16. MIAMI CONFIDENTIAL: THE WORLD FINANCE CORPORATION

The Florida-based World Finance Corporation (WFC) is a multinational financial conglomerate with connections reaching from Latin America to the Middle East. There is evidence connecting WFC to the CIA, Fidel Castro, Cuban exile terrorists, and the massive drug traffic that flows through South Florida. Investigation attempts to untangle these political intrigues enough to prosecute have failed, reportedly stonewalled by the CIA, the State Department, and upper echelons of the Justice Department.

According to a secret document from the House Select Committee on Narcotics and Drug Abuse, "There is no question that the parameters of the WFC can encompass a large body of criminal activity, including aspects of political corruptions, gun running, as well as narcotics trafficking on an international level ... It is against this background that our investigation encountered a number of veiled or direct references to CIA and KGB complicity or involvement in narcotics trafficking in South Florida."

R. Jerome Sanford, an assistant U.S. attorney charged with prosecuting drug and Cuban exile terrorist cases, quit the Justice Department out of disgust and frustration because his efforts to investigate WFC, along with a lot of other things, were stonewalled by his own department.

Among WFC-related revelations, some never made public before, are that: the CIA confirmed that one of South Florida's major suspected drug traffickers was employed by the CIA from 1962 to 1972; an official of WFC was a Castro agent, the subject of a major FBI espionage investigation, and apparently also worked for the FBI; the president of WFC received a personal loan from the Soviet's Moscow Narodny Bank in London and reportedly provided the Castro government with money earned from massive drug traffic; WFC helped finance an attack on a Cuban diplomatic official in Mexico in 1976; a major narcotics violator said he was present when Cuban DGI (intelligence) and CIA operatives discussed and agreed to support narcotics trafficking as an element of "intelligence tradeoffs;" the CIA was responsible, at least in part, for killing the entire federal investigation.

The failure of the news media to fully explore the World Finance Corporation and its role in the complex and bizarre dimensions of American intelligence activities qualifies this story for nomination as one of the "best censored" of 1981.

SOURCE:

Inquiry, 8/3/81, "Miami Confidential" by John Cummings.