing with supposed discrimination against white people. In January 1973, his department began investigating accusations of reverse discrimination after he received a total of 52 examples from six national Jewish organisations. Agudath Israel of America, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the Jewish Labor Committee and the Jewish War Veterans sent the examples of reverse racism against “white male applicants.” One of the examples given by the various Jewish organisations cited an advertisement by the Sociology department of Williams College for an “Afro-American with a PhD and teaching experience.”
In February 1973, the “Wounded Knee Occupation” began when around 200 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the town of Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation located in South Dakota. A stand-off ensued between the insurgents and the supporters of a local controversial tribal president, Richard Wilson. The election of Wilson was considered to be fraudulent by most observers. He was accused of buying votes with the help of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and of bringing in non-residents to vote for him. Opponents of Wilson lost their jobs and were harassed. An Ann Arbour Sun article from 25 April 1975 entitled, Reign of Terror at Wounded Knee, reported that two years later, the situation was still tense:
“Legal workers and attorneys have been pulled from cars, brutalized and assaulted with weapons by Wilson and his now infamous “goon squad.” Since the beginning of March 11 people have been killed on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Most of them AIM supporters.”
Wounded Knee was the site of a 1890 massacre of 300 unarmed Lakota people; the memory of this event seemed to help catalyse the stand-off. The protesters criticised the US government’s failures to fulfil their treaties with various indigenous people of the United States, and they demanded a reopening of treaty negotiations. The retaliation by the government against the protests was emblematic of the Nixon era.
Initially, the government flew in J. Stanley Pottinger will handle the negotiation process. As Pottinger made his way out of Washington to deal with the crisis, he commented on the situation, stating that he was “concerned as a negotiator that the option I represent – to negotiate a settlement not involving force – has come to an end.” These veiled threats from Pottinger came as residents whom the insurgents had ousted threatened to make a move against the protestors. The tribal leader, Richard Wilson, who was cited as the main reason the insurgency began, publicly backed a tribal attack against the insurgents, threatening that their attack would happen “with whatever is necessary”.
The aforementioned Ann Arbour Sun article gives us an idea of the strategy implemented by Pottinger after the initial negotiations failed. The Government clearly intended to punish the protesters:
“Two years after the occupation one might ask: Why has the government spent more than two years and millions of dollars trying to convict these people? Why is the government continuing to prosecute after over 80 cases have been won on acquittal or dismissal by the court? Why has a reign of terror begun in which 11 people have been killed on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the past month alone? Why were over 20 American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders arrested within 48 hours of each other last March?”
Around the same time as the stand-off at Wounded Knee began, Stanley Pottinger was also central to the conclusion of another official investigation into a national controversy. In May 1970, Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others.
From April 1973, it was being reported that Pottinger was put in charge of investigating the fatal shooting on behalf of the Justice Department. Soon after, Pottinger referred the case surrounding what is now commonly referred to as the “Kent State Massacre” to a Grand Jury. By this time, the newly promoted Assistant Attorney General, J. Stanley Pottinger made it clear that the decision to send the case to a grand jury did not mean a guilty verdict was expected or sought, saying:
“This action does not mean that we have made a decision to seek indictments.”
The case had initially been dropped by the former Attorney General John N. Mitchell in August 1971, with Mitchell stating that there was insufficient evidence to warrant a hearing by the grand jury. Pottinger sought the permission of the successor to Mitchell, Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson, to reopen the investigation in August of that year, with approval being granted to re-examine any new evidence.
By March 1974, 8 members of the National Guard of Ohio who were involved in the Kent State Massacre were indicted by the grand jury, which stated that there was “no conspiracy found”. The 20 men and women of the grand jury did not cite any of the Guard officers or Government officials who had been criticised in other private investigations on the mass shooting.
However, evidence later surfaced suggesting that there may have been a conspiracy after all. In May 2007, the Tampa Bay Times reported in an article entitled, New evidence surfaces in Kent State shooting, that Alan Canfora, who was one of the nine students wounded during the shooting, had an audio recording which included a “military order to fire on the protestors”. The article states:
“Canfora played two versions of the tape – the original and an amplified version in which he says a Guard officer issues the command, “Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!” The tape begins with static in the background and screams from protestors. The word “point” can be heard followed by the sound of shots being fired.”
Canfora told reporters that the reel-to-reel audio recording had been made by a student who had placed a microphone on the windowsill of his dormitory. Stan Pottinger told the press in 2007 that “he doubts anything was overlooked then.”
Pottinger was emblematic of the staff which made up the Nixon administration. On Saturday, 24 November 1973, in the Daytonian newspaper ‘The Journal Herald’, Pat Ordovensky wrote an article entitled ‘Pottinger: Proud of His Job, Sure of Himself ’, in which the paper’s official Washington Correspondent stated:
“As an upper-level Nixon Administration official, he [Pottinger] projects its stereotype. His sideburns are just the right length, his suits an unimaginative blue or gray. His voice exudes self-confidence without being overbearing.”
While Pottinger was developing his reputation as a key Nixon aide and civil rights crisis negotiator, a storm was brewing in the Nixon White House. The Watergate burglaries were eventually to be the nail in the Nixonian coffin, but the controversy had raged throughout 1972 and 73. By October 1973, in an article entitled “Bork Meets Aide,” John M. Crewdson reported on meetings between the Acting Attorney General, Robert H. Bork, and members of the Justice Department, stating:
“There were unconfirmed reports of further resignations in the department, possibly including that of Mr. Pottinger.”
Nixon’s departure didn’t automatically mean the end of Pottinger’s role; he was to stay on when Gerald Ford took over in August 1974.
Regardless of all Pottinger’s dealings with the various civil rights movements during his time at the Justice Department, by 1975, pundits were calling a defeat on the supposed Nixonian efforts to end discrimination. In an article in the News-Palladium of Michigan, Jeffrey Hart wrote about the failure of the Nixon administration to end discrimination, quoting previous remarks by Pottinger on the Office of Civil Rights:
“We have a whale of a lot of power, and we’re prepared to use it if necessary.”
But while Pottinger was heading up the Office of Civil Rights, the way in which the department chose to utilise its power seemed sparing yet focused. With criticism of the Justice Department’s efforts echoed around the media, all eyes were set on the first day of school in Boston. In September 1975, Pottinger was present for more clashes over the desegregation, which were again about to flare up, leading to running battles in the street.
Even though Nixon had stepped aside, the Watergate scandal was still in the news. The New York Times published an article on 20 February 1976 entitled “Helms Won’t Face Break-In Charge”, which stated that:
“Assistant Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger, head of the department’s civil rights division, said that he and other officials had carefully weighed evidence to prosecute Mr. Helms for a civil rights violation. However, Mr. Pottinger told a news conference, “his congressional testimony is under review for possible perjury charges.””
With a Nixonian man like Pottinger in charge, the former Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, appeared safe from prosecution over Watergate. Helms had also denied to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the CIA had “conducted domestic surveillance or supported political foes” of the late President Salvador Allende Gossens of Chile. In the latter NYT article, it reads:
“Mr. Pottinger defended the decision not to prosecute Mr’ Helms and others involved in the burglary of a photo studio in suburban Fairfax City, VA., that was partly owned by a CIA employee. “I had the lead responsibility in this case for the last few months,” Mr. Pottinger said. “We have spared no resources, no time and no effort. I myself interviewed Mr. Helms.””
In fact, Mr Helms was probably delighted to have been interviewed by J Stanley Pottinger, a man with an abundance of links to the CIA.
The Murder of Orlando Letelier and the CIA’s Domestic Surveillance
On New Year's Day 1976, part one of a two-part New York Times article was published entitled ‘Study of Dr King’s Death Finds No Link to FBI.’ The article started off by stating:
“For nearly eight years the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has puzzled many private citizens and even some Government officials who were sceptical that James Earl Ray, an escaped convict with no obvious antipathy toward the black civil rights leader, had been the lone assassin, despite Mr. Ray’s own admission of guilt in court.”
In fact, the previous November, a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had disclosed that the FBI had waged a significant campaign for at least six years to discredit Martin Luther King. For example, on 21 November 1964, the FBI sent the infamous “suicide letter” to Dr King’s residence, which also contained a tape recording of King having sexual relations with a woman other than his wife. The New York Times’ Beverly Gage reported in 2014 that “the so-called ‘suicide letter’ has occupied a unique place in the history of American intelligence—the most notorious and embarrassing example of Hoover’s F.B.I. run amok.”
The festering wound, which was the assassination of Martin Luther King, was to linger long in the memory, and it was to be J. Stanley Pottinger, who was put in charge of investigating federal wrongdoing. The latter article states:
“The Justice Department’s re-examination of the case continues. But J. Stanley Pottinger, head of the Civil Rights Division, said in an interview that so far his inquiry had turned up no evidence whatever of FBI involvement in the killing.”
Pottinger also asked the FBI not to comment publicly on the case, saying that it may negatively harm James Earl Ray’s appeal. In 1997, Dexter King, the son of Martin Luther King Jr., met with James Earl Ray and asked him: “I just want to ask you, for the record, um, did you kill my father?” Ray told King that he hadn’t been responsible for the assassination of MLK, and this led to the King family filing a civil case in 1999 against Loyd Jowers. Jowers had appeared on ABC’s Prime Time Live, where he claimed to have conspired with the federal government and the mafia to kill Martin Luther King Jr.
The jury in the case of Coretta Scott King v. Loyd Jowers, which was made up of six blacks and six whites, decided that the Memphis police and federal agencies had conspired to murder MLK. The King family’s belief that James Earl Ray had been innocent endures, with the Washington Post reporting in March 2018 that:
“It pains my heart,” said Bernice King, 55, the youngest of Martin Luther King’s four children and the executive director of the King Center in Atlanta, “that James Earl Ray had to spend his life in prison paying for things he didn’t do.”
In 1976, the flawed investigation into FBI involvement in the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the only high-profile assassination in which Assistant Attorney General Stanley Pottinger was involved.
On 12 September 1976, the Government of Chile officially revoked the citizenship of Orlando Letelier, a prominent Chilean diplomat, lawyer and economist, who had been Chile’s former Ambassador to the US, as well as serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs under Salvador Allende. Nine days after Pinochet’s regime had revoked Letelier’s citizenship, he was brazenly assassinated via a car bomb as he was driving along Washington’s Embassy Row. A New York Times article on 22 September 1976, entitled, “Opponent of Chilean Junta Slain in Washington by Bomb in His Auto”, told of the recent reports of harassment by Chilean’s living in exile, stating:
“Recently many of the 8000 Chilean exiles in Argentina and the hundreds in Columbia have been subjected to severe harassment including beatings, from right-wing elements. Some victims said they saw the hand of the Chilean secret police in the actions.”
Although the Chilean authorities officially called the murder of Letelier an “outrageous act of terrorism,” they were in fact responsible for the assassination. Two days after Letelier’s murder, newspapers were reporting on a tip given to the FBI by a Chilean who said that he “recognized a Chilean secret policeman who disembarked from an airliner that arrived Aug. 25 in New York from Santiago.” The source had identified a high-ranking member of the DINA – the Chilean secret police – aboard the Lufthansa flight.
On 28 September, an FBI secret document entitled “Condor: Chilbom” was circulated, which began by stating:
“Operation Condor is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence DATA concerning so-called “Leftists,” Communists and Marxists, which was recently established between cooperating intelligence services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorist activities in the area. In addition, “Operation Condor” provides for joint operations against terrorist targets in member countries of “Operation Condor.” Chile is the center for “Operation Condor” and in addition to Chile its members include Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.”
The assassination of a diplomat in the diplomatic centre of Washington, DC, had rocked the US security services and the FBI were left scrambling for quick answers. The aforementioned FBI document explains why Letelier’s murder was most likely an officially sanctioned action taken as part of Operation Condor, stating that:
“A third and most secret phase of “Operation Condor” involves the formation of special teams from member countries to carry out sanctions up to assassination against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organizations from “Operation Condor” member countries. For example, should a terrorist or a supporter of a terrorist organization from a member country of “Operation Condor” be located in a European country, a special team from “Operation Condor” would be dispatched to locate and surveil [sic] the target. When the location and surveillance operation has terminated, a second team from “Operation Condor” would be dispatched to carry out the actual sanction against the target.”
Operation Condor’s member countries collaborated in many ways to support their allies, with member states using special teams to create the false documentation necessary for a successful operation. The teams participating in these operations could be composed exclusively of individuals from one member nation of Operation Condor, or they could be a mixed group from various member nations involved in Operation Condor. Under Operation Condor, each of the member nations’ intelligence services became entangled and culpable for the actions of their partners. This shared responsibility for the intelligence operations of the participating countries involved in the operation made any potential international punitive action or sanctions more difficult to achieve. The last page of the secret FBI document stated:
“It should be noted that no information has been developed indicating that sanctions under the third phase of “Operation Condor” have been planned to be carried out in the United States; however, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the recent assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. may have been carried out as a third phase action of “Operation Condor.” As noted above, information available to the source indicates that particular emphasis was placed of the third phase actions of “Operation Condor” in Europe, specifically France and Portugal. This office will remain alert for any information available indicating that the assassination of Letelier may be part of “Operation Condor” action.”
If the FBI's concerns were valid, the US intelligence services' close Latin American allies were responsible for helping to form parts of the conspiracy behind the assassination of an official former diplomat on Embassy Row in Washington, DC. The top men in the US who were responsible for damage limitation were soon to meet. Eugene Propper was assigned to the case by the DOJ’s Assistant US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Earl Silbert. Propper was Assistant US Attorney at this time and was described by Silbert as “industrious and resourceful.”
The FBI had managed to scupper the investigation into the assassination of MLK, but this killing was going to be harder for them to hamper. Because Letelier had been a former-Chilean ambassador, this provided him special protection under a special federal statute protecting diplomatic personnel; this provision meant that FBI involvement in the case was assured.
In the book by John Dinges entitled “Assassination on Embassy Row,” the author describes Eugene Propper’s realisation of the complexities of the case he had been assigned:
“As he [Propper] called professionals and friends in government agencies around Washington and read reports as they came in, a bewildering cacophony of buzzwords began to engulf him: Communists, Allende, Marxist government, CIA role, military coup, concentration camps, torture, human rights, DINA, friendly intelligence service, IPS, left-wing think-tank, comsymps, political assassination.”
Before long, the FBI had investigated various leads, and all the evidence pointed to DINA being the group that had enacted the assassination. Although the question was being asked in the media of whether or not the Pinochet regime was responsible for murder in Washington, DC, the official response had been purposely designed not to link the two publicly.
Whether out of convenience or necessity, the CIA were about to become involved in the investigation. But the CIA, under the leadership of George H. W. Bush, were also keen to set the ground rules for their involvement. It is here that the conflicts between the CIA and the Justice Department were most glaring. The CIA did not want their sources exposed, or to be on the record because, as Dinges writes, “the investigation might reveal that someone the CIA had worked closely with in [sic] Chile in the past was directly involved in the assassination.”
To bridge the gap and negotiate a special relationship concerning the Letelier case, J. Stanley Pottinger was brought in to oversee the negotiations with the CIA. John Dinges writes:
“On October 4, J. Stanley Pottinger, assistant attorney general for civil rights, and Eugene Propper met with CIA Director George Bush and CIA General Counsel Anthony Lapham to hammer out a solution to the problem of CIA cooperation. Bush said the agency was willing to help if Pottinger and Propper could “solve his problem” about the executive order banning domestic intelligence gathering. In the course of their discussion of developments in the case, the subject of Scherrer’s discovery of Operation Condor came up. Bush said that if Attorney General Levi would write him a letter requesting that the CIA initiate an investigation of Operation Condor, they would have a solution to the quandary about CIA cooperation.”
Pottinger was leading a secretive renegotiation of the CIA’s relationship with the American Government and the American People. The CIA was asking for legal permission from the Justice Department to investigate the activities of their Latin American counterparts and allies, including the intelligence service of the Chilean regime, which had been initially installed by the CIA. Not only was George Bush seeking the CIA to scrutinise its own involvement with the member nations of Operation Condor’s intelligence services, but he was also using the opportunity to push for Pottinger and the Department of Justice to approve the CIA's use of domestic surveillance officially. In response to these requests, Dinges explains:
“Over the next few days, Pottinger arranged for the presidential order, and he and Propper ironed out the details of a Justice-CIA agreement for secret, circumscribed cooperation. The CIA would provide “relevant” information from CIA files, but Justice could not use the information in court unless it had independently obtained it from a separate source. In case the outcome of the investigation turned on a particular piece of CIA information or a CIA witness, the decision to use the information would be made by the president.”
In essence, Bush and Pottinger were using the assassination of Orlando Letelier as an excuse to grab significant powers of surveillance aimed at their own citizens. It also set a dangerous precedent for future scrutiny of CIA operations. On 21 October, Attorney General Edward Levi, accompanied by Eugene Propper and Stanley Pottinger, met with Ismael Letelier and Michael Moffitt (whose wife also lost her life as a result of the explosion) but behind closed doors they were not working toward true justice for Orlando Letelier, they were working for the benefit of the CIA, a reoccurring theme in the life of J. Stanley Pottinger.
From Iran With Love
As the 1970s drew to a close, it was clear that Stanley Pottinger had become very close to the people manning the upper echelons of the CIA. In fact, Pottinger had been a valuable tool for more than just the Central Intelligence Agency. He had been a loyal servant and important tool of successive American political administrations who were trying to close the book on such major historical events as the assassination of Martin Luther King and Orlando Letelier, the Watergate break-ins, the Kent State Massacre and Wounded Knee, among others. J. Stanley Pottinger had become the go-to guy to clean up the most sensitive issues of state. Pottinger had forged a niche for himself and, once leaving office in 1977, he was able to offer his special set of skills and his wide array of influential contacts not only to the private sector, but to intelligence agencies too.
In the years after he left public office, Pottinger began working for giant companies such as Chemical Bank and Mead, but he would also join a reformed legal practice, Troy, Malin and Pottinger. While practising as an attorney, Pottinger represented several high-profile clients through some very controversial events. Clients such as Cyrus Hashemi, who, alongside Pottinger, played a central role in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1980, Pottinger was secretly recorded by the FBI as he organised the illegal sales of arms to Iran, breaking the arms embargo which was in force at the time. The same year as the FBI tapes implicated Pottinger in running weapons, he also defended another illegal arms trafficker, Gerald Bull, who was accused of breaking the arms embargo which had been placed against the apartheid South African regime. Intelligence agents later assassinated both Bull and Hashemi.
It wasn’t only Pottinger who was to play a central role in the Iran-Contra scandal; Jeffrey Epstein was already swimming in very similar circles. In fact, Epstein and Pottinger were about to meet each other for the first time.
In the following article in the Pottinger series, we’ll discover how J. Stanley Pottinger wasn’t only helping his intelligence-linked clients to break various arms embargoes, but he had also got into bed with the CIA, in the most literal sense possible.
That will all be covered in the next episode of this series – The Pottinger Supremacy: The Road to the Takedown of Jeffrey Epstein
The Pottinger Identity is part of a series that will reveal important events which led to the take down of Jeffrey Epstein. Although this author does not wish to see the Ghislaine Maxwell verdict overturned, such a thing may happen due to previous CIA involvement and collusion within the Epstein case. The true story of the take-down of Jeffrey Epstein has never been told, until now. This series has taken almost a year of research, and to maintain this standard of journalism, I need your support. That support keeps me independent, enabling me to uncover stories that others can't. Please support NEWSPASTE
Amazing investigative journalism. Well done and congratulations on part1.
Great article. Do you have the Bull link sourcing or link? I can’t find one online or in this article